I must say, I’m happy to see my little writeup on ngmoco’s pricing practices featured on a couple of sites already, most noticeably TUAW and Smoking Apples. If you agree with the point I’m trying to make, please spread the word, either on your site or by submitting tips to others.

Thanks!

RE: ngmoco’s slippery slope: Eliminate and TouchPets

I’ve been a fan of ngmoco since I played their first game for the iPhone. Great innovators, great polish, good stuff. You’re always guaranteed something well designed and thought out. ngmoco has also always charged a decent premium price for their games. I bought Rolando 2 for $10 and Star Defense for $6. I had no problem paying these prices in an AppStore full of $0.99 games because ngmoco’s polish was through the roof, and with the recent Plus+ integration, I was totally drinking the ngmoco koolaid.

Now though, I fear we’ve lost these talented devs to something called greed. Not intent with charging for games traditionally, they’ve opted to release games for free and require you to pay-to-play. Now I’m no stranger to this formula, I’ve played MMOs and the like, but I wasn’t quite expecting it to be so dramatically greedy that it severely effected my willingness to play.

Having played Eliminate, one of my #1 anticipated games for the iPhone, I was impressed. It featured the same amount of ngmoco polish, even more than any game I’d seen from them. Beautiful graphics, great music, kinda-decent-enough controls, and a cool upgrade system. When they accounced you’d only be able to get “credits” (the in-game currencey for buying new upgrades) while having “Energy” (something that dissipates when you play), I was already nervous. Now that I’ve played it, I can safely say this structure will ruin their games for me. I managed to play 3 five minute games online with the amount of energy supplied for “the day”. Now that I’d met that quota, I could either wait a day or two for my energy to recharge to make my combat time worthwhile, or I could buy more energy and keep playing. Basically the energy they supplied lasted about 15 minutes, and by that time, I was already in a “guess you have to spend some money!” scenario.

But that isn’t even the worst. TouchPets, essentially a pet-simulator akin to things like Nintendogs or Petz, also has these in-game purchase options. Except this isn’t for anything like vanity items, toys, clothes, or other needless things for your pet, it’s for FOOD. That’s right, any of the virtual currency you earn in TouchPets can only be used to buy clothing and toys for your newly adopted puppy. If you want to keep him fed, and therefore maintain a status of a decent master and not some terrible Michael Vick villain, you need to spend $1.99 to buy more food. My dog’s energy had gone down to zero after teaching him some tricks and playing for a bit. After feeding him the single bowl of food the game includes with a new pet, he was hungry again within a few hours. I was shocked to realize that despite having over $1,000 of in-game money, there was no way to keep my puppy from whimpering from hunger other than busting open the in-app purchases and spending the $2 for more food. Considering $2 gets you 20 bowls of food, and the dog seems he could eat 2 bowls or more a day, you’re roughly spending $2 every 10 days to play. That’s 6 dollars a month, and that’s $72 a year. To play a pet simulator. And that’s if you keep your gametime to a minimum, because the more you play with your dog, the hungrier it gets.

Is this what you’ve come to ngmoco? Please change. Please go back to charging a premium for your games so real customers like myself and many others can go back to enjoying your great work for what it was, and not for it permanently hovering over my wallet.

Gaming Communities are starting to pop up left and right on the iPhone. With iPhone 3.0 being the most accessible version yet, capable of having many new features, it’s no surprise we’re seeing so many.

I love to see them popping up, but I think so many could be a problem down the line. Imagine if the Xbox 360 didn’t only have Xbox Live, but it had “Xbox Scores” “Open Xbox” and “Xbox Live Scoring 360”. 3rd party scoring communities all with their own APIs and their own achievements and their own settings. It’d be a nightmare, and unfortunately it’s a direct result of the AppStore being such an open and highly profitable community.

TUAW has reported Scoreloop as another one of these scoring communities. Add this to OpenFeint and ngomoco’s fantastic Plus+ Network, we have THREE contenders in a niche that should really only have one. I say this because these scoring communities are meant to bring gamers together, and compare their scores against one another. Usually I’m a fan of friendly competition, but I think it comes as a detriment to this specific niche.

If we have three games on Plus+, two games on OpenFeint, and two games on Scoreloop, users will have three usernames, three sets of achievements, and three friends lists, all in three communities whose purpose is meant to create one central & unified scoring community.

I think that this could go a couple of different ways. Either one will eventually win out, they’ll merge, or just live together, and we’ll just have a weakened gaming community on the iPhone. It’d be nice if Apple came out with their own network to unify the gamers, but I doubt we’ll see that happen.

I for one love the Plus+ network, and it’s currently the only one I’m a member of. Having three (I’m sure there will be more) is a bit daunting to me, and seems like something I may avoid.

I’m excited to see this much interest in an Xbox Live-esque network on the phone, I just hope we see something more central down the line.