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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

Very good and intelligent article. One point I don't fully agree with is the actual cut-off price. For iOS devices I have noticed that anything above $5 has the exact effect the author described - it forces to pay more attention and cut the app more slack. Also, I would not even consider buying a $25 game for iPad. But then if it were a desktop game, I would, meaning that that magic price depends not just on the game, but also on the platform.

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XCom: Enemy Unknown is $20 on iOS, only sightly cheaper than the PC version at the time of launch, and is a more-or-less straight port of the PC game. Despite the (comparatively) high price it was in the Top Grossing list for a while.

Square-Enix have also been successfully selling $15 iOS ports of their Final Fantasy series.

I suspect a lot of the people buying the Final Fantasy remakes are people who played them years ago and are buying them to replay now because they no longer have a Playstation / SNES / the original game discs, but retain fond feelings for them. Which is all fine, but it doesn't generalise well to newer companies who don't have a long-established fanbase already.

I would classify XCom: Enemy Unknown as console game, not a PC game. But the important point is that it's not an iPad game, and as such is automatically "worth" more due to having a different anchor.

Why is that? It is a remake of a PC game, from a traditionally PC game developer, and the interface is PC-centric. It's a PC game with console ports.

The interface is far from PC-centric. It's PC-tolerable, but was clearly designed for consoles.

Firaxis initially promised separate interfaces for both platforms, and presumably for touch devices as well, but the differences ended up being cosmetic at best.

If you want an example of a dual-platform game with a PC-centric interface, the first example that comes to mind is Command & Conquer.

I think this is why iOS is crap for gaming. I have yet to find an actual good game with some depth for iOS despite having a far larger market than when a lot of the classics where put out like all those pool of radiance games. I mean Boulders gate EE had an IOS port but Boulders gate 2 EE did not despite having the same game engine.

I think the crap gaming (from our perspective) situation is there for a few reasons.

1. Mobile wasn't taken as seriously by AAA devs, and now when they try and break off to make something for iOS, it's drowned out by:

2. The horde of companies that came from Facebook which are making the games you and I deem as 'meh'. They have optimized the crap out of acquiring users and charting. Good luck if you're a developer trying to make a high quality immersive experience, because no one will find you (unless you have a brand name or lots to spend on acquisition).

3. The reality is probably that the mass market on iOS won't go for more hardcore games. They want Smurf's Village type games...

4. Many of the higher quality games we would want, end up not being done well. Baldur's Gate is actually a good example. I paid for it the first day it came out, and there was a lot of silly problems, related to controls, UI, etc... I loved it at its core so much, but it really needed more work/time :(.

Yeah its a different model for mini based games and the coffin box and euro game - but in that case you are paying for physical objects as well.

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