TomWhitson » App store pricing

App store pricing

Pricing You App

When the app store was first announced the lack of available apps and the novelty allowed developers to charge anywhere up to $9.99 an artificial benchmark created by Sega when they decided to price Super Monkey Ball at $9.99. Developers saw this move by Sega and priced competitively against this benchmark. Unfortunately this single act has all but doomed indie developers trying to get a good deal out of their applications.

Since that day the price of apps has been on a steady race to $0.99 (or worse, free). Developers who have worked hard to create something useful are seeing their apps copied and sold for $0.99 or as ad-supported freeware. This has allowed consumers the luxury of being able to find most utility apps on the app store for free, great for consumers, crummy for developers.

Solutions

So what’s to be done? Clearly what matters is getting on the iTunes homepage; however for most this is impossible as you would need to sell around 2000+ copies of your game to stay at the top. Some have suggested the top 100 should be tweaked so that ranking is done on a revenue basis (cost*number sold) instead of on a volume basis. This would help some developers, especially those such as Sega and EA who are able to sell at high prices and large volumes. But this doesn’t do much for the indie developer sitting in his garage coding his latest action title.

Others suggest there should be an element of randomness to getting on the frontpage. Again this would alleviate some of the challenge allowing everyone their 15 minutes of fame on the frontpage but its not really a long term solution to the issue. What’s really needed is a willingness for app developers to create apps and price them at a value both they and their consumers can afford.

If more app developers were to price realistically instead of spending all day undercutting competitors the app store wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in and developers would get what they deserve.