Around a hundred years ago in 1984, I owned a ZX Spectrum 16K (which my Dad had bought for Christmas in 1982). This tiny little computer cost £100 or so, hooked up to your TV and the games had to be loaded over a audio cable from a tape recorder. I remember my Christmas Day was spent with a hairdryer trying to resolve a hilarious problem where any dust inside would cause internal shorts and produce a little row of bombs across the screen. Ah, heady times.
The games I bought were sold in two shops. Tandy on the Antrim Road in Lisburn and a video rental store. At the time the full price of a game was around £7.99. The rental store also rented the game for 99p for two nights. This was achievable to my 11 year old mind and I rented the game which caught my eye.
You see.
TRON had been released in 1982 and I was obsessed. (In hindsight I really should have stayed with the computers thing.) And a company called Personal Software Services in Coventry (England) has produced a game called Light Cycle.
Evidently Disney wasn’t paying attention to computer games in 1983. But anyway – this game which entranced me (before I knew what the gameplay looked like), was £7.99. (I know it says it was £5.95 retail on the web site but I tell you, it sold for £7.99 in pre-globalised, pre-internet Lisburn).
So, iApp prices.
I think everyone knows that 59p (99c) is too cheap for anything of value.
That said, the iPhone has proved quite the opposite (and it seems to be everlastingly sustainable) as we fill our home screens with games and utility apps that are, quite frankly, too cheap to be good, but so good you’d be stupid not to try them. I’ve got pages of apps and games which cost very little and yet I get hours and hours of use out of them.
We knew that iPad apps would cost more. Sure, you can run your existing iPhone apps on the iPad by stretching them up to fill the screen, but there’s a heap of new apps coming. Some of them are refreshes of existing iPhone apps with new content but some of them are new and exciting.
So iPad apps and games will cost more.
They’re not going to cost like PC games or console games – between thirty quid and fifty quid for a single game – but they’re also not going to trend towards 59p! As you can see below!
These images are from MacRumors:
Expect bigger prices from big names. We’re going to see some amazing content on this device. Just be prepared to pay for it.