| Published | Actual | |
| Birmingham New Street | 07:10 | 07:10 |
| London Euston | 08:30 | 08:29 |
When I was a child, my family would go on holiday to caravan sites in Wales. Sometimes, true to reputation, days were long and wet but there was always one thing that would take away the boredom and give me something to do… the arcade, a room full of flashing lights, loud noises and above all, games. Even though I was young I still remember completing Final Fight and Golden Axe during one wet holiday at Clarach Bay.
Recently I’ve downloaded CSR Racing for the ipad, a street racing game where you earn game cash and gold by racing against computer competitors, the controls are simple and each car has a few upgradable items at 5 stages each. If you need to update and don’t have the game cash then you can break out the plastic and buy some credits, these are reasonably priced e.g. £2.99 for $25,000 in-game. This is only the second game I’ve downloaded that follows the freemium model, i.e. the game comes free but you can buy in-game credits. Lots of games follow this model, which I call this ‘freemium model 1’.
Another game I have downloaded recently is MetalStorm, a dog-fight flight game where there are a number of missions to complete or simply the head-to-head game. As with CSR, tokens and cash can be earned and bought during the game but unlike CSR, if the plane crashes the option to continue is presented at the cost of 5 coins. As I sat there watching the 30 seconds drip away it reminded me of standing by the Golden Axe machine as the 10-second countdown ticked by and the words ‘Insert coin to continue’ flashed, I even felt the same need to click continue rather than lose my game. This impulse and type of experience is what I call ‘freemium model 2’, it takes pay-to-play into the game like arcade machines of old. I can see that model 2 can be used by a number of game formats and suspect that it will be used more and more in upcoming releases.
I’ve had a look at how much I’ve spent and time played on these two games and cost per minute of play so far is around 4p, I think this is quite reasonable when compared to arcade machine prices for similar levels of enjoyment.
