EA Drops Original Peggle For New "Freemium" Title

I hope you all kept your copies of the old Peggle, because the faithful-to-PC counterpart on iOS is gone, with a new freemium game taking its place.

Peggle, the acclaimed pachinko-like game where you drop ball-bearings and hit coloured pegs with them to rack up a high score, once a App Store best-selling champion, has been removed form the App Store. Its replacement is a free-to-play title in typical EA (who owns PopCap) fashion, and that, if you know the drill, means calling on an old friend: In-App Purchases.

The new game turns Peggle on its side and gameplay is now portrait-orientated.  Bjorn and all your friends from the Peggle Institute have been redesigned through the “Peggle 2”-like graphical update along with several new features. However, enforcing the use of In-App Purchases means your game can and will get hindered by barriers and stop signs.

Following the Candy Crush formula, New Peggle makes the use of Lives to slow you down when you want to restart or quit a level. So you’ll have to wait or fork out $1.28 for a pack of lives (no obvious Social option to give or receive lives from your friends was found). There are also certain powerups you can buy with real cash.

EA removing the original Peggle from the App Store means that you can no longer revel in the “Pay Once, Play All” game Peggle once was before. So if you like not paying for countless microtransactions for a “complete” game, I’d suggest you hold on to your copy of Peggle. Original Peggle.

[App Store]

(At time of writing, it seems that the Peggle Nights expansion for the old Peggle app is still around for purchase, but you’ll need to have had the game to begin with.)