Digital Chocolate has moved quickly to cut the price of its games on BlackBerry App World, bringing them down from the UK launch-week price of £7.85 to a much more appealing £3.95.
That matches the price being charged by rivals Gameloft and HandyGames, although publishers including Glu Mobile, Gamevil and RealArcade are hanging on to the higher price point.
This, despite the fact that Java games on operator portals retail for £5 or less in the UK, while even the richest iPhone titles only sell for £5.99. The fact that most BlackBerry App World games are ports of existing Java titles makes the high prices even more puzzling.
As DChoc boss Trip Hawkins explains in an interview with VentureBeatwhen asked about RIM's app store: "Its not so hard to dump an entire library of games on another platform that supports Java."
Hawkins continues to be bullish about iPhone, though, reiterating that it's now a priority platform for Digital Chocolate.
"Its by far our most effective platform. We make as much money with these games on one device as we do putting a game on 100 different cell phone platforms," he says.
"We may experiment with putting games on those new app stores, but the urgency now is to put games on the iPhone."
For DChoc's rivals, dumping entire libraries of games onto BlackBerry App World and slapping nearly four quid extra on the price may seem like a good business model. But we'll be interested to see if sales figures say otherwise.
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Contributing Editor
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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