Gun Bros freemium game gets $500 in-app purchase gun
Freemium games are hard to hate and hard to love. The concept of having a free (or close to free) base game with additional purchases to “make it better” normally means that games get updated and maintained more often than “normal” games (simply because they generate so much money), but some of the games take the whole thing a bit too far and makes it easy to rack of thousands of dollars in in-app purchases. For instance, there’s a big difference between paying a one-time fee of $0.99 for the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds and buying in-game currency over and over again in games like We Rule. If you play a game a lot then it’s not unreasonable to pay a little bit to make the experience better, but at some point it just gets ridiculous.
Guns Bros, a popular shooter game, has managed to not only reach that point with ease, but use it as a short pit stop before heading off into another dimension of IAP stupidity. One of the guns you can buy in the game, the Kraken (incidentally a complete ripoff of the RYNO from Ratchet & Clank, if anyone knows that game series), is buyable in-game for 3500 “war bucks”. If you use the IAP system to get this in-game currency, you end up spending a whopping $500 on the game. That’s $500 US dollars, the kind you use in real life.
The price of this item has actually increased from 1400 “war bucks”, a price at which people on YouTube actually bought the item. Apple’s new policy of banning in-app currency rewards from clicking ads etc. also means that you can’t just click ads to get the cash either. Whether someone will buy the gun at the $500 price is anyone’s guess, but I wouldn’t hold my breath and hope for sanity to prevail. Apple of course makes a lot of money off these types of games, but given enough bad publicity I’m thinking that might change.
[TouchArcade]
