Oh my. ... My mistake. I didn't read your sig, and unfortunately fell into the trap most men do of thinking, not on purpose mind you, of products being made by men alone. Jeez. I'm actually really embarrassed now. Sorry. Really. ... Anyway, the fact that you market just about everywhere points out what I'm getting at. Your apps didn't sell on the low price alone, as if that were true other devs would have a similar level of success. You did your fair share of laying the groundwork for successful product launches. Again, I'm a neophyte with my foot barely in the door in the marketing world. And, again, I concede I could be COMPLETELY wrong about such things. That said, IMHO, indie devs who have enough money to do so really should invest a bit, or, if already investing invest more in marketing. Hire a pro. Doesn't have to be a big agency. It could be a freelancer or small team of freelancers. They could do a helluva job. You yourself have shown that doing just a bit of legwork in that end can pay off very nice dividends. Some indie devs may not be as fortunate as you to have internal team members who really "get" the need for marketing, and in that case, if they have the money, hiring a freelancer may help the product.
price increasing? There seem to be an idea that releasing game at lower price and increasing it later is not good idea; and generally, you should not set price higher than it was at release. Can anybody explain why is it? Also, why history of price changes so important for an app (well, except for dramatic changes and big prices, let's say more that $5)? I understand, people who do to places like TouchArcade will see those changes. But as we know, majority of the customers buy apps from iDevice itself, and very unlikely they would know how much the app was costing yesterday. So, why is the price history affecting anything?
Well, I bought Real Racing as a kind of show of solidarity; I believe iDevices need professionally made $10 games. Seeing RR now sold for $7 means even Firemint couldn't toe the line at $10 a game for some reason. I'm sure it was done in order to get more sales and cover their million+ investment in the game and online platform, but what's the chance of the next company investing that kind of cash when they have to hope to sell copies for $10 for at least a month before sales fall off a cliff and the inevitable downward price spiral begins? IMHO, every game should get cheaper over time. The market has worked this way for many years now. Games start at $60 and unless they are AAA games, they are usually $30 by the time they're a year old. A buddy of mine paid full boat for Forza Motorsport 2; I got it used for $3 at Gamestop last month.
I think this issue gets complicated by the fact that the App Store is so near and dear to us, so it might help to talk about "widgets" instead -- imaginary products often used in marketing discussions. Let's say you've developed a brand new widget. Marketing analysis tells you that that widget is most attractive to customers "X," while customers "Y" are somewhat interested, and customers "Z" just don't give a damn. Careful use of marketing communications has allowed you to reach a very large percentage of customers X, who are now throughly enthusiastic about this widget. Customers Y are perhaps a bit curious, while customers Z are still pretty clueless about it. Further marketing research has shown you that customers X are willing to pay $7.99 for this widget; customers Y are perhaps willing to pay $3.99, while customers Z (the ones who've actually heard about the widget anyway) will perhaps give it a shot for $.99. Now, you could decide to reach the widest possible audience with a $.99 "special introductory offer". Such pricing will definitely get you customers X, and Y, and may even get you a few of customers Z. The problem is that now you have no customers willing to pay the higher prices (customers X were going to buy early anyway, and customers Y know a bargain when they see one). So you may raise your price, but there's noone left willing to spend that kind of money for your widget. What's worse, whenever you sell a widget for $.99 to someone who was willing to pay $7.99, you are losing $7 in the transaction. Let's say that your total customer pool is 100 (to keep things simple) and it breaks down pretty much evenly between X, Y, and Z customers (33 each). Let's say your sale reaches all of X, all of Y, and 10% of z: you end up grossing $69 for your efforts. Were you to start your pricing at $7.99, you could very well get all of customers X and, say, 10% of customers Y: that's an initial gross of $287.00. And the cool thing is: you can still lower the price later on to get the rest of customers Y and some customers Z. Keep in mind that that initial batch of customers are your best evangelists for the product (because they love it and because they paid more for it), which may very well raise interest in both the Y and Z camps. This is all pretty basic marketing, so why do people often do the opposite in the App Store? Because the perverse economics of the platform provide a tremendous incentive to get a lot of sales fast, since rankings are such a great marketing tool. For low-investment (casual) games this makes sense, since the majority of your customers are in the Z category (not too many people were salivating for Flight Control before it came out). For something like Real Racing or MC:S, such as strategy is just a bad idea. Hope that makes sense...
