ngmoco gets greedy with in-app purchases →
Matthew Rex brings to light a shocking practice by ngmoco, one of the App Store’s leading game publishers:
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.
There’s more.
