Gameloft slams EA over aggressive festive 59p iPhone game sale
Makes it ‘harder on smaller companies’ to compete on App Store
Gameloft founder and CEO Michael Guillemot has told IGN that he believes EA’s App Store Christmas sale, in which the publisher reduced all its titles to 59p/99c, is detrimental to innovation and makes it ‘harder on smaller companies’ on the platform.
During the sale, many of EA’s big name titles like Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit leapt to the top of the charts in the run-up to the Christmas freeze of the App Store charts, meaning that newcomers to the system on Christmas day were greeted by a range of familiar EA brands flying high in the charts.
Guillemot complained that such a practice only damages the potential of the App Store as viable alternative to traditional forms of distribution, saying that ‘there is a high uncertainty for the future anytime somebody can steal the market at Christmas’.
Gameloft itself wasn’t exactly raising its own prices at the time, however, with 21 games including hits Hero of Sparta 2 and Let's Golf! 2 reduced in price days before the religious holiday.
In unrelated news, Uno and Uno HD from Gameloft are now available on the App Store for 59p/99c.