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There’s this one (idiot) game journalist that I can’t stand (professionally). One of the things he constantly harps on is the price of Square Enix’s iOS games. He has used thousands of words to rail on the company. On a good day, he says that the games are overpriced. On a bad day, he says that the pricing is obscene. The truth is that the game’s are selling well enough so that it’s inaccurate to call them overpriced. Are they expensive compared to other iOS games? Sure they are. Is the pricing obscene? No. If enough gamers are happy to be paying these prices and the publisher is making money then why do some people have such a mad-on about the pricing?
Let’s look at the recently released Final Fantasy Dimensions, for example. Some game journalists, JRPG fans, and iOS users went nuts when they learned about the game’s U.S. pricing. The entire game costs $28.99 or $32.96 if purchased by individual chapters. My game clock after chapter one was a little over nine hours. By the end of chapter two, it was a hair over 26 hours. I’m currently near the end of chapter three and my clock is at 36:54. In terms of game time, $28.99 for an RPG that I’ll get at least 45 hours out of is a great value. I wouldn’t say that’s overpriced or obscene.
Then there’s the quality. While the graphics aren’t anything special (though they are a nice homage to Final Fantasy V), the music is fantastic. The combat system — centered around a sweet version of the Final Fantasy job system — is awesome. The story is very good, especially for fans of 16-bit RPGs. The game has a lot of depth and a ton of replay value for those that like to experiment with job systems. It’s a great game that compares favorably to RPGs I’ve purchased for other portable devices. Many of those games cost more than FFD’s $28.99 when they were first released.
I understand if some iOS gamers think that Final Fantasy Dimensions is too expensive. Although I think it’s a brilliant throwback game, others might not dig it. I don’t understand people calling the price obscene or claiming that Square Enix is out of its mind. It’s not like the company is sending flocks of wild chocobos to gamers’ houses, forcing them to buy Square Enix iOS games. If nobody buys these games then the prices will go down. One of the great things about the iOS market is that publishers can be flexible with pricing. For a new game (outside of Japan) that offers depth, quality, and dozens of gameplay hours, I don’t see anything obscene about Final Fantasy Dimensions‘ $28.99 price.
Of course that’s just my opinion. What do you think of this game’s price? How about other Square Enix games for iOS and Android? Leave a comment and let me know (please!).
It sounds a bit expensive, but the only reason for that is because it’s on Apple devices. Once the price gets around $13, people complain that it’s “too expensive”. This is nothing new. For the time and effort you can put into such a game without being bored, it’s definitely worth the price.
For a touch device I do find it expensive. I don’t see myself dumping that many hours into a game on my iPad by virtue of it not being comfortable to use for extended periods of time. Tapping on the screen becomes a chore of sorts as opposed to button tapping muscle memory.
Aside from my special gripe I think the value is right. It is cheaper than DS RPGs.
What I
don’t understand is why people feel the need to bitch about the price. If it’s
too expensive for you, then don’t buy it! Some people will buy it at that price
point, and others won’t. What part of supply and demand do these people not
understand? It’s in the publisher’s best interest to get the game into as many
hands as possible while making the most amount of money possible. I’m pretty
sure they’ve got it figured out. Besides, all you really have to do is be
patient and wait for the game to go on sale.
If you
really wanted to be unbiased about it, any game reviewer could do a cost per
gaming hour analysis. All you have to do is take the amount of time it takes
you to finish the game and all of the side quests and divide that by the amount
of money you spent on the game. So if it takes you 10 hours to complete a game
that cost $32, then the average price per hour is $3.20. I get that this is
just a rough estimate of what it cost one particular person to play a game, but
at least it’s a good starting point as to what you can expect the cost per hour
to be. $3.20/hour to play an RPG would be a lot better than $10/hour to play
the campaign for the latest Call of Duty game assuming you paid $60 for it.
On a more
personal note, Mr. Padilla, I’ve actually played FFV a few years back on my PS2
and I have to say that it’s probably one of the worst FF games I’ve ever
played. In part because of the asinine “job system”. Don’t get me
wrong, the job system has a lot of potential if done properly, but FFV just did
a really bad job with it. The characters were flat and interchangeable with a
piece of wet cardboard. The story was cookie-cutter RPG, the gameplay was
uninspired, the sound and music was nothing memorable, and I had a very hard
time trying to figure out of half of the main characters were either male or
female. That game really bored me
to tears. They just didn’t give me a reason to care about the characters since
they had no personality thanks to the job system. I could turn that pirate
chick into a black mage or a warrior. There was no definition of characters since
I could make a full party of bards and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
-M
It looks like you weren’t paying enough attention to the character stats in FFV. It’s true that any character could pursue any job, but that doesn’t mean that they should. For example, when Butz levels up he gets higher bonuses in strength in vitality than the other characters. That makes him more ideal for the melee jobs. It would be wasteful to use him as a white mage or black mage, but I like that players can choose to develop the characters any way they want to. There are so many job/skill permutations that player choice is a powerful thing.
Also, this was the first time the job system was this flexible. It was extremely basic in the original FF and a little more fleshed out in FF III. The job system in FFV was the root for the excellent gameplay of the FF: Tactics games.