EA did NOT screw over Real Racing 3!

I’ve been reading a lot of winey reviews of Firemonkey’s Real Racing 3 distributed by EA. The Verge, PennyArcade and 512pixels are just two examples.

I don’t understand why. We are not talking about a console version of a racing game here. We are talking cell phone/tablet here. Yet considering this fact, the visuals on this game are just stunning. It doesn’t compete with Gran Turismo 5 even closely, but one might say it’s the Gran Turismo of iOS.

Some of The Verge’s complaints are…

In-App Purchases: They claim that IAP’s permeate the game. There is one location in the game that asks for dollars from users. The Store. There are three ways to spend money, add R$’s, add Gold Coins, and purchase “packs” which contain cars, boosters, etc… That’s it.

You use R$ and Gold Coins to repair your cars and purchase new cars as well as keep existing cars running the best they can.

Timers: They complain that when you upgrade your cars or do maintenance, you have to wait for them to finish. This is true with the maintenance on a single car, but upgrades are added when the timer ends, but you can still race with your pre-upgraded car until the upgrades are installed.

The commenters on the article all claim that they would be willing to pay $5+ for the game. I would bet 10x that amount that more than 75% would back out if they were forced to actually pay $5+ for the game. Just look at all the copies of iOS games that are being pirated. There are iOS developers that are having to shut down due to overwhelming piracy.

I really feel that the Freemium pay model is a battle tank against piracy. It has to be very difficult to pirate IAP’s in games since there really isn’t a download aspect to the idea. You are simply setting a flag on a server somewhere that says that you are now allowed to have this car or that upgrade.

So long as IAP’s are for in game currency, I don’t have a problem with IAP’s at all. However, if developers start creating in game “walls” just to get players to fork out real world cash to get past, then there is a problem.