Mr.Farmville

Appearing both on our top daily active user and monthly active user lists this week, Ludia’s Facebook app The Price Is Right Game has been growing rapidly. In just over two weeks, the new title has attracted over 919,000 MAU and 253,000 DAU.

The game itself is a respectable rendition of the long running television show, and luckily for the player, it’s quite fun. Supporting up 12 players simultaneously, the title includes all the nuances that made the game show popular, and few flaws.

First and foremost, The Price Is Right is not intended as a single player endeavor (at most there are some practice mini-games). Players start off with a handful of daily coins and for the cost of two, hop right into a game with 11 other Facebook users. The game from here is more or less identical to the actual show.

Players will be given a random video of some retail item and all 12 try to guess the price by coming closest to its value without going over. The top four will move up to “Contestant’s Row” where they will be able to compete for the big prizes and payouts. This process will repeat itself for five rounds, with audience members replacing the four in the Contestant’s Row should they make better guesses.

Once in the Contestant’s Row, the closest guess will be sent to a random mini-game for a chance at bonus cash. These are the same mini-games seen on the show and include Safe Crackers, the Clock Game, 3 Strikes, and so on. There are nine games, and each involves some gimmick to guessing the price of another random retail item. As a basic example, Safe Crackers gives the players three dials with three numbers. However, each number can only be used once. The idea is to guess the right “combination” for the safe, which will be the price tag on the presented item.

Unlike the game show, the prizes aren’t real, but the bonus cash can earn some real stuff, with more of it unlocking extra mini-games to practice on. Cash is also used to enter users into weekly contests, by becoming “Team Cash.”

This is one of the other social aspects of the game. Team Cash consists of one’s own cash multiplied by 10 and all of their friends’ cash multiplied by two. Once a required amount of Team Cash is accrued, the user can then enter the weekly contest. Currently, the prize is a trip to LA and VIP tickets to The Price Is Right show itself. That said, players need about a million Team Cash to even enter.

Getting back to the actual game, after five rounds are completed, the top two players will compete in the final Showcase round where they attempt to guess the price on a large collection of expensive items. Meanwhile, the remaining 10 users will spin the Big Wheel to try and earn bonus cash by spinning it up to two times. The catch is that they cannot exceed one dollar (sort of like black jack in wheel form).

In truth, it’s easy to see why The Price Is Right has been growing so rapidly. There really is absolutely nothing wrong with the game. The only real concern is the volume of items that are in the games video showcase. It only happened once during a practice mini-game, but if there are not enough products in the game, some will inevitably repeat. This means that long-time players could have an unfair advantage. All the same, the repeat only happened once, and, on average, peoples’ memories probably are not going to be that accurate.

Overall, The Price is Right Game has all the nuances that made the actual show enjoyable and translates them well into a digital format. Granted, the prizes may not be as abundant, but it still does have a nice means to grant some tangible reward; even if it just a chance. This is an app that will likely continue to grow for some time.

Source: Inside Social Games