Minecraft: Pocket Edition digs into iOS Thursday
It's a busy week for Minecraft, the world's leading dig 'em up. The PC edition will at long last launch officially on Friday at MineCon, and now it turns out the promised iOS version will launch tomorrow for your shiny iThings.
It's a busy week for Minecraft, the world's leading dig 'em up. The PC edition will at long last launch officially on Friday at MineCon, and now it turns out the promised iOS version will launch tomorrow for your shiny iThings.
Minecraft: Pocket Edition is already available on iTunes in New Zealand, which exists in the future. It's priced at NZ$9.99, which indicates that it should cost $6.99 in the US--the same as on Android.
"Minecraft PE will have multiplayer that allows Android users to play with iOS users," Mojang's Jens Bergensten confirmed on Twitter. The Pocket Edition debuted exclusively on Sony's Xperia Play pocket telephone in August, becoming available to other Android devices too in October.
As for the possibility of mobile and PC players getting together, Bergensten noted, "I'm not sure when/if that will be possible."
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Shacknews
replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Minecraft: Pocket Edition digs into iOS Thursday.
It's a busy week for Minecraft, the world's leading dig 'em up. The PC edition will at long last launch officially on Friday at MineCon, and now it turns out the promised iOS version will launch tomorrow for your shiny iThings.-
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Uh oh.
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I want to use one of those fancy proxy things to DL this from the app store RIGHT NOW. Possible?
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The volume goes up if the price is low. Devs should want more penetration/volume which will return more in sales. This is what everyone is learning from valve. The quality of the game only means that it will sell more if it's good verses a game that is bad. Devs want their product in peoples hands, there are enough people on this planet to allow for such a pricing model to work.
Making your game stupidly priced only means you deter an even larger market away from just saying "eh, it's only a dollar, I'll try it out." If it's good game, they'll continue with loyalty to the next project as well.
A good game doesn't care about price. People care about good games and as players you can reward the dev by spreading the word and having your friends buy a copy too. After all, it's only a buck! X 12,000,000 devices.-
Larger volume also means drastically increased support requests and increased chances of rare bugs. Free/cheap also brings in people who expect everything for nothing and complain vocally for silly reasons. There are definite trade-offs to lowering price and increasing volume... it's a delicate balance I think.
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Because your example requires one of two things to happen. You either get super-fucking-lucky and somehow your app just happens to get picked up by crazy word of mouth and make it big time. Or, you market the shit out of it in order to destroy all competitors.
Everyone else that does as you suggest, will be left in the cold with a $.99 or free app, and getting a minuscule amount of sales.
Sure, maybe they'd sell more if it were $.99 instead of $3.99 or whatever, but just making your app a dollar isn't automatically going to make you a billionaire-
And that's been one of my points that they may sell more marking it at .99 cents for minecraft. Yea, if a game sucks and it's .99 cents or 4.99 it won't continue to sell because it sucks.
Maybe angry birds main success is only from its marketing and luck. Probably a mix of all that. I'd have to look into when/how they started doing all that. The numbers they're selling that game in is staggering.
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Right so what *is* your point exactly? I'm curious as to where your years of experience of product development, marketing and sales comes from?
By your standars the iPhone 4 should be $0.99 and it will sell BILLIONS!!! Yet people are still shelling out $300+ for iPhones and iPad's each year?
Something is obviously very wrong with this, and you sir definitely have the right answer!-
Reading about the success publishers/developers are having with ingame purchase and huge discount sales like those found on steam.
A game that sales for 50 dollars. Everyone has a breaking point at what they're going to pay for a game at any given time for many reasons. If you mark that same game down 75% you widen that range of people now willing to buy the game and make up the loss from the markdown by the volume of sales.
Plenty of articles on it.
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Stupid douchey developers, expecting to actually get paid for their work. What assholes.
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I think its 20 euros. It was 10 in alpha and will be 40 after release if I'm not mistaken. Seems to me that 1/8 the release price is reasonable.
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it will get dropped eventually. Just like scribblenauts
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And how exactly did you come up with this number? I'm curious. You are making broad statements with no actual proof or market statistics to speak of. Honestly what you are doing is just kinda pulling these numbers our of your ass, so to speak. No offense meant.
But you are simply equating a lower value number to a larger broad audience, aside from that, what secrets do you know, that others are not privy to?
Square sells games at $15.99+ for iOS devices and they sell a metric shit load. MS sells DLC to Xbox LIVE users at $10.00 - $20.00 a pop and millions buy that shit up.
If you are going to start telling everyone they are wrong and that you are right, and that you have some sort of greater knowledge, than back your statements up with some proof, or examples other than your innate wisdom.-
http://gamerant.com/valve-gabe-newell-school-interview-digital-sales-dyce-68763/
http://www.shacknews.com/article/70745/valve-boss-explains-steam-pricing-experiments
http://www.shacknews.com/article/70902/angry-birds-reaches-half-a-billion-downloads - because it's a great fun casual game is .99 cents.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOMI0BxB0yA - cool interview with gabe talking about a lot of topics including sales.-
Well you provided 3 links referring to Steam, I am asking specifically about iOS app sales, Steam is a whole different platform.
The Angry birds article you used simply states that it sold a shit load, but nothing in there says why it sold a shit load and why $0.99 is better than $2.99 or $6.99. I could've tod you Angry Birds sold a lot as well.-
I'm not sure if you can get angry birds for free so I'll assume that 500k downloads doesn't necessarily equate to 500k in dollars. If a pc game was selling in those numbers that would be awesome news.
I don't think it's a far leap to guess that it's a fun casual game and was priced at .99 cents which played the majority of it's huge success.
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Ideally you get the best of both worlds, but sometimes you have to decide whether your product differentiates itself enough from the competition to warrant a cost premium. In the case of Minecraft, Mojold apparently thinks Minecraft is one of those products. If everyone starts putting mobile games up for 99 cents just because that's what the competition is doing than you'll see the quality of games go down as the whole market just becomes a race to the bottom.
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I get what you and others are proposing, I just don't get how that will make the developers make less quality games. Developers that make good games get rewarded by lots of people paying and playing their game. the more games they can sell the more money they can get to make new games. Developers that make bad games will fail because people will spread bad word of mouth/bad reviews, etc.
Angry birds is probably worth 10+ dollars, thats a top quality game selling for .99 cents and killing it.-
"Developers that make good games get rewarded by lots of people paying and playing their game."
I dont think that's accurate. There are a crap load of really great games out there that were made by independent developers or firms that don't get rewarded because they are over looked or over shadowed by other AAA titles.
I guess what my issue here is that you make a lot of direct statements and claims as if you have worked as an industry expert for numerous years, but you aren't providing any real evidence that supports your individual beliefs of how the industry works. Basically you havent shown anything that proves that you aren't anything but a professional consumer, yet you make statements that attempt to qualify yourself as an expert.
I'm not trying to call you out here, but I'm just asking for evidence of your statements.-
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Well for me I actually do work in the industry, I have for 16 years as a developer, creative director, producer, test engineer and now an PR+Social Media Director and Designer. I have a lot of intimate knowledge, personal knowledge that puts a few holes in your belief system.
I'm not saying you are wrong, but what I am saying is your definitive solution is not accurate and cannot be applied generally. The gaming markets and their distribution channels are very organice and dynamic. You cant just say "99 CENTS FOR EVERYTHING MAKES MILLIONS" because that's not true.-
And minecraft is a solid game and would continue to sell. Potentially even high numbers if the price were lower since we know the game is already really great.
And I agree, if the game is crap and is .99 it's still going to be crap and not sell well. I wasn't making a case that .99 is a magic number for millions, only that it has a wider potential interest level on the mere fact that it's priced low.
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This only works if you have a shitload of marketing or get really lucky. In the case of Minecraft, well, they have the benefit of both.
They'll start the app at $6.99 and then once the initial rush wears off, they'll drop the price and spam social networking with a sale and get all the other people that didn't buy it at $6.99 but will buy it at whatever lower price it becomes. -
Keep in mind that those lower priced or micro transaction based games are often built from the groud up for that environment. Minecraft is not. It's a portable version of an existing game.
For one it would be rather shitty to the people who payed $30 or even $40-50 after release for the full PC version to then see a pretty similar game for $1 on another platform.
For 2 adding in microtransactions would be rather dumb in minecraft. If nothing else it would make the portable version something completely different from the PC version which is contrary to what they are trying to do which is let people get a small fix of Minecraft when not at home.
I imagine these are the same reasons that Square and others who sell portable versions of their games also charge a higher price.
I don't think you are inherently wrong about the market. I just don't think Minecraft is a game that fits your concept. Plenty of others absolutely do.
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I'd be okay with it except that on Android it doesn't support things like the Transformer's keyboard and touchpad. The on screen controls are alright, but given Honeycomb and ICS natively support gamepads and other hardware I'm more than a little disappointed it ignores them.
The demo was basically the free creative mode demo, and okay for what it was, but I'm not going to pay for it, especially given the limitations. -
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For some strange reason, I can't get into the PC version. This though. Might be worth it.
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