iPhone Game Developer Ngmoco Acquires Freeverse

Holy molly. Congrats to the FV guys, not a nicer bunch of guys out there running a company.

I hate the "freemium" method that Ngmoco is using...sigh

An iPhone game company buying a Mac company. Omni shifting focus to the iPad.

Yep.

fantastic, now they're really going to try to push this pay-to-play crap down our throats even more. everyone hates it. they are in some serious denial over there. they have made terrific games but ruined them with their crap pricing model, which pisses me off cause i really wanted to play them. i know theyre not successful cause ive been watching the top grossing apps and NONE of their 'freemium' apps have been in the top 100 for very long. the way i understand there are two scenarios, and both of them suck:
1) you play for free and are crippled and/or limited in what you are able to do
2) you pay to play ridiculous prices in order to play the game to its full potential
both of these situations are a psychological mindfsuk, and either way you cant really enjoy it cause youre on a countdown timer. VERY frustrating.

its actually pretty amazing how narrow-minded (im being very generous here) they are. for example, they could make a fortune off of the touch pets app if they made it completely playable from the start and just allowed people to buy their dog toys, yards, etc.. and especially buy toys for other peoples dogs and take advantage of peoples desire to pay for a gesture (thats how valentines day works). with the eliminate app they couldve made a ton of money and gotten tons of people playing by charging a modest upfront price, and then they couldve made-it-rain with all the money they would get from selling different maps and such.

they are fighting an uphill psychological battle with this bs pricing plan which they are GOING to lose no matter how great the games are. they cant live off investment funding forever.

I've always liked Ian Smith's little Freeverse businsess. How can you not like a company that uses monkeys in their products at every opportunity? I hope the staff and products will stay as they are, even when under new management.

"freemium" is worse than a subscription model.

I really hate it.

Wow, this is really terrible. First Pangea, now Freeverse. Bye-bye original mac games.

Crap, now ngmoco is going to ruin all my favorite Freeverse games! I wish Apple would implement an "ignore updates" feature for the App Store.

Freemium is really lame. I've never been able to get into any of them. My wife was really excited about Touch Pets but hasn't played it since it came out. She didn't want to keep having to pay for dog food. She would rather have a real dog and pay for it's dog food! Too bad our landlord changed our contract at the last minute before we signed it to no pets. If our rent wasn't $329/mo I would probably care more (and yes--its a nice 2br apartment, not fancy though. We just live in a low living expense area and have good credit, but I digress!)

Didn't they make a ton of money from Rolando 1 & 2? I loved both those games. When I heard they killed Rolando 3 because they couldn't figure out a way to financially rape my wallet with a freemium system, I was so upset. Fine, don't take my $10. There are alternatives, Soosiz anyone? Has anyone heard of a sequel to that?

Speechless and sigh...

I've loved Freeverse and their games from way back. I know nothing about ngmoco, but from the sound of it they're big on pay-per-play games, which is rather horrifying.

What I'm REALLY worried about, though, are their handful of non-game apps--I absolutely LOVE Comic Life, and Sound Studio is sweet for as much as I've used it.

Oh well, at least their existing apps work great now, so they're not going to get any worse regardless of what ngmoco does to the company.