Final Fantasy Dimensions launching on iOS and Android next week for $29
Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Dimensions will release on August 30, and will cost $28.99 for the whole game. Or, you could get the prologue for free and the first episode for $2.99.
It's time to face facts, everyone. We all humored Square Enix's wacky App Store pricing experiments, like asking $16 for Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions sans multiplayer when the PSP version (with multiplayer intact) costs almost half that amount. They're just figuring out what pricing models work, we thought. No harm in that.
But with today's announcement that Final Fantasy Dimensions will cost almost thirty bucks, the uncomfortable truth has become clear. The company has gone mad with power.
Square announced the pricing alongside the release date of August 31 on iOS and Android, along with a handful of screenshots. And to be fair, you don't have to pay the full amount to try out the game. The prologue will be delivered for free, and subsequent chapters will be be increasingly expensive. The first chapter will cost you $2.99, a bundle of chapters 2-4 will cost $9.99, and if you want to bite on the whole thing it will cost $28.99. Presumably, that means it's at least five chapters long.
The game looks to be a very retro-throwback title, so if you're itching for a classic Final Fantasy experience but just can't bring yourself to buy Final Fantasy IV again, it might be worth picking up.
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replySteve Watts posted a new article, Final Fantasy Dimensions launching on iOS and Android next week for $29.
Square Enix announced Final Fantasy Dimensions will release on August 30, and will cost $28.99 for the whole game. Or, you could get the prologue for free and the first episode for $2.99.-
I could see justifying this cost if there were even the slightest chance of it being something epic along the lines of the SNES titles, but it looks just kinda cheap.
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it's pretty amazing how strongly Square is trying to resist mobile pricing patterns. I think they're actually getting more expensive...
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I'd be really curious to know what kind of sales their previous "holy shit expensive (by iOS standards)" titles did. As in, FF1+2 at $8.99 each, FF3+T at $15.99 each, etc.
Most smaller app developers drop the prices of their app when it doesn't sell well, but Square Enix has multiple different other revenue points (i.e., all the other games they put out elsewhere) I was never sure if the prices of those games never going down (except for the occasional brief sale) was a sign that they were selling well (or at least well enough) or if Square Enix just didn't care because it's not like they were desperate for money.
That they're coming up with a mobile-specific FF game and charging so much for it implies to me that maybe sales were good enough for them to continue with their pricing strategy but their games never stay on the top sales charts long, not even the top grossing one.-
well one aspect you didn't mention was protecting the value and perception of their brand, particularly with their titles coming out on platforms where $30+ is the norm. If they start selling all their titles for $5 on iOS not long after release then how many Vita sales or PSN downloads are they going to generate at $15-30? How's Sony going to feel about their relationship going forward with that kind of disparity?
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That's true, and it makes the mobile market tricky for traditional dev studios with big budget portable projects.
If you port a game from DS/3DS/Vita/PSN and charge a lot less then you piss off your partners and also hurt any sales the traditional portable versions had.
If you charge the same or, at the very least, a lot more than your typical $0.99 Angry Birds, then you anger the typical phone clientele. We can debate whether or not they're justified but it's how it currently is.
if you develop a game for the mobile/phone devices exclusively you're taking a huge risk because they might not buy a fairly priced app (commiserate to your development budget) and you might not make a profit or your investment back if you charge a buck. To say nothing of the difficulty of even getting noticed on there sometimes (although that's probably less of an issue with the established brands like FF)
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its probably because they can and its working
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Tricky stuff. They need to price it right for the brand. It's also a full game, where most mobile titles are mostly just time wasters vs what shackers would call a 'full game'. I'll probably buy it just to support Android game development. At least this is an original title. Hopefully that means they've geared all the controls and menus, etc specifically for phone-sized screens and touch controls.... yeah, I know.. dreaming.
