2K Producer: iPhone Civilization Revolution price, on paper, 'makes no sense whatever'

Civilization Revolution fairly burst onto the iPhone, taking us all by surprise, but has had much of its thunder stolen due to reports of performance issues on the iPhone 3G.

Gamasutra has been chatting with the game's producer Jason Bergman, who revealed that the celebrated game design guru Sid Meier still shouldered the bulk of the workload in 2K Games's iPhone debut.

"Sid wrote this game core that didn't care what platform it existed on, and we just wrote an interface layer. For 360, we wrote an interface layer; for PS3, we wrote an interface layer; for DS, we wrote an interface layer," Bergman explains.

"I don't know how many people actually believed us that it was literally the exact same game. So we wanted to prove it. Civ Rev for iPhone, again, is the same game core. Nothing's changed. We just took that game core, and we got it up and running on the iPhone hardware in like two weeks, and then we wrote a new interface."

There has been some confusion over what the performance issues could be, given that while Civilization Revolution is still a worthy addition to the franchise, it's not nearly as taxing for the iPhone as a game such as Real Racing, which suffers no such problems. Perhaps the weight of code left over from an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 port is what's causing the game to have these perturbing chest pains?

It would also seem that 2K Games isn't entirely satisfied with the App Store's pricing structure: the company felt that it was 'giving' away what's essentially a £40 Xbox 360 game at £2.99 (from what Bergman says, the company was originally looking at the top pricing tier).

"On paper, it makes no sense whatever. It was 60 bucks on [Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3], 40 on [Nintendo DS], and then here it's 10. Common sense would tell us we could cut [the size of the game] in half and still get away with it.

"There was discussion at one point about taking out some of the leaders and making them as DLC, but we're including all sixteen. We are still going to do DLC."

The news that Civilization Revolution has some download content in the works is very welcome, however. Not only will this (hopefully) give the developers the opportunity to fix any performance issues, but is the kind of vital interest needed to really help a game shine - particularly one that it suffered a false start.

It is also reassuring to know that Sid Meier is still very much involved, and hasn't passed the game off to a team put together simply to exploit a brand name.

"It is Sid's code, one hundred percent," Bergman concludes. "Sid's goal when designing Civ Rev was being able to play, start to finish, on a New York to Los Angeles flight."

You can read the full interview over on Gamasutra.