December 15th. $9.99.
You can download and play for free but the full price gets you everything the game has to offer apparently. Certainly a not so usual way to sell a mobile game. Will it work?
I’m excited, if only because I really liked what I saw of the reveal. Some cool new stuff in the video at this link.It’s not just an endless runner.
iPhone and iPad only to start.
Uh. This is far from unusual. For years now.
The $10 for a mobile game is unusual. I hope it works, but it’s an outlier in the mobile market, and the internet will bitch and moan irrationally at how expensive that is.
I’ve read this is the product of Nintendo finally caving to their shareholders telling them that mobile games are where the real money’s at.
Nintendo is still resisting a bit, it seems, since it’s not a “free to play, expensive to feed the addiction” game yet.
I really can’t remember the last time something cost $9.99 that I was interested in downloading from the app store. It seems unusual to me at that price. I suspect for people who normally only pay free that it will be unusual for them, too?
Outside of a few outliers, Square Enix mainly, it certainly is unusual.
But both Square and Nintendo trade on name and a certain assurance of value. They may be able to do what few others can, and to be honest I hope it works for them.
Football Manager Classic is, I think, £15 for iPad
Right! And Out of the Park also charges a few bones.
So super niche, or high brand value/ recognition.
All of the Final Fantasy ports, and Dragon Quest ports are pricey. 10-20 bucks. Some of them are excellent ports, however.
I’d hardly call Football Manager niche. It’s one of the biggest selling franchises in Europe.
But he said high brand recognition too.
Nintendo had a similar pricing model for Pokemon Picross on 3DS – free to play, or $20 to buy enough of the time gated resource to play through unhindered. The problem for me was the pay resource was mechanically important to the game’s flow, so your options were to buy in at the expense of trivializing game systems, or grind for literal hundreds of days to play for free. Hopefully they can strike a better balance here.
Not certain, but today’s news certainly sounds like it’s basically a demo for free, pay to unlock and access the whole game. Not a freemium game with a grind as a gameplay system. Could be wrong, but that’s the impression I get.
How’s it compare to the Rayman run games? I thought those were excellently done.
We’ll know when it comes out. All we have to go on right now are a couple of really great looking gameplay videos. Miyamoto said you can play it with one hand. Graphics are New SMB style.
I have no problems with $9.99 for a quality Mario game. I wish it was paid up front and not IAP, because family sharing doesn’t work with IAP and my wife will want to play this, too. I can always do it the old way by logging into her phone under my app store account, but that’s an annoyance when it comes to updates.
Hmmm… I wonder if it’s really IAP or more of a demo version/full version? We’ll know more in a month.
I think that’s the most important question here!
I don’t think the App Store allows for the latter, devs just accomplish it with IAP.
They used to have demo apps and full apps. I’m pretty sure I have a few like that in my iTunes. I’ll have a look sometime.