Someone should make a ranking of games based on the App's price and ranking in the app store, that should approximate revenue-based rankings. Or have multiple rankings by price range. Any takers? TouchArcade should do this!
Yup. It's the "race to the bottom." Developers lacking confidence in the quality of their apps have a bad habit of gaming the market to start at a higher price until the sales slow, then drop to the next tier to get the cheaper folks, then drop again until they hit rock bottom. I suppose it can work, but all you're doing is ruining it for yourself and others by creating lowered expectations from consumers who will see an app for $X and not buy because they'll be expecting the price to drop eventually. Developers need to cut it out. Price it at what you think it's worth, have a sale every now and again if you want, but don't sell out. If your game is awesome and worth the money, it'll sell. Your sales curve may be slower, but you make more money, and you maintain your integrity. Plus, if it's good enough to get good reviews from various review sites, sales will pick up and word of mouth will spread. But if the race to the bottom remains the norm, it's just going to keep getting harder to sell apps for what they're really worth.
Problem is that alot of these developers are just putting out CRAP and they know it's not going to sell for 7.99 etc.. So they drop to .99 to get some sales there are litterly thousands of crappy apps out there for .99 and the mass market thinks thats the price point for apps. You can not close the pandoras box now. Consumers will wait you out till they drop down in price at least once.
Frankly, the above is a nice ideology that totally disregards the reality that developers need to pay their bills. Once your app is off the top charts, it's not selling "less", it practically stops selling at all. A game company will not survive on ~10 copies sold per day. Confidence in quality is irrelevant if you can see from the sales graph that the game is simply not selling. The only way you can keep your app in the top charts once it starts falling is to cut the price. No marketing, no web visibility, no word of mouth will make a difference. One way for Apple to improve the situation is to rank apps by their ratings instead of popularity, but even that list will become stagnant in the long run, and benefit those who get to the top first. There is no simple solution. In the current App Store market, a developer pretty much has a polarized choice: make a $0.99 gimmick app in a month or less, or invest big money and try to make it back with a $9.99 app - and not many indies can afford going big. Despite some successful examples of middle ground ($2.99-$4.99) pricing, it seems like the only smart thing is to sell high for the core audience, or go for volume from day one with $0.99. So yes, the current climate encourages smaller developers to make clever gimmicks.
Dont forget that the featured "NEW APPS" section on apple doesnt actualy show all the new apps. Most are actualy old. So a real 'new' app has no visibility at all. It could be the greatest app ever, and be $0.99 but nobody would buy it because nobody knew it was good. So how does it ever get to BE popular and make it to the top? It cant. Maybe have a filter on the app store to hide all $0.99 apps? Its right that people will pay for quality, but finding the quality is hard in the LONG list of crapps.
I like the idea of having a top 10-100 listing for free and payment apps like the store has now but maybe one more with every app or game priced over a set value, say all games $4.99 or more get their own listing. *edit* also releasing a free lite version with a direct link to the app to buy itself seems to be a big thing to do right now.
k. The problem with the app store is that the fact that you don't have to manufacture anything to supply people with your game. So yeah, it costs less, sells faster, and drops price much earlier... But since everything can be bought without so much as a trip to the store, new games will be brought out a lot faster. This will really suck, as it's going to do tolls on our wallets and space left on our idevices... Dare I mention the 9-page limit.
It's true that it's very difficult to get around this. The volume of new apps daily in the App Store guarantees that any new release will get lost in the shuffle within a couple of days. This is made even worse by the fact that new releases bear the date stamp of the day they were submitted, not approved, which means many (most?) apps will be buried the moment they're released. It's a terribly flawed system that makes gaining recognition very difficult without some hook to get you noticed -- like selling cheap. Unfortunately this won't work either. The ratings system is even more flawed. This is chiefly due to Apple adding the ability to rate a downloaded app when it's deleted from the device. Whoever thought this cunning plan up obviously didn't think it all the way through: If someone is deleting the app, what does that generally mean? The user didn't like the app. So what are they going to do? Rate low, that's what. Apple needs to do two things to help fix this. First, either get rid of on-device rating at deletion time, or require a review along with a rating so at the very least some constructive criticism can be given. Better yet, jump into the App Store entry for the title the user is deleting to get them to write a review. Second, Apple needs to date stamp new releases for the day of approval, not the submission date. But the problem is that this climate was created as a direct result of the race to the bottom in the first place. Apple's system encourages developers trade cheap apps for popularity in order to gain recognition and coveted top spots in the App Store. This needs to change. You can't make a living off $1 apps unless you're so prolific and your apps are at least marginally worth the price that what you lose in single unit revenue you make up for with numerous units, and that's a short-sighted business model. Unfortunately too many developers have made it almost necessary in order to compete. It's a damn shame, too. There are many apps worth their weight selling themselves for a song, and that's gotta be discouraging for many good developers.
Acually apple an itunes are two different companies own buy the same conglomerate. So it's itunes that needs to rework its business practices....everything about the itunes store ethically is messed up
Right, that's the secret. You're supposed to set a release date, otherwise it defaults to the submission date. If you're wrong at your guess of Apple's approval schedule, oh well.
Maybe they can judge quality simply by price. But at this point, there's no way to filter by price. You'd assume a high price game would probably be worth it, but often no where near the downloads of a cheap stupid app, so it has no chance to be seen unless the seller has to make a ridiculous price drop. If something costs a $1 or so, it should go in some bargain bin at the AppStore, that way all the stupid gimmick apps don't completely drown good apps in the top apps list. Plus a cream of the crop section that has premium price apps, something like $5+ range. You'd see the top games and apps within that price range. And if a crappy app tried to get in there it would just be knocked by the negative reviews due to price. There just needs to be a way for high quality apps, that demand a high price, and are worth it, can still stand out over time, above the endless $1 apps that overtake all. And maybe it would help balance the pricing if it means app makers can keep their prices high without worry of it disappearing. It really sucks that high quality games are forced to practically giving it a way. I want developers to make money and in turn be encouraged to make more, better, games.
