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Comment by teamonkey | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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