“This announcement changes the landscape of the App Store as we know it,” said Colin Smith of Freeverse.

SGN boss Shervin Pishevar said “This is one of the most important announcements to come out of Apple on the iPhone platform.”

But why? It’s not a big change from selling a game for 59p with in-app payments, is it? Well, yes.

The first impact will be on social gaming from companies such as Zynga and Playfish.

On Facebook, their business models are based entirely around free-to-play games, which then make money from advertising, but also virtual items.

That model now works on iPhone too – they don’t have to put an initial price on their games to do the virtual item stuff. If that nudges those companies into bringing games like Pet Society, Farmville and Restaurant City to iPhone a bit quicker, it’s good news indeed.

The second impact of Apple’s change in its in-app payments rules is on the difference between Lite and Paid games. In short, they become the same thing.

Currently, if a developer wants to let you try a limited version of one of their games for free, it has to make a separate Lite version. If you like it, you have to go back to the App Store to find the non-Lite edition and buy that. It’s a bit fiddly.

Now, developers can bundle the two together: let you download the full game for free, but keep most of it locked behind a paywall. It’s what ngmoco has already done with Rolando 2, following Apple’s announcement. More will follow.

Ironically enough, this is one area where iPhone can be said to be following in the footsteps of Nokia’s N-Gage, which provided every game as a full download for free, to be unlocked with a payment.

Which brings us neatly onto the third impact of the new in-app payments rules: they could help reduce iPhone game piracy. Which, as you may be aware, is pretty rampant at the moment.

Pirates can crack a premium game file and stick it on BitTorrent, but if the payment is happening within the game itself via an in-app payment, that’s a different kettle of fish for hackers to get around.

We don’t like to make the mistake of assuming that every pirated copy of game equals one lost sale, but developers will be chuffed at anything that helps to stem the tide of illegal downloading.

Of course it’s very early days to see how quickly this shift will affect the App Store. Not all premium games will go free with in-app payments tomorrow, social games won’t flood the App Store this month, and BitTorrent downloads of iPhone game files won’t slam to a halt anytime soon.

But the potential changes shows why there’s so much excitement in the industry about Apple’s announcement.

The post Why in-app payments is big appeared first on AppTrawler.

Yet there’s also some confusion about how this will change the way the App Store operates in terms of the interaction between Free and Paid apps.

What people are looking for now are examples of how the new system will play out.

Significantly US publisher ngmoco – which is based in San Francisco and known to be close to Apple – was very quick off the mark when it came to reacting to the changes.

Indeed, it already has Rolando 2 Chapter 1 – its free-plus-paid version of the original Rolando 2 game – live on the App Store.

We wonder how it managed to compress the normal two week approval process into 12 hours. Actually, we don’t. The only way it could have happened is Apple pre-warned the studio, enabling it to get this build into the system in time to go live for the announcement.

//note:
ngmoco CEO Neil Young has since informed us that the company repriced its already approved 99c version of Rolando 2, which had in-app transactions to unlock new chapters, as a free app, and set it live.
//ends

As a poster child release, people will be looking to see how Rolando 2 performs on the Free chart over the next couple of days to see if consumers go for this new approach.

More interesting however will be the release of the much anticipated shooter Eliminate.

Yesterday it was also announced as a free game, with micro-transactional support for players who want to buy extra energy cells to progress faster through the game.

If this approach works, expect plenty more developers to jump on the bandwagon.

Indeed, in an interview with PocketGamer.biz, Tag Games’ Paul Farley has said he’ll be specifically watching Eliminate to see whether it’s a model he’ll choose for Tag’s game Astro Ranch.

French developer Boostr is reworking its Urban Rivals online card combat game as a free app. Apparently it wasn’t as well informed as ngmoco and was hours away from submitting the game as a paid app but heard the news just in time.

And, no doubt, hundreds of other studios are also rethinking their plans. It’s going to get very interesting and maybe very messy on the App Store over the coming weeks.

The post Eyes turn to ngmoco’s for in-app payments appeared first on AppTrawler.

More details are said to be following, but Ngmoco has long announced that Eliminate would carry in-app purchases for energy that allows players to earn additional credits. Every player gets a certain auto-renewable source of energy, but once depleted, to earn more credits the player must either 1) wait a certain amount of time for your energy to recharge or 2) purchase more energy. If you don’t care about credits, you may also continue to play but simply be ineligible to earn credits during those games. Credits are used for equipment upgrades and leveling up. We had a hands on with the game earlier this month which explains the system in detail and also gives impressions of the gameplay.

Based on comments by Ngmoco about the “aggressive” pricing of Eliminate, we long suspected that Ngmoco planned on making the bulk of its income in these in-app purchases. The move to a completely free game would expose Eliminate to a much larger audience of potential customers and also remove the issue of having a large enough user base to support an online multiplayer game.

Eliminate has been submitted and is awaiting approval from Apple.

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