$2.99 for an increased game limit?

[CombatEX]

5 games is certainly enough for free users. I don't play much anymore (I still love the game! I'm just really busy), so I usually have around 7 or so games going. I paid for the game and I'm still happy with almost as few games as a free user. Hey guys, you're playing for FREE! 5 games is plenty and if you really enjoy the game that much that you want to play more you should be able to give the devs the paltry sum it takes to boost that limit up to 20.

As for the $3.00 for 35 cap limit, it makes me a bit nervous. As I've already said, this doesn't affect me since I don't even get close to the 20 game limit, but it worries me that the Uber Pack is the 'buy this if you don't want to be nickeled-and-dimed' choice but then now the door is open for microtransactions - a practice which I despise. Again, I don't mind at this point, but please don't start adding a lot of things like this. It's not about the price which is more than reasonable, in fact I would pay $20 for Outwitters, but it's about the idea. I'd much rather pay $20 for something which gets me the COMPLETE package than pay $5 for a base game and then $1 seven more times for little micro-features that come out here and there. At the end of the day the latter would be cheaper by quite a lot - $12 instead of the $20 flat fee - but the latter also leaves a bad feeling compared to the $20 full purchase.

On a side note this is one of the reasons I'll never touch Hero Academy.

Now to clarify, expansion packs are fine. Something approximately equal to the price of the original game or 60-80% of that but which adds a huge amount of content.

As an example, take Starcraft 2.

Heart of the Swarm is a nice way to add content and charge for it. A huge expansion with plenty of interface and gameplay additions/improvements. Now imagine if instead Blizzard decided to monetize the game with little features you can buy here and there. Want to customize your menu backgrounds (something which you could do pre-patch 1.5 by mpq-editing)? Sure, there's a $1 microtransaction for that. Want to use dark-themed Protoss units in game (these variants exist in the custom map editor)? Sure, there's a $3 microtransaction for that. Want to replace the Starcraft 2 background music and sound set with SC:BW? Sure there's a $1 microtransaction for that. And so on...

These features wouldn't be bad and you only need to pay if you want them, but the fact that all these microtransactions are there instead of just getting everything from your one time purchase feels wrong.

On a final note, an example from another iOS game that I enjoyed. I won't name names here but this was a cheap game. $0.99. For the price it provided immense value and I was amazed that the dev sold the game for that price. Now as the months went on he added a donate button where you could support him. I gladly donated to the dev who I believed more than deserved the money since the game was great and way undervalued at the selling price. However as time went on he started adding little features here and there and charged people to buy them. Things like increased storage space, in game currency, extra skins, etc. Now, this is a single-player game so it's not like these are making the game imbalanced. You don't need to buy them. You could argue that this game is the same as it was before but just with the option to buy these things and as such it shouldn't bother me. However it did! Because I bought the game with the idea that I was getting a complete package - but apparently that wasn't the case. Again, it's not about the money (as you can see since I donated to him), but about the principle. I would have rather paid the $5-$10 that I thought the game was worth at that flat fee than pay $1 and have all these $1-$2 microtransactions. PLEASE don't go down the road that this other dev ultimately took. He's now making an interesting new game but I'm not going to give him a cent for it.

Again though, it's not a huge deal at this point. Just don't overdo it.