iPhone and the expectation of getting something for nothing

Very good point. But if you think about it, lower priced games are good for consumers, so they will buy them more often. More buyers = more revenue. It is just a balance between price and demand, and the people have shown that they like their games cheaper.

 

I know, it's really quite sad. A lot of reviews for DDR S lite say that the full version should be lowered. $6.99 is pretty cheap though when you compare it to the consol versions.

 

It's got nothing to do with exact numbers at all. If the majority of games in appstore cost 2.99 on average, a 5.99 game is expensive; it wouldn't matter if the same game cost 20 or 50 bucks on another platform. As for expecting updates: it could be 1c and 10c, and the guy who paid 10c for a game will still howl like he got cheated out of his lunch money if the game he bought for 10c doesn't get updates and the 1c game does.

That is seriously idiotic though. And the game should cost more, not less, if it is good.

 

I for some reason expected a load of the apps to be free when I first got my iPod, but after a while, I realized that these things don't appear magically, and that devs actually have to work hard to make them.

Perhaps they're still stuck in my former stage?

 

The backlash for Dark Raider going on sale to $1 wasn't THAT bad. Not many people had bought the game yet.

As a developer you can price your app at what you think it's worth, and get a few sales, or price it below what it's worth and maybe get a lot more sales because many of them will be impulse buys. The vast majority of sales are from people that have limited attention spans and will buy something on impulse just to see what their cool little phone can do. They may never run your app more than once but they are customers nonetheless.

I wanted to make a stand and price the game at what I thought it was worth compared to other apps. I thought there would be enough gamers willing to pay a higher price for a bigger game to be profitable. But everything you read about the App Store is true. You need to be in the top 100 lists to be noticed. The only way to do that is the underprice your app and get a lot of impulse buys.

Unless Apple changes the way the rankings are kept, I don't see this changing over time.

 

I think a lot of the apps people buy are disposable. I tried to make a game that required people to play it often, and would last them a long time, and hopefully get more enjoyment out of it. Wanted to give them some value for their money. Hopefully if they paid a higher price for a game they would value it more than the handful of other games they only played once and actually try to finish it.

The other day my girlfriend bought a box of pills from the store, came home and opened it and found somebody had taken the pills out of the box. $6 for an empy box! No way to return it or prove what happened. There are worse way to lose your money. If you bought an app that went on sale, at least you got it! Enjoy the app at whatever price you paid.

 

What you guys are failing to take into consideration is the pure relativity of everything. Since the app store's creation, everything has been at this .99-5.99 price range or thereabouts. That has become what people expect out of the app store.

Candy bars, soda, movies, etc., all have their own "norm" on prices, so people don't mind paying that much for it, since that is what they have come to expect. If the app store began selling all games at 10 bucks, people wouldn't mind paying 10 bucks for games.

It's all relative, and now that these prices have been engrained in the app store culture, it will be hard to stop it.

 

The app store DID start out with $10 games. I paid $10 for super monkey ball and trism.

 

That sound like me when the App Store first was available for us to download. But now I am more than willing to pay more than 9.99 if it is something that is a complete game, incredible replayability, and also I am more than pay the high price is that the dev invested their time into this and they should get rewarded but that is for devs who cares for us. *Looking at DS Effect*

 

The good news is that there are enough iphones and ipod touches to actually make a living selling 99c games.

 

The opportunity is there, true, but it depends on how much developing the game cost and how many people actually buy the game.

 

I rarely come to the actual forums page, I go to http://toucharcade.com/newest-iphone-games/ and I guess many do. On the right are the latest 'game discussions' but they usually are promo codes "A lurker took a code!" or "OMG it's too expensive" threads or "It's OUT!!!!!!!!!" followed by 20+ posts discussing the price, the fact it's too much and hey they only have 99c left.
Does having all that so prominently featured help new people or does that begin to foster some sort of need to demand cheap? Does all that fall into Game Discussion?

I think developers should decide their own price and not be lead by the vocal 99c brigade. And I can't but think the prominence of that bleating cannot help anyone but them. I would like, and I guess others too, considered responses about games.

I generally don't want to see promo code replies because they are generally given very quickly "First!" type things and they can be ... wrong. I have said before that I think promo codes should be in a different forum and the reasons are the same as the above, it's noise.

As games get more complex and are designed for longer periods of play then discussing them can show others how much is in a game, content that cannot come from just a review. Isn't that going to help the perception of value, even for the 99c games?

 

I'm split on this. I enjoy my 59p treats as much as the next person, but I know deep down it's not doing the future of app store games any good. I also know that I would probably curb my spending if 59p apps didn't exist any more, which is probably a false economy. More games for less money? or Less games for more money? Swings and roundabouts! But I do know that if prices rose I would appreciate the fewer games I did have (and could afford) a whole lot more. Right now, I could count the games I have finished on 1 hand! Bad, naughty Alichan...

 

Apple's poorly designed app store is partly to blame, imo. Effective at first, but the sheer glut of apps released daily make it nearly impossible for developers to even come close to recouping their dev costs when their app is viewable for a day before it falls off and drifts into the abyss. If you don't win the Featured lottery you don't stand a chance.

So the only alternative is to price it cheap to improve your chances of getting it discovered. And when everything comes out at $0.99, all expectations are set to that level. Anything more is a slap in the face to customers, apparently.

I'm with RPGguy. Only thing to do is price your app in relation to similar apps and what you feel the value is. We made about as much selling fewer at $2.99 than more at $0.99, so that's what we're sticking with. It is hard to justify the higher costs of higher quality products, however, with the way things are going. Expect more shotgun apps for a buck and less truly unique games until something changes, imo.

 

It's pretty clear to me that this is on Apple to fix. The structure of the app store has no support for better, more expensive games. The rumored "premium section" would have been a step, but only a very minor one.

Also, I gotta say, there /are/ a lot of 99c games out there that should be free. To be honest this is starting to remind me of the first video game crash—Atari let anyone who wanted to build games for their consoles, resulting in a ridiculous amount of market saturation with sub-par games and the whole video game industry crashed and burned. Then Nintendo came around and started only releasing the games they thought were good enough for their system—singlehandedly brought the industry back.

While I'm not saying this is the way to go for Apple—one of the best thing about the App store is that it is attainable for at-home programmers—but they need to do a little better than just having a handful of "featured apps."

Essentially, they need to realize that computer programs are not songs.

 

Agreed. One of the things I wish they would consider is a "pruning" process. If an app has been in the store, free or otherwise, for more than a month and has not broken a certain threshold of downloads or reviews or whatever... remove it. The developer can re-activate it with an approved update, but I believe this will help eliminate a lot of the crap out there.

 

Well if a game is very good, it should be free so I can play it.

hahaha J/K