So, I'm a little behind in keeping up with my favourite podcasts, and yesterday, I just listened to Accidental Tech Podcast, Episode 52. In the episode, Casey Liss metions this post by Thomas Baekdal that expands on my earlier post about app pricing models and particularly games that rely on in-app purchases and "pay or wait" tactics for revenue.

In the post, they have two videos of Dungeon Keeper. They have a video of gameplay of the original PC version (1997) of the game that was sold at a fixed price of $5.99, then a second video (review) of Dungeon Keeper for iOS and Android that uses the "pay or wait" model. The second video is painful and contains NSFW language. This is very similar to how Angry Birds GO! operates. You can either wait a very long time, or spend gems/coins/tokens to keep playing right now. And to get more gems, you can earn them very slowly — but you can never earn them fast enough to keep playing — or you can buy them.

Dungeon Keeper Mobile 2014 - [NSFW, but hilarious]:

John Siracusa offered another take on the proliferation of these crappy games in the ATP, Episode 52. His take is that there are just so many more games out there in this new mobile gaming world where anyone can make a game, that we are bound to have more crap. He also believes that the sheer number of games out there now means we likely have more good games than ever before, too, but that we have to wade through a lot of crap sometimes to find them. Previously, most games were made by large or mid-sized game studios. Now anyone can make a game of varying levels of quality, and it is resulting in a broad range of games available on the App Store.

I agree with his take, but it's still frustrating wading through all that crap.

That might lead me into another rant that I'll save for another day. Apple needs to fix App Store search and improve its ranking, rating and recommendation system. The current system is very broken.