Rip off

MT-B

How can King possibly justify increasing the cost of 150 gold bars in Candy Crush Saga from £10.99 to £14.99? That is a 36% price increase or to put it another way @36 times the rate of inflation. I assume King realise that their gold bars are not an actual currency and therefore not sensitive to fluctuations in the Exchange Rate Mechanism? You haven't suffered from the rising oil price because you don't need to ship your virtual bars. No this is pure greed and price gouging. You still have the amazing ability to alienate your customers and find novel ways to make them stop providing you with a revenue stream. 

MarkHawk

Hi MT-B,

Thanks for addressing your concern.

Concept, design, implementation, support and maintenance of our games is a long and complicated process.  While we are always dedicated to providing the finest in mobile gaming fun, we often need to test new features and evaluate possible tweaks to our pricing structures, to ensure our games are well balanced and viable.

All of our games can always be played and enjoyed for free with no purchases required whatsoever.  We do offer players the possibility to buy small items to either speed up their waiting process or add a little helper for that tricky level, however these purchases are entirely optional and never compulsory in order to work your way through the game.

This current price change is one of these tests that we need to run every now and again, to see whether any further tweaks are needed. However, rest assured I’ll pass your thoughts and feedback onto the Development team for them to take into consideration. 

I hope that this helps answer your question and if you are interested in game design methodology and development there is a super interesting Wiki page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_development#Development_process

Kind regards,

- Mark, Team King Care