My opinion piece on the difference between the price and value of games on the App Store seems to have stirred up some debate.

Well, here's another approach in terms of how to decide your game's price.

Evangeline Marzec, the owner of Seattle-based developer Pocket Protector, based the development cost of its debut game, an iPad title called 2Foos, on the sale of her Jeep Grand Cherokee.

"The city kept threatening to tow it from in front of my house, due to a 72-hour parking ordinance," says Marzec, who has previously worked at Garage Games and microfinance site Kiva, before setting up Pocket Protector as a game consultancy.

"I tell people how to run game companies for a living, but I wasn't actually running a game company. So I decided to put my Jeep where my mouth is."

From wheels to game

Budgeted at $10,000, she initially assumed the game would have to sell to around 2 percent of iPads, but with the iPad to-date selling 3 million units, by the time the game launched, this had reduced to 0.1 percent or around 3,000 downloads.

"I needed to price it at $4.99 to make a profit. Since $10,000 divided by $3.50 [Pocket Protector's 70 percent of each sale] is 2,857 downloads, that was my break-even," she explained.

To make the most out of an iPad game, the design was for a two-player in-person experience.

"The iPad does what no other console ever has: lets two people play intuitively on the same device. It's a fundamentally social and physical experience," Marzec says.

In terms of justifying the $4.99 price to gamers, she argues; "At $0.99, our app would never turn a profit, and we would never be able to pay ourselves enough to buy things like pants and shoes and an iPhone 4G.

"At $3.99 the app breaks even or becomes profitable enough for us to maybe buy a mocha over at Stealth Starbucks. At $4.99 we might be profitable enough to buy some pants, and make another game of roughly equivalent cost to 2Foos itself."

Project overrun

In terms of actual budget, 2Foos cost about $12,750, including $4,500 of artwork, and $7,500 in terms of programming.

"The development team in Eastern Europe cost $25 per hour. They estimated it would take 160 to 260 hours, but actually came in at 300 hours. That was my biggest cost overrun, by far, " Marzec says.

As for the project's overall success, you can follow how it all pans out over the Pocket Protector's website.