The rather excellent mobile puzzler Monument Valley has received an expansion in the last week, but it hasn’t been particularly smooth sailing for indie developer Ustwo Games.
Some players took umbrage to the fact that the expansion isn’t free but instead carries a price tag of $1.99/ £1.49, and decided to flood the game’s App Store description with 1-star reviews.
Understandably, Ustwo was rather upset about this, and so they took to twitter to discuss the issue:
Seems quite a few people have gone back and 1 star reviewed Monument Valley upon update because the expansion was paid. This makes us sad.
— ustwogames (@ustwogames) November 12, 2024
That's it, we're giving up the premium game. Next time we're just going to sell you 500 coins for $2 instead.
— ustwogames (@ustwogames) November 12, 2024
The tweets seemed to have worked in Ustwo’s favor, resulting in fans of the game rallying together and fighting back with their own five star reviews . It seems to be working, too: the game has (as at time of writing) an impressive 4 and a half-star rating for both the current and original version of the game.
“We saw a vocal minority early on, but if you check back at the store page now you can see that they have been hugely outnumbered by more positive reviews,” Ustwo director Neil McFarland told Gamasutra. “That said, I have the perception that there’s also a silent majority who have an uneasy relationship with mobile app value. Spending money on apps for their hugely expensive piece of technology doesn’t come easily for a lot of people because the general environment has trained people to expect low prices for huge amounts of content or even apps for free.”
Check out the trailer for Monument Valley’s expansion below:
