The Ever-Changing iOS Gaming Market

Even though it’s not the first iOS game with a pre­mium price point, the recent release of Final Fan­tasy Tac­tics: The War of the Lions (Square Enix) on the App Store for $15.99 has fueled a lot of dis­cus­sion about higher-priced iOS games by big com­pa­nies. Are these pre­mium games here to stay? If so, what does it mean for the over­all iOS mar­ket and espe­cially for indie devel­op­ers? In this post I take a brief look at the his­tory of game pric­ing on the App Store and spec­u­late on what’s pos­si­ble to come in regards to iOS games.

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Free-to-Play Done Right

Free apps account for 81% of the appli­ca­tion down­loads on the App Store. In regards to games, cur­rently 8 of the 10 top-grossing iPhone and 6 of the 10 top-grossing iPad games are free. The fact that there’s no entry bar­rier cou­pled with the addic­tive nature of most of these games make for an extremely prof­itable cat­e­gory and encour­age more and more peo­ple to enter the free-to-play (F2P) bandwagon.

I have noth­ing per­son­ally against these kinds of games but I’m put out by the fact that many of them keep bom­bard­ing the player with micro­trans­ac­tion offers and even go as far as cre­at­ing “pay walls” in which the player must pay at some moment to be able to achieve any progress. I feel that tak­ing some lessons from a few suc­cess­ful PC F2P games with friend­lier busi­ness mod­els wouldn’t hurt the iOS envi­ron­ment. In this post, I’ll men­tion some of the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the model of two of these games.

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A Few Great Books for the iOS Developer

Hello! This is my first post for iDe­vBlo­gA­Day. I’ve been fol­low­ing the list for quite some time and it’s been of great value for me so I’m hon­ored to be part of this group along­side so many tal­ented individuals.

For those who don’t know me, I’m a game devel­oper and recently launched my first iOS game (The Fish Dies in the End). I’m also cur­rently a M.Sc. Can­di­date in Com­puter Sci­ence in the field of Arti­fi­cial Intelligence.

Before start­ing the devel­op­ment of my game, I had never pro­grammed in Objective-C. Thank­fully, there were some great books that helped me make the tran­si­tion from a C/C++ back­ground to Objective-C while con­cur­rently learn­ing a frame­work (cocos2d) that would allow me to develop the game as effi­ciently as pos­si­ble. This first post will focus on some of the books that I found most help­ful dur­ing the process. Please note that these were by no means the only learn­ing tools I used. The inter­net has many won­der­ful resources avail­able for free, includ­ing this very own iDe­vBlo­gA­Day, but at least for me these were invalu­able and I hope they can help you as well if you decide to check them out.

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The Fish Dies in the End Is Out Now!

So if you’ve been vis­it­ing my site lately, you’re prob­a­bly aware that I was devel­op­ing a game called The Fish Dies in the End. I’m really proud to announce that the game has been released and is out now on the App Store! Keep read­ing for some thoughts about this release.

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The Fish Dies in the End To Be Released on April 13th!

I know that I’ve been post­ing only about my game lately and I’m sorry for that, but I’m basi­cally work­ing on the game non­stop for a few weeks now. I’ll try to post more gen­eral stuff soon!

Any­way, I have some excit­ing news today! The Fish Dies in the End finally has a release date: April 13th is the day that the game will be out on the App Store and you’ll be able to engage in the most excit­ing fish-dying action of all-time. It’s been a fan­tas­tic (fish-tastic?) ride so far and the response to the game has been great with lots of pos­i­tive com­ments. If you have an iPhone and the game seems inter­est­ing to you, I ask you to try it once it’s released and give me your feed­back which will be very impor­tant to me. If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still talk about the game with your friends! Keep read­ing for some more information.

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The Fish Dies in the End Trailer Launched!

I’ve been talk­ing about the game I’m devel­op­ing in my pre­vi­ous posts. After releas­ing some screen­shots and the web­site of the game, lots of peo­ple asked me to release a trailer for it. These peo­ple don’t have to ask any­more since the trailer is here now :). Check it out below.

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Website For My Game Launched

In my pre­vi­ous post I men­tioned the game I’m cur­rently work­ing on, called “The Fish Dies in the End”. Today I’m proud to announce that I just launched the web­site for the game. Visit http://www.thefishdies.com/ and you’ll get access to a list of fea­tures, screen­shots and more. There’s also a Twit­ter account for the game (@thefishdies) and a Face­book page. So please fol­low on Twit­ter and like the game on Face­book and help me spread the word! Keep read­ing to see some screenshots!

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A Hint of Things to Come — “The Fish Dies in the End”

I’m hard at work on my cur­rent game in the past few weeks. Every­thing is com­ing together very well and I’m really excited for the end result, espe­cially because beta test­ing is start­ing this week and if every­thing goes well the game will be released really soon. Keep on read­ing for some more details!

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The Best iPhone / iPad Games

Lists are pop­u­lar on the inter­net, aren’t they? Since I play a lot on my iPhone and iPad I decided to make this list show­ing my pre­ferred games for iOS plat­forms. Of course, it’s just my opin­ion so feel free to dis­agree with me on any choices or omis­sions. Click on the icons to be redi­rected to the iTunes page for each game.

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Book Review: Why Video Games Matter?

I recently read the book “Extra Lives: Why Video Games Mat­ter” by Tom Bis­sell (Chas­ing the Sea). I was really inter­ested in this book for some time. It has been touted by Publisher’s Weekly as a “scin­til­lat­ing med­i­ta­tion on the promise and dis­con­tents of video games” and the author is a famous jour­nal­ist and writer who was sup­posed to bring a whole new and inter­est­ing way of ana­lyz­ing the impor­tance of video games as a cul­tural form with increas­ing main­stream accep­tance. So what’s my opin­ion after read­ing the book?

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