Free-to-play Gun Bros unleashes $500 Kraken
Free-to-play iOS shooter Gun Bros prices an in-game gun at roughly $500.
What's the most you'd pay for a virtual item?
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Jeff Mattas posted a new article, Free-to-play Gun Bros unleashes $500 Kraken.
Free-to-play iOS shooter Gun Bros prices an in-game gun at roughly $500.-
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"As ultimately silly as the initiative may seem, it's also hard to knock Glu for its attempt to prey on rich idiots. They're a business, trying to make a buck."
No, it's easy to knock them. This is a deliberate and cynical business move to prey on their customers who are most given to compulsive excess. I firmly believe that game design is about being an advocate for the player, not the careful architect of compulsion loops and superficial communities centered on the ownership of virtual items. What this developer is doing is unethical and that charge applies generally to many if not most applications of the "free-to-play" business model. When developers have the gall to openly speak about the metrics based way in which they design their games to maximize ARPU, from individual mechanics to high level theme, I fear for the future of the industry. -
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I removed the free version of gun bros from my android tablet yesterday, due to it's insistence on constantly running AirMailService in the background.
Couldn't turn the damn thing off no matter what.. and of course the micro-payments were ridiculous. Bye bye what could have been a fun game, from a morally void developer.
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You also have to take in it's value as a marketing piece. Photographic lens manufacturers are known for making incredibly expensive lenses, well beyond the realms of normal people ($20,000+). Yet they are shown around and talked about all the time, yet the vast majority of people will never even see one of these things in person.
Something that is expensive and exotic will be desired, even if only talked about in the way someone does a fantasy, "I wish I won a million dollars" , "I wish I had this product..." -
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Marginal cost = 0 means that the supply curve is horizontal, not vertical, and that the supply curve is the horizontal axis. Under these conditions, a monopolist's profit maximizing price is wherever the own-price elasticity of demand is equal to 1. In a perfectly competitive market, the price would be pushed down to zero.
("Infinite supply" is not well-defined, but could indeed mean zero marginal cost.)
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