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Comment by snewe | Hacker News Reader

He basically concludes that non-iPhone development has huge sunk costs (i.e. less competition), so it is where the money is:

"The bar is set too low. Anybody can play in the iPhone space. All it takes is an idea and few thousand dollars to pay someone to build it. The entire process, from idea to launch, takes only six weeks.

In my world--the Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T world--a game costs $50,000 to build and $100,000 to port."

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The genie is out of the bottle. I don't know who's paying $25.00 a game on their mobile phone -- but if they did it a year ago, they aren't going to do it now. Now that has Apple come along and changed the market, every user is going to compare the experience and price and decide that what came before was bullsh*t.

More likely: the ridiculously steep, unsustainable price competition drives most smaller players out of the market, remaining companies take advantage of reduced competition to raise prices back to a relatively sustainable level.

But who determins what a sustainable price is? What you say could be used as a general purpose excuse for never lowering the price of anything. That cycle of lowering prices, shaking out some players leading to consolidation leading to higher prices leading to more competition leading to lower prices is just how things work in capitalism.

I'm just not sure if the price for the user has actually dropped or just shifted towards paying Apple.

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