Broken Rules provides some interesting graphs relating to And Yet It Moves sales versus pricing on the Mac App Store, resulting in this conclusion:

In the end, we learned: the lower the price the higher the revenue.

This is also the case on the iOS store, where games like Pac-Man top the chart at 59p but vanish without a trace when they’re priced much higher. It’s baffling that the likes of Namco don’t settle on lower price-points all year round.

Mind you, even more baffling is that the Broken Rules game is currently back at $9.99, despite the company stating the following in its blog post:

[…] we quickly realized that the App Store is not a place where a $9.99 game is easily bought. Established brands might launch at this price point, but our first hours proved that we would get nowhere at $9.99. So we soon dropped the price

A dev chum noted that Angry Birds is becoming the new Tetris, not in terms of being a classic piece of game design (Angry Birds is fine, but a cute semi-random take on ancient Apple II game Artillery welded to some physics-based destruction is a far cry from Alexey Pajitnov’s beautifully elegant endless puzzle game), but in how it’s being ported to every platform under the sun (along with becoming a set of plush toys, a board game, an animated movie and, presumably soon, designer toilet paper and an automated dog-walker).

The funny thing is, while what love I had for Angry Birds has waned through a combination of massive overexposure, the discovery of better, similar iOS games (hello, Castle Smasher!), and the fiddly and overprecise nature of many of the game’s later levels, I found myself enjoying it more on the Mac (where it’s already topping the Mac App Store charts).

The differences are very slight but nonetheless important. First, the reset control is always on-screen, making it far quicker to reset a level. Since Angry Birds is largely reliant on semi-random flinging of annoyed avians and often requires many attempts to complete a level, this makes progress quicker and repeat plays less irritating. Secondly, the addition of a cursor and mouse control on a large monitor actually improves the game. I’m surprised I think this, because I initially thought the game was well-suited to iOS. However, the visual cursor makes it easy to repeat a shot or make subtle tweaks to a previous aim, compared to trying to remember where you had your finger on a glass screen. I’d sooner see every version of Angry Birds provide a ‘ghost’ marker regarding where your previous shot was taken from, but the pointer on the Mac release is a decent half-way house.