Order N Development's Andy Finnell has written a very cogent argument in favor of keeping app pricing above the poverty line.
"By far the biggest reason why developers price their apps so low is to game the App Store. Applications are sorted by how many copies they have sold. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the lower the price, the more copies an app will sell. The top 100 applications sell tons of copies, while applications outside that top 100 seem to wither away unnoticed. So in order to get more exposure, developers price their applications as low as they can.
The problem is that this scheme only supports 100 applications. Everyone else is hosed. Unless you can get and stay in the top 100, then lowering your price was for nothing..."
Finnell goes on to argue that the current model is unsustainable, and that the App Store is headed for a crash--unless Apple fixes its merchandising scheme so that superior apps actually get the promotion they deserve, developers work together to set a floor under their prices, or both.
The second solution sounds great, but we think that the coordination issues involved are probably intractable: a large percentage of the many thousands of app developers would have to subscribe to the cartel to have any real hope of resetting consumer expectations, and the temptation to defect would be overwhelming. That said, we have noticed that prices seem to be rebounding a little bit on their own; we are seeing many more games in the $1.99-$4.99 range these days.
In our opinion, the only real hope for avoiding a full-scale burst of the App Store bubble is for Apple to step in and fix the system. We agree with Finnell--Apple has to be working on this behind the scenes, because the conclusion is simply too obvious to be ignored. It wouldn't set all of this glorious infrastructure up to let it slouch into a graveyard for "abandonware," right?
Right!?
[From losingfight.com]
1 Comment
right! hahaha
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