this is just wrong. let's sum up what is REALLY happening.Undeux said:Well yeah, $10 is steep on the app store. When you can get hundreds of games for $1 or less, I think a company really has to prove that their game is worth that much. I get that they may have to charge that much to cover heavy development costs for an advanced game, but that's just how the market on the store is right now.
yokel A pays his $99 to apple for the SDK and codes a fart app in an hour. Puts it up at 99¢ to see how many people will buy it. If 20 people buy it, he just made $14 for his hour of work.
100 people do this and 99¢ apps dominate the top 10 lists.
REAL companies, tired of putting real money and effort into smaller titles only to get dominated in the sales charts (and resultant marketing) by fart apps, start putting on regular sales of games to 99¢ to keep their ranking up, useful for when the apps aren't on sale.
savvy users take note of these frequent sales and the regular occurrence of even the biggest titles making their way to $2.99 or lower eventually and start refusing to buy anything unless it's 99¢ for a regular game or $2.99 for an AAA game.
At the end of the day NONE OF THIS has anything to do with either actual value or perceived value. The valuation of the app store is so beyond fucked right now it's not even funny. It's essentially a knee jerk reaction by developers to compete with vultures looking to make a quick $25 on their useless app for 45 minutes of development time.
Fortunately this looks to be changing. Doom Res stuck around at $9.99 for a while. Civ Rev has been sitting high on the charts at $5 and will likely continue to do well at $10. All publishers have to do is release a quality product and stick it out. There have been tons of people in this thread who "finally caved" after getting sick of waiting for a $3-5 app to hit 99¢ or waiting for a $10 app to hit $3. Hell, how many people alone in this thread have bought Real Racing. Yeah there are a bunch who haven't because of it being $10, but I guarantee you that even some of those folks will end up buying it at $10. That's what MORE companies have to do.
There are only two ways things are going to change on the app store for games. Either apple is going to have to intervene on pricing or the layout of the store, or publishers are going to have to change their handling of their products. Fewer and less drastic price drops, higher quality titles from the get go instead of "meh features and serious bugs but here's what we have planned for the next update!!", and just generally treating the app store like a real retail store instead of a flea market. I mean that's what it really is, right there. It's the medium publishers actually trying to compete directly with the fart apps in some race to the bottom, and then the big publishers trying to meet them somewhere in the middle.
Like I said though.. EA is holding their ground. ngmoco seems to be good about not doing crazy "$2.99 sale for a $10 game).. publishers are starting to just let their game sell.
it's not the tyranny of the 99¢ app that is lowering relative value on the store... it's the buying public feeding off publishers doing frequent and massive price cuts on software. If they would stop doing that, the relative value of their apps and the price expectancy of good apps in general will go up.