Another late Marketplace update keeping Sally's Spa at bay, plus Fling raises its price

As folks ‘in the know’ know, updating a platform’s Marketplace/app store is a challenging and laborious thing. Regular occurrences like publishing the latest Xbox Live game and updating the Deal of the Week might seem (to simple laymen) like things that could be easily set up in advance, but that is not the case at all. If you need proof, just notice how the Windows Phone Marketplace hasn’t updated yet. Challenging, I tell you!

All sarcasm aside, these late updates happen from time to time, most recently in June when Fling was scheduled to launch. Today’s delay means Sally’s Spa is not available just yet, much to my dismay (the last game was seriously fun, naysayers). Nor do we have a new Deal of the Week. Interestingly enough, last week’s sale, Need for Speed: Undercover actually ended on Monday, well before the scheduled end time of Wednesday morning. More evidence that running a Marketplace is super hard? You tell me.

The price is wrong?

While we’re on the subject of Xbox Live pricing issues, remember how I just mentioned Fling? Well, that fairly so-so puzzler launched at the reasonable price of 99 cents, the same as the iOS version. At that price, who cares how plain it looks or how annoyingly tough some of the Achievements are? But strangely enough, within the last few days Fling’s price has jumped up to $2.99, triple what it was before.

We’ve seen Windows Phone Xbox Live games drop in price only days after release (Pac-Man Kart Rally), but this is the first instance of a game’s price increasing post-release. Certainly curious, and of course we’ve reached out to Fling’s developer Miniclip to investigate. If they comment, we’ll post an update.

Back to the Marketplace

Now then, we return to waiting on that all-essential Marketplace update to go live. If this thing happens in a few months’ time, we’ll have to say the Windows Phone Store is updating late, due to the impending name change.