Check out Pocketgamer.biz. Every week they post an analysis of the top 100 list inc. what devs are in there and how many games they have, average prices etc. Its interesting stuff. Here's the latest issue, which also covers the new top grossing list (link). The top 2 devs are EA with 14 titles averaging $4.78 and Gameloft with 10 titles averaging $4.29.
You can't look at gameloft and say that you should price your game higher because their higher priced games are bringing in more revenue. My guess is that they only dropped the price to 99c because revenue on those older games was dropping. Brother in Arms is much newer than Hero of Sparta, which to me explains why it is grossing more, not because it is priced higher. This isn't to say that higher priced games can't get you more revenue, but be careful with comparing games that have significantly different life spans on the app store. I'm definitely in the camp that a higher priced game is generally (not always) perceived as being something of higher value and that 99c is the last place you want to take your game because once you do your IP gets cheapened quite a bit. This may be a smart move at some point, but really it seems like it should be your last move, because there is no turning back. I think an end goal should be to get to a place where you can always charge more to start with because you have consistent pricing, e.g., Gameloft at 6.99 and then drop your game to 4.99, 1.99, etc. as slowly as you can.
With todays economy yes 0.99 is the way to go definatly more appealing. You have to make a pretty dam good game to sell it for anything above 0.99
One canadian comedian (Mike Wilmot) called us Australians "Free Range Canadians" because we have a relative freedom of not having americans and the french sqeesing us on both sides. His words, not mine.
BiA and HoS both came out within 2 weeks of each other back in December. The reason BiA hasn't dropped so much is the brand name whereas HoS doesn't have that advantage.
aaack. thanks Nizy for those great links (I have been well-aware of Pocketgamer.biz for ages but never looked at their detailed chart analysis data before, that stuff is all very useful). as a new mobile dev this market is both exciting and infuriating - as a game developer for 10+ years I am so used to seeing the system work in a very particular way, and now with this whole Appstore revolution it is bizarre, to say the least, how everything's been quite turned on it's ear. Though in spite of the frustrations I have to say it is quite a rush to be in the middle of it as well, though the first phase of The Golden Days of Indie Prosperity on iPhone (en masse) are just about all wrapped up, we are definitely heading into whatever the next phase is. As a new dev trying to build up a name I can't argue with natty/etc who support the 0.99 model, it makes sense in that you are just trying to get your name and an association with quality out there. But it is true on the whole, most devs cannot expect to make money in the short term that way. In fact I'd say most indies should not expect to make zilch at this point, beyond getting some name recognition - but along with that, it is my feeling that you should also try to establish yourself as not seeking to placate the bottom-feeders and jumping on the 0.99 bandwagon (unless only as a last-resort). You give an impression of the quality that your potential customers will expect when they look at that price tag. Make a good, polished product - charge $2 or $3 dollars for it, might not sell out of the gate but if your product has a half-decent marketing plan and is good enough to hold it's own in the long-term (6mo-1 yr?) then only good things can happen. This is a tricky market though, the above would all be completely viable if the App Store were more clearly understood, more directly relatable to more conventional game markets. There's some more twists and turns in this road for sure and so we will see more unexpected things happening as time passes. No sure bets here - but the (simple?) things you can do, to assure some degree of success - make a good game, make it look like it's worth $30, spend some time/energy/$ marketing, charge next to nothing (as $1 is next to nothing, so is $2 or $3), and then do it again, and a few more times.
