Former EA executive slams expensive iPhone games
Neil Young has been making headlines recently. The former executive of EA recently left the developers to start up his own business developing games for the iPhone and iPod Touch platform. However, now he’s taking aim at games that are costing the iPhone, or iPod Touch, users over $9.99 a waste of time and money. He clearly doesn’t want to make money!?!
When the AppStore opened its electronic doors back in June, there was a fair few games available for the Apple console users, ranging from an easy $0 to a fair $4.99 and beyond, clearing the $10 price tag. Unfortunately for the games that preferred the higher price tag, their future days were numbered. It appeared that no one wanted to buy them.
Young, who moved on to start up the iPhone gaming developer, ngmoco, says that there is a very valid reason for this, it involved expectations. In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, he said, “My read on the market is most of the games that are $9.99 don’t really deserve to be there right there. If that’s the premium tier of pricing on the device, my expectation would be the premium tier of pricing would have premium games built for the platform that fully take advantage of that, versus a cross-port from a Symbian or a DS game.”
Young has also spoken out about the iPhone’s similarities with the enormously successful Nintendo DS, claiming that, “If you think about the games that were successful, have been successful on the Wii — and it’s also true of the DS — they’re games that have kind of been built from the interface out. And by successful I mean both from a critical standpoint but also a commercial standpoint. The DS started to accelerate as a platform was when designers started to do more than just port the old games over, try to map some hokey extension with the stylus and started really building games that specifically took advantage of the stylus. I think that’s true on the iPhone here, too. We’re just at the very, very beginning.”
The iPhone is sitting on a cloud at the moment as it’s enjoying massive gaming success that was totally unexpected by everyone involved and more and more unique gaming experiences are being brought to the platform, making the iPhone capable of taking on the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP in a battle of the handheld consoles.
However, Young does admit that as time goes by we will be seeing more and more $9.99 games claiming success on the iPhone console but warns that if it were to happen, don’t expect it to happen a lot.
He said, “On the DS, users, on average, spend $62-a-year on software and on the PSP they spend $45-a-year on software. I think it’s unlikely you’re going to get an average user buying 62 99-cent games, but I do think you could get an average user two or three $9.99 games and those $9.99 games to some segment of the audience are extended with microtransactions or delivered episodically.”
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