iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

[Valkysas]

http://kotaku.com/5497459/apple-bans...shes-app-store

read the whole post, but this is my favorite part.

In his rant last week, Refenes explained that, about five months ago, he raised the price to $15. It was an experiment. On the day he raised the price, three people bought the game. He said he raised the price to $50, and four more people bought it. Refenes was inspired and convinced that people who buy games from the App store aren't good at sniffing out good games. He would keep raising the price to see how many more people would buy the game. Fourteen people bought the game at $299, he said.
On Monday, March 15, the day Zits & Giggles was removed from the App store, someone bought the game for $400, he told Kotaku.

At the Game Developers Conference, Refenes called the App store to the "Tiger handheld game of this generation," a platform on which big brands are sold but where game quality is not the consumers' priority. The pricing experiment had confirmed this, he told his fellow game creators: "My conclusion to all of this is that the people you're selling games to on the App store, they're not necessarily gamers. There are some games that sell very well on the App store, but for the most part, when you have stuff like Street Fighter and Assassin's Creed, the are a way to sell a brand, just like the Tiger handhelds were. "

[Denmo]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

it's pretty abysmal from a gamer's standpoint.

But when you consider the target audience, and how easy it is to purchase an item from the app store (just punch in your password and download), someone accidentally paying $399 for a game doesn't sound so crazy. They might have misread it on that tiny screen....

[Kire]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

I don't think it's as much of iPhone gamers are stupid as much as people are stupid...and you've got a lot of non "hardcore" gamers w/ iPhones.

[Perversion]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Yeah...I read about this last week in some article about the GDC. The new news is that Apple pulled the game. I give the guy props, though, for trashing iPhone games, and for pulling off the experiment. It kinda DOES prove a point...the point that if you price a game (good, bad, or otherwise) at a moderate, reasonable price, it'll be lost within a sea of other games. But if you put a higher price on it, the clods who use the iPhone for gaming automatically assume that it's better just because it has a higher price point.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Okay, now I definitely have to learn how to make an iPhone game.

[Duel]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

I've bought many games from the app store but never actually played them. Damn.

[marcus]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

This doesn't prove anything except 21 people are dumb. There's no thought experiment here, no control, no hypothesis or goal. The guy made a bad game and got lucky enough that fourteen rich and/or incredibly bored people saw it and bought it. I guarantee if you **** on a canvas and offered it to 50 million people, at least one person would buy it.

The problem is twofold a lack of quality and poor poor marketing. There are few dedicated websites to iphone games and there's a flood of products making it near impossible to review all of them which leads to good games getting pushed to the wayside. The only thing this proves is that the iTunes market is a mirror of our own capitalist society. You can now safely digitize your feces, have it published with little quality control, adjust the price to your liking, know that it's freely advertised to several dozen million people, and realistically expect to make a profit from it.

iPhone games are a gold mine for small developers with no moral compass or care for their products. That's all this proves.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Or in a much shorter form, offer ANYTHING at ANY PRICE to ENOUGH people and SOMEBODY will buy it.

[Perversion]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

iPhone games are a gold mine for small developers with no moral compass or care for their products. That's all this proves.

Yeah, at my reunion, this guy who's the lead singer for some band who has a bunch of songs on ABC Family shows told me that I should make games for the iPhone. I told him I didn't want to do that. I basically said, "You're a musician...you know what selling out means, right? If I made a game for the iPhone, that would be my version of selling out."


This was before I knew he was making songs for ABC Family shows, so I think he might have thought I was accusing him of selling out.

[The_Real_Crunk]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

I guess ss soon as you start making money you've sold out.

[Perversion]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Not necessarily. I'm talking about slopping something together for the express purpose of swindling people out of their money.


I'd rather create something I can be proud of and make less money on it rather than make something that panders to the lowest common denominator just because I think it'll make some money.

[The_Real_Crunk]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Take advantage of the stupid and make some spare change. If anything it'll give you more experience you can put towards a real project in the future.

[DarkwingChuck]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

Not necessarily. I'm talking about slopping something together for the express purpose of swindling people out of their money.


I'd rather create something I can be proud of and make less money on it rather than make something that panders to the lowest common denominator just because I think it'll make some money.

iTunes is just a release and distribution platform. How much effort you put into the game is up to you. If you threw something together just to make some money it'd be selling out no matter how you put it on the market. And if you actually put effort into making a good game releasing it through iPhone wouldn't be selling out. Or are you saying the temptation to sell out would be impossible to pass up because that says more about you than iPhone development, lol.

[Perversion]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

I'm just saying that if I'm gonna spend the time making something, I would not release it via iTunes...it'd just get lost in the shuffle.


As you kinda alluded to, there are much better platforms on which to release something of quality. Plus, if it's something I would want to eventually make a living doing, I'd not want to get my foot in the door slapping some crappy game together just for the sake of having something out there to make a quick buck off of.


marcus' "moral compass" comment above is very telling, I think.


Realistically, I've had a game idea for RPGM3 that I'm gonna try to make on IG Maker and put on the 360. And it would probably not sell well, because I intend to force gamers to confront their own reality, and the end result is not gonna be pretty. People might not be willing to shell out money for a very sobering look at their lives.

[marcus]

Re: iPhone "gamers" are retarded.

A nice little article on iPhone pricing.

It's insane how many people will buy an app. I've got to get into this market!