Last week, the game Beards & Beaks was released for Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 platform. The game pitches a community of gnomes against a murder of crows that has invaded their home town of Gnomeville. The crows try to steal the gnomes' diamonds, and so the gnomes' job is to kill the thieving birds and defend their rocks. Different gnomes have different abilities—shades of tower defense—but are mobile and moved around the battlefield with a flicking action.
The game has two notable features. The first is that this is the first game developed entirely in-house by Microsoft Game Studios; the concept is original, with the phone as the sole platform.
The second is that it includes microtransactions. The player has a certain number of mushrooms that they can use to attack the crows with certain special weapons, such as hurling a meteor at them. Though mushrooms grow naturally and are given on completion of each level, if the player has used all their mushrooms, they may need more in order to successfully manage the next level. This is where the microtransactions come into play: you can refill your mushroom supply once for free, but if you run out again, more mushrooms must be purchased. Mushrooms aren't the only thing that can be purchased: the game also features downloadable content. The first downloadable map has already been distributed for free, but uses a new in-application purchase API to enable it. Future maps will likely have their price hiked to some non-zero amount.
Though applications on the phone are priced in real currencies and paid for either by credit card or using operator billing, the in-application purchases are different. Like both the Xbox 360 and Games for Windows Marketplace, they use Microsoft Points. On the one hand, this further embeds Windows Phone into the broader Xbox ecosystem, but on the other, it represents something of an inconvenience, as a points budget must now be maintained—an annoying overhead, given that the platform already knows how to bill users' credit cards.
Though in-application purchasing is an important feature to mobile platforms, it has proven risky for developers on iOS and Android, after developers were sued by Lodsys for patent infringement. Developers on Microsoft's platform should be covered by a patent agreement that Microsoft has with Intellectual Ventures, the company that previously owned the patents Lodsys is now suing over. However, Google has a similar agreement, and that hasn't stopped the patent troll from going after Android developers, so Redmond may be opening a can of worms with this feature.
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Source: http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/_c6uCU4rddw/beards-beaks-brings-microsoft-points-microtransactions-dlc-to-windows-phone.ars
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