There can't be many developers who have never had an App Store sale on any of their games. In an increasingly crowded market, varying price is considered one of the key levers in terms of driving demand.

"Some people love it and some people hate it," admits Anders Martensson, of Illusion Labs' attitude.

But the truth is the six man Swedish studio, which has released multi-million selling games such as Touchgrind and Labyrinth, is one of the handful of developers which has persuaded consumers its games are worth more than 99c.

Don't pay peanuts
Touchgrind, released in November 2008, remains in the US top 100 despite its $4.99 price, and while there is a free Lite version of Labyrinth, the paid game is $2.99 (released at $6.99), and the sequel operates at a further premium, priced $4.99

"I have a simple attitude," Martensson says. "I don't like freemium. Maybe it's a Scandinavian thing and Americans prefer to pay monthly, but I like to pay for things whether games or phones up front, so that's how we make our games. We make high quality games with a strong focus on graphics, physics and control.

"We also like to make games that people can't easily copy. It's hard to do great physics, graphics and controls. For example, we see loads of iPhone games with great ideas, but which have controls that in our opinion aren't good enough."

It's a philosophy that Illusions Labs practises as well as preaches, with many of its ideas prototyped but eventually scrapped before release.

Martensson says one of its relative failures, cute physics platformer Sway, was educational in this respect.

"We're proud of the game, but the controls took some time to get used to," he says. "It was a good lesson for us. You only have 20 seconds to impress players."

Feel the noize

Another element in Illusion's top quality drive is the scale of its games. For example Labyrinth 2 HD ($7.99) features all of the 150 levels in the iPhone release, plus another 150 new examples for iPad.

"As a small studio, we really thought about how we could compete with the likes of EA Mobile and Gameloft," says Martensson. "Labyrinth 2 is just too big for anyone to clone successfully and undercut."

Not that this means the company won't experiment on occasion.

New iPad-only release Foosball HD is a simple simulation of the bar game, albeit with smooth controls, which runs at 60 frames per second and uses OpenGL 2.0 to enable specific effects such as the shiny plastic of the players. Taking five to six man-months, it ranks as a small project.

Martensson is also keen to play around with iPhone 4's gyroscope.

"We have lots of ideas. Flipping motion, maybe pancakes," he laughs. "Sure there won't be a lot of devices out there but let's see if we can do a fun game. If it sells then great. If not, it will still be a good game."

And as mottos for game developers go, that's hard to beat.