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Comment by interpol_p | Hacker News Reader

We set this site up for our new game Crabitron and decided to call it Crabstarter. It is intended to be a light-hearted parody of Kickstarter, while showing real sales.

One of the main reasons we set it up is because we wanted to have some hope of recouping our investment in this game. In order to do that, we felt that we couldn't go for rock-bottom pricing and hope for a mega-hit. That seemed crazy and unrealistic.

Instead we gave our game the price we thought it deserved — $5. In order to help App Store players get over the "sticker shock," we set up Crabstarter. When you see that five dollar price in this context, it suddenly doesn't seem so high.

We also wanted players to see that we were real human beings, and not a faceless company. So we tried to make an honest video in the format of a standard Kickstarter video.

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It's good to educate the buying public about how much it really costs to make something like this and how hard it is to recoup that. I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts.

The new era of apps is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we've got these obscenely low prices... but on the other hand, people are actually buying software. That's a bigger deal than most folks realize. Before the iOS era, people basically just didn't buy software. I mean, geeks did if there was some specific tool they needed, and gamers bought games of course... but the run-of-the-mill normal person? At most they bought MS office and maybe got hoodwinked into picking up Norton when the trial expired on their computer.

Now? Jane Q. Soccermom buys programs and games. That's a huge shift.

I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts.

The Oatmeal did a great parody of these people a while back: http://theoatmeal.com/blog/apps

While funny, it completely fail in identifying the underlying causes of this consumer behavior.

I do not consider it strange that people feel threaten by a $3 app purchase, but not a $400 phone. To me, its consistent with consumers when they buy a product they trust vs a product they don't. In psychology, economics, and finance, its call Risk aversion and is the reluctance of a person to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff.

People expect software to fail. To a degree, Microsoft is to blame with blue screen of death, but thats only part of the culture regarding software. If I buy that $3 app, it might not solve the problem I got, it might be buggy, and it might not even start. If it end up in either of those cases, the social blame is normally put on the consumer for not knowing better on which software to buy, adding additional feeling of uncertainty.

On products like phones or computer hardware, the risk feels less. If the phone don't start, we expect to get it replaced and fixed. The blame will be on the seller/producer, and not on the consumer. Add on top the positive reinforcing through marketing in TV and movies, and a physical sale person, and the $300 or even $1000 can feel much safer for the consumer than clicking yes on a $3 app purchase.

Point. I've been dithering on purchases of a DNLA client for my iPod because quite frankly everything I've demo'd and tried has sucked. Crashy, buggy, poor format support, etc. Now, maybe these problems are also coming from my servers, but the programs are terrible at explaining what I'm doing wrong.

While I agree that people didn't buy applications, they definitely bought games. Not just in store either as can be seen by the success of Steam.

Also, people who in the past would have pirated software can't be bothered. When your a high school student, $50-$60 per game means you buy a couple of games a year, pirate them, or just stick to shareware and demos. Hell, how many of us burned through 99 cents in minutes on one-shot arcade machines?

Quality apps can demand premium prices, Minecraft runs for $6.99. I think in the future we will see more of a divergence between premium, dirt cheap, free, and freemium. Certainly the more hardcore gamers will understand the models behind freemium games and lose interest in them.

Good luck from a fellow Adelaidean. Have tweeted (@isaacforman) to plug the game and will buy it when I get home to the iPad tonight. Looks like a decent partner game to Ridiculous Fishing, which is my current time-waster.

Well done on the launch.

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