Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Price point vs. entertaining trial version... To buy or not?

So, I've been playing some Peggle (from PopCap Games) lately. Specifically, I've been playing the demo. Like other reviewers, I went from an immediate reaction of "how is this interesting or strategic? I just fire a ball at some pegs..." to "wow, this is a cool puzzle game with interesting mechanics and challenges" in the course of about 15-20 minutes. There's a bunch of content, the core gameplay is strategic and fun, the matches are quick enough that you can learn-by-failing but not get frustrated.

The problem I'm having is that $19.95 is just too high a price point for this kind of game. Most XBLA games are in the $5 to $10 range and it's hard for me to think about this game being worth more than those games. And with XBLA I get to add achievements for completing the game to my gamerscore ;)

Now, there are replays that apparently you can save or share -- and I know that PopCap has some community features -- so maybe if I were more tied into the community I'd be more interested in picking up the game.

But, given there is so much cheap (and even free) content out there, as much as I'd like to see additional Peggle content I think I'm going to just stick with the trial version.

No comments: