Vlambeer to mobile devs: Don’t ‘be scared to charge $3 for a game’

Vlambeer, the maker of titles like Super Crate Box, earned a lot of praise last week for its new iOS game Ridiculous Fishing. Now the studio is speaking out to other developers, encouraging them to fight against the freemium model.

"We do believe that developers shouldn't be scared to charge $3 for a game," it wrote in a Reddit Q&A.

Ridiculous Fishing contains no in-app purchases, and Vlambeer is strict about this rule.

"The problem is that at $0.99, you'll need to sell endless amounts of copies to be able to survive as an indie developer. Most games don't even get close to that. A direct result of the whole race-to-the-bottom in prices is the prevalence of free-to-play on iOS — it seems to be a safer bet.

"But since it's almost impossible to do F2P in a non-evil way and without sacrificing the elegance of your game design, we'll prefer to charge $3."

Charging $3 does erect a barrier to entry for some, but the word-of-mouth for Ridiculous Fishing has been huge. Gamers can easily seek it out on the App Store and identify it from the many dubious games out there. Not every studio has experienced the same good fortune.

In the thread, Vlambeer also address the possibility of an Android release.

"We're still arguing about an Android release," it wrote. "There are a lot of things to consider and a lot of things that we just don't know too much about since we've yet to make a game for Android. As soon as we figure all that stuff out, we'll see what we can do."

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[via GI.biz]