Are you building your games/software company around the wrong model?

Just like Groupon, if you don't have a plan for how you will handle the sale, you shouldn't have the sale.

I was under the impression that Amazon guaranteed a small amount of money, even if they gave your app away free, but apparently you can sign that away, too.

At any rate, if you don't have a plan for how you will get all those free customers to buy something, giving your stuff away for free is idiocy.

And if your app is crap, people are not coming back. (Not saying this app was crap, but I've seen plenty of free ones that were.)

A few years back, a pizza restaurant in town gave out coupons to everyone for a free pizza. I had never tried them, but heard they were good. So when we got the free pizza, we were excited to try them. It was one of the worst pizzas we had ever had.

Now, this was probably because they were overloaded with free pizza orders and couldn't get them out the door fast enough. People were stressed, there was too much work, etc etc, and quality suffered.

But because of that, they not only lost that sale, but they lost every future sale for my entire family. It would have been FAR better not to give us anything than to give us bad pizza.

Are you talking specifically about app & social games, or would you make the same argument for other distribution channels (console, downloadable, board/card games)?

Anyway, excellent article. Looking forward to digging through your archives.