September 17th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
As HandyGames recently announced with PocketGamer, selling iPhone games at 99 cents is destroying the market as consumer expectations are lowered. Pocket God, feels the pain already and will start charging for extra's via micro transactions.
The company seems to be facing a problem after updating the game on a weekly basis. They have hit their saturation point and see sales toward new users decline. This means the company has to change it's business model. In an interview with Jon Jordan, they announced to start charging their existing user base via Apple's micro transactions for additional content.
The reason the company chose to charge for additional content instead of the weekly updates is because consumers expect the updates to be free. So the company has chosen to start off with offering skin packs. Those packs will cost 99 cents and allow consumers to customize the look of objects within the game. The developer does note that he would like to charge even less for the extra's, but he's limited to the 99 cents minimum from Apple. The problem he sees there is that the game itself now costs as much as a skin pack.
