January 31st, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
There is a new rumour spreading amongst mobile game developers. According to them, some of the bigger publishers have been invited to open a new channel for premium iPhoneOS games which will be priced at $ 19,99.
According to PG, the rumour has been floating around for several months already, but now it is finally surfacing and a roll-out during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June is to be expected.
They contacted Apple (we guess in the UK) and we took the liberty to give Apple here in NL a go. In both cases, there was no confirmation (as expected). The big publishers also don't respond according to PG.
What can we expect when Apple launches such expensive games? History already told us that casual gamers don't like spending much on their mobile games. $ 5,- is already a huge price. Next to that, the iPhone consumers are already accustomed to fun games and applications which start at $ 0,99.
The only way for publishers to stand out from that bit of the market would be to create much more expensive productions. Not only in gameplay, but also in visuals and sound. Apple could be helping them a bit though by making available parts of the SDK that the smaller developers don't get access to.
UPDATE – The plans for the premium channel have been confirmed to us via a game publisher that has been contacted about it by Apple.
