To coin Donald Rumsfeld, there remain plenty of unknown unknowns, as well as known unknowns when it comes to the iPad.

Some we'll discover come Saturday 3rd April. But others will have to be teased out in the following days and weeks.

For game developers, perhaps most crucial of these first impression points between consumers and content makers is the always sticky issue of pricing.

XL pricing?

I've been number crunching and worked out the average price of announced iPad games (technically those that have also announced their price) is $3.52.

In the process, I spoken to plenty of developers about their plans for Apple's supersized device. It seems that while they're hopeful they can charge more for games, they're also making sure they remain flexible.

"We'll do our best to give iPad a healthier marketplace than the 99c-$2.99 pit the iPhone App Store is in right now," states Jani Kahrama of Secret Exit, which is releasing Zen Bound 2 exclusively for iPad.

"Zen Bound 2 will cost more than Zen Bound 1 did when it launched [$4.99], but there has been significant work done to justify the increase."

"We're going to strive to maintain competitive prices for iPad-specific games. We anticipate selling at between $5.99 and $9.99," says Kris Jones, minister of propaganda at Thunder Game Works, which is releasing an iPad version of its popular Trenches games.

Another race to the bottom

Wayne Whatford, CEO of Revolutionary Concepts, which is releasing Frogman for iPad is more cautious however.

"We hope the extra work involved in creating iPad apps means the public will accept higher prices, but it all hinges on the developers," he points out.

"As the space becomes crowded, it only takes one to start the race to the bottom. Sadly I think the prices will end up the same as on iPhone."

Howard Tomlinson, CEO at Astraware agrees: "Personally I think $5-$10 for a decent iPad-optimised game is pretty fair, but I can see a drive-to-lowest push happening early on, before the market begins to get sensible again."

You can see a full breakdown of the price of announced iPad games - which goes all the way from free to $10+ - here.

All-for-one

An additional issue for developers concerns whether they decide to release Universal Apps, which support iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices within one download. This would also mean universal pricing across the three.

"If people will pay more for iPad games then it will be hard to do a universal release without either having a price that's too low for iPad or too high for iPhone," says Adam Meyer, creative director at Steamroller Studios, which is releasing Super Shock Football HD for iPad.

"The markets might end up being too different. I think people need to be able to choose which version they want and not pay more to have access to a version they can't use."

One way of dealing with this is to release two versions of your games. James Brown of Ancient Workshop is taking this approach.

"I'm releasing Ancient Frog HD, a significantly reworked hi-res version of my iPhone game Ancient Frog at $4.99, but once I've actually tried it out on the hardware and added in some features, the price will go up," he explains.

The original iPhone Ancient Frog will become a Universal App, and maintain its current price of $2.99, for the time being.

"That's the plan, anyway," Brown muses.

"Of course, anything could happen. If the iPad takes off in a big way, I may be able to survive with the HD game at a lower price point. If it's a dud, I may need to put the price right up so as not to undercut sales of the desktop version.

"It's going to be interesting watching how this plays out."