I'm surprised no one has mentioned the shitstorm that followed the release of Nintendo's Super Mario Run on iOS. The game comes for free with 3 levels. To unlo

I'm surprised no one has mentioned the shitstorm that followed the release of Nintendo's Super Mario Run on iOS. The game comes for free with 3 levels. To unlock the full version, you need to make a one-off in-app purchase that costs around $10 depending on your local currency. But other than that, it has a pretty traditional pricing. So after release, this otherwise awesome, deep game was getting tons and tons of negative reviews because of the fact that the in-app purchase was, according to many, way too expensive. I followed this topic a little bit on Twitter, and what I saw (I know, very unscientific) was that most of the people complaining where youngsters that most probably spend their most time playing games that require you to pay in order to progress faster in the game. Of course, they usually pay a fraction of the $10 that Nintendo wants, but they do it many times over the lifecycle of a game. Just compare the $10 that you have to spend in order to play Super Mario Run (assuming that you already have an iOS device) to what you would need to pay to play a Mario game on Nintendo hardware: the cheapest you could do is to pay ~$200 for a Nintendo 3DS + ~$40 for the game. Of course, once you get the hardware, you can play more games on it, but the games are still 4x more expensive than the one release on iOS. To wrap this up: I think that in-app purchases are really, really bad for the gaming industry and should not be abused the way they are now. Especially Apple should intervene here and maybe put a limit on the items to be sold and ban completely "pay to level up quicker" IAPs. Also, Apple should offer a demo option for their apps already, instead of forcing developers to abuse in-app purchases for that.