The $0.99 Problem
gamasutra.com
gamasutra.com
It is also possible to sell virtual goods from within your (cheap or even free) application:
http://www.insidesocialgames.com/2009/11/30/ngmocos-free-to-...
I'm assuming a horizontal supply curve (and marginal cost approaching zero), which implies that pricing comes down to substitutability and demand.
The pricing strategy in the article implies that to break into the top 10, your app has to be priced at $.99. To me this suggests that quality apps are perfect substitutes, and are selling at as close to marginal cost as possible. Once you fall out of the top 10, however, the competition is more monopolistic, and you can raise your price such that you sell the quantity where marginal cost equals marginal revenue.
This seems backwards to a traditional market, where the competition is more monopolistic in the higher quality products, and more perfectly comptative in the lower quality products. Interesting.
It seems a bit stupid that to see more copies you need to have a high volume to crack into a best selling list.
Why do you say it is stupid ? Shouldn't a "best selling list" be created based on the definition of a "best selling list" ?
Btw rankings based on the standard "best seller" definition cannot be maniuplated the way that rankings based on "ratings" can be manipulated.
imo Apple's current ranking policy - ranking by best-seller-list and also ranking by most-revenue-earned (i.e. the top grossing list) - is good.
Why not?(I don't have an iPhone, so I really don't know anything about it.) It would be fairly easy to buy your own app. A $0.99 app and 30% fee to apple, you could buy your app 300 times a week for $90. If it is really that much of a hit driven market it might be worth it. Apple would love it(cash and being able to claim the next billion sold that much faster.)
Apple could do something similar - highest grossing games, not just number sold. Would balance out factors like those the OP discuss.
Sure, games are hit-driven and their sales peak early... but the iPhone/Touch platform is very young and still growing. These games will still be playable and sell in small quantities years from now, when the platform's installed base is much larger.
Maybe the only "problem" here is impatience?
PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here.
Old PS2 games still sell, 10 years after the platform was introduced. A good, simple game for the iPhone platform may still be sellable, in some format, in 2019. And the installed base of compatible devices could be 20x larger.
PS. There was an invention hundreds of years ago that addresses exactly the need for paying current costs while waiting for long-term profitable projects to pan out. It's called 'finance'. Considering only 2-month windows of costs and revenues as if we were talking about subsistence farmers is a rookie myopia.
That is probably a conservative estimate on the AppStore (and people ask me why I won't develop for it).
By way of comparison, roughly .3% of my sales to date were within 6 weeks of release. If you consider the release of my web version to also count, then about that bumps up to about 5%.
If this is their main concern, then why are they spending their time on such a low payout time consuming endeavor? "Not enough people are buying my iPhone app fast enough for long enough" isn't something a mortgage lender or a hungry kid wants to hear.
So yea, I didn't mean for it to sound quite so dramatic, like the app store doesn't have any tail at all, because that's not really true. But for getting a read on your product's success and earning some useful revenue for the next project, those first 2 months in my experience are key.