This is totally correct in my opinion. They need to keep their prices constant, or reasonably constant if they want to be taken seriously as "premium" game developers. If developers would hold their ground on pricing instead of getting nervous about sales and racing to 99 cents, it would pretty much put an end to this whole AppSniper "waiting for a sale" trend that seems to be becoming more and more prevalent lately.
+ 1 I was playing with Real Racing again last night, and it is worth whatever price they decide to charge. I seriously hope they don't follow the slash and burn pricing strategy.
I think there's justification for price drops on both. The economics of the App Store have been demonstrated time and again - price drops bring increased sales which equals more revenue. Look at Hero of Sparta. Or Assasin's Creed. Or Let's Golf. Or Toki Tori. All were essentially languishing and revising pricing downward opened up a whole new wave of sales. Toki Tori debuted in May at $4.99 and never even sniffed the Top 100 and languished for a while despite having a dedicated following. Once the dropped the price to $.99 and put out a Lite version, sales skyrocketed. They're currently at #15. I'l be willing to bet they're making more money at $.99 than they did at $4.99. Which brings us to Real Racing/Star Defense. I would guess both are due a price drop any day now. Would not be surprised at all. The public will drive the economics of the store, not the other way around, so I don't think Firemint has anything to do with 'respecting' $9.99 games.
Surely Ngmoco and Firemint don´t trust the top 100 like a lot of good players don´t do, then they are not worried on that. They will rely on the quality of their games and publicity they make and people spreading that. Respect and glory forever to that 2 great companies, that´s the way to go not like gameloft making bad games with good graphics.
LOL -They're not in the business for some 'quality game' crusade. They're in it for the money, plain and simple. Their biggest selling game is $.99. Even they realize that keeping a spot in the Top 25/50 means much more money than holding out on principle for 'word-of-mouth' sales. Economics will always trump anything else, and in this case the single biggest way to make money is to get an app into the Top 25/50. These games will most certainly have a price drop. The only question is when, not if.
Let's say just for the sake of simplicity it takes 1000 app sales a day to make it on the top 100 and 5000 sales a day to make it on the top 10. At a buck you're making $1000-$5000. Now, say they're comfortably selling 800 units a day which is keeping them just outside of the top 100, at $10 a pop that's $8000. Now obviously there's potential to make more money on sales volume by dropping the price and getting Real Racing up on the charts, but I can't think of any game short of maybe Peggle that saw a price drop that was ever able to see any success once the sale is over and the game returns to its normal price. By having a $5 sale, they're cutting the value of their game in half, and showing gamers that there's no sense in buying it at $10 because they can just wait for their next sale to roll around. If sales are too low for the threshold of the top 100, but high enough that they're making a decent amount of money, it's probably worth sticking with the $10 price point since the game will spike in sales and popularity as they release each update or randomly get featured by Apple. Either way, without sales the sales figures which haven't been published and probably never will be published, this is all just armchair speculation.
+1 to that! Both Star Defense and Real Racing are very solid titles and i hope they both maintain they're prices because they are more than worth it and the Devs know that!!!
