Of course, I wasn’t the one who bought it…

In most cases, and in the case of Daniel X, the pricing does not inform the main body of the critique. The price is the final consideration when making a recommendation to purchase or avoid an app.

As we know, price is not necessarily an indicator of actual value. However, once evaluated, an apps price can be – and in this case is- disproportionate to its value.

Daniel X is indeed a well executed adaptation of the comic book to the iPhone. This is besides the point though because the story is dire and would remain so no matter what the format.

Josh, I’m very much looking forward to what you guys put out in the coming months. The technology is wonderful and, with the right content, will make for wonderful iPhone apps. I really do hope I’ll be recommending one of your apps in the future!

As for the price, Daniel X is actually a 125 page graphic novel and while we know that pricing will mature in this space, we think that $9.99 is a fair price for something this new, fun and engaging. If you want to try another ScrollMotion graphic novel, I suggest you take a look at First Things Last (http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=301896118&mt=8) which is $1.99 and a very compelling experience that shows some of the possibility innate in this new story telling form.

Josh, ScrollMotion Founder

I paid $18 for Harry Potter 7, and I paid $6 for the complete Lord of the Rings in one binding. Harry’s clichéd, not terribly well written, and is only the last book in the series, and I’ll only ever read it once. The Lord of the Rings brought me more enjoyment, and I will read it many more times before I die, and if it’s still in good shape, maybe others will read it after that. Yet I’m happy with both purchases, because they’re both fairly small change and they both brought me some enjoyment.

I completely understand panning the product if you don’t like it, but that doesn’t make $10 a greedy or prohibitive price point for a nicely done adaptation of a comic book to the iPhone, and the tone of this whole article comes across as a personal swipe at the artist, author, and developers. Maybe they failed to deliver, but that doesn’t make them greedy or unrealistic.

Should I be mad at OmniGroup for charging $20 for OmniFocus for the iPhone? After all, this is a different platform with different expectations. How about Puzzle Quest at $8? That’s also more than your four apps put together. And totally worth it. That doesn’t mean it’s better than your four apps. It’s different — maybe its audience is smaller, maybe its development costs are higher, maybe they’re just capitalizing on having a name outside the iPhone. Whatever the factors behind its cost, it’s $8 well spent if you like that kind of game.

(One last question: How many authors/artists make their books available online as CBR files? How much do they charge? In a quick look around, I can find three — Cory Doctorow, Hermes Pique & Juan Romera, and Jim Munroe & Salgood Sam — all of them free/Creative Commons works. Which is neat, and all, but isn’t really a “vast, almost endless, library of graphic novels and comics from some of the most celebrated artists and writers in the world.”)

- The plot and dialogue are trite

- The tech still needs some tweaking

- In relation to print, specifically graphic novels, the price point is appropriate even cheap. However, the iPhone is a different medium and thusly consumers have different expectations. Therefore, comparatively speaking, the app is over-priced. For free, you can get Topple.

For $0.99 you can have Passage (which features a narrative with a thousand times more depth than Daniel X and manages to communicate it all in pixellated lo-fi form). For $5 dollars you can have Rolando.

But you might argue that, despite the fact one may gleen infinitely more pleasure from the above apps, they are different: they are games. It’s like comparing apples with oranges.

In that case, we could compare Daniel X with Clickwheel Comic Reader. The former is ten bucks, the latter is free. The former is closed, providing access to one story. The latter is a platform that allows you to download from a vast library of comic books for a modest fee. The former is as hackneyed as my apples-with-oranges statement, yet carries less weight. The latter features classic – genuinely classic – stories from 2000AD and Judge Dredd, amongst others.

But wait. That’s not all. Clickwheel Comic Reader is kind of closed too, in that you can only install comics from the Clickwheel folks. Ouch. Well, in that case, try iComic. Costing 99 cents, that’s nine whole dollars less than Daniel X, you can load in your own CBR comic files, potentially meaning you have access to a vast, almost endless, library of graphic novels and comics from some of the most celebrated artists and writers in the world.

Or you can down ten bucks on Daniel X. Ridden with clichés, bad writing, boring story, useless after the first disappointing read. Totally your choice.

But wait! There’s more! You could purchase every single app – all of which I’m arguing provide individually more pleasurable experiences than Daniel X – for less than the price of Daniel X. Indeed, Topple, Passage Rolando, Clickwheel Comic Reader and iComic, amount to a paltry $6.97. Purchase these instead of Daniel X and you’d have cash left to buy a comic book from Clickwheel and post a smug tweet about your savvy buying decision.

So, that’s ten bucks. Ten whole dollars. For one story. One bad story. With nice tech, I’ll give it that. But awful story. Or $6.97 for three amazing games, two comic book readers and one comic to start off your burgeoning collection. Your choice.