Maybe this will subsidize the costs of the Macbook Pros and those will be relatively cheaper. Shit, I wish.

P.S I know that was totally unrelated and excessive caps-lock but you have no tips submitting button, also I thought this was a videogame blog not fashion items :3

You don't fool me, you just added that to make me look stupid!

Well when you compare the higher end iPod games to DS games, the price doesn't seem so bad. Granted the content isn't as extensive, but then again the price isn't as much as a DS title either.

Screw that. There are plenty of good titles out there for under five bucks, even moreso if the cheap game appeals to you. And plenty of free titles.

Sure, it's not a gaming platform like the DS or PSP, but for something that multitasks to the extreme, it doesn't do gaming all too badly.

The iPhone app market is in serious trouble right now. Prices have been converging toward zero, which sounds great at first, until you realize that games cost money to develop.

An iPhone game costs about as much to develop as a game of a similar scale on the DS or the PSP. Simple puzzle games can be created in a month by a single bedroom developer, but developing bigger games takes a lot more time and a lot more people, and consequently a lot more money, and the prices just don't reflect that.

And no, they can't make it up on volume - on the contrary, good casual games are likely to sell a lot more copies (see also: Wii) - and in the case of phones the situation is especially bad, since most people just want something to play while waiting in line or sitting on the toilet.

When people are used to paying as little as $1, a game that costs as much as a game for the DS or the PSP would be a tough sell, and if the developers have no hope to at least break even, they simply won't develop for the iPhone. Until this problem is solved, you won't see many 'serious' games on this platform.

$20 might just be enough however, especially if it's coupled with serious promotion on Apple's side - although it's less than the retail price of a DS/PSP game, I believe the developer gets to keep a lot more of that cash on the iPhone than on the DS/PSP - I don't have any information about the DS/PSP, but Apple takes just 30% of the sales price and forwards the rest to the developer, which sounds like a way better deal than what I expect the console manufacturers to pass on, since DS cartridges and PSP discs cost money to manufacture, transport, store, and sell at retail.

To sum it up, while this premium store might sound like OMG OVERPRICING, this is really just bringing the prices in line with the rest of the industry, and is likely to entice developers to create something other than shovelware.

(I'm an iPhone developer, and although I work on a productivity application as an employee at a larger company, I do have a little bit of insight into the iPhone app market.)

(Perhaps I should make this a blog post...)