Just thought I'd add some data to the discussion, and my own thoughts on app pricing so far. I released Zombieville USA in mid february at $3, with very little pre-release hype. I didn't send out review copies or a press release, merely promoted it here on TouchArcade with a gameplay trailer. The response to the trailer was mostly very positive, was featured on the front page of the site, and my game had decent (but not amazing) sales in its first two weeks (somewhere around 4000 downloads over two weeks). It very briefly peeked into the top 100 for only a day and disappeared. After two weeks, sales were down to roughly 200 a day and then it got featured by Apple in the "new and noteworthy" list around March 1st. Sales immediately exploded up to over 2000 a day, and the game rapidly climbed to around #30 on the charts and was holding steady. I decided that trying a $1 sale was worth a try, because I knew that the higher you are on the charts, the longer an app's lifespan tends to be. As others have noted in this thread, being popular tends to generate a lot of sales from people who assume "well, this must be good if its in the top 5". The sale, combined with the already high visibility and a well timed feature update more than tripled my sales, reaching 6-7k a day. At this point I was highly reluctant to end the sale, since it had not only pushed me into the top 10 apps, but increased revenue as well to my surprise. The game had already vastly outperformed my wildest expectations, so with nothing to lose I took a deep breath and bumped the price cautiously up to $2... and sales barely dipped at all, dropping to roughly 5000 a day, increasing my average revenue again. In fact, within a week they were even higher than when the sale first took effect, and the game peaked at #2 on the paid app charts (#1 in games) briefly while still at $2. I later tried another sale when my second update came out to try and maintain my position in the top 10 a little longer, but the effects were different. Halving the price roughly doubled sales, and doubling the price roughly halved sales again - it was pretty much a fruitless experiment. My takeaway from the whole experience is that a sale is certainly not necessary to make a decent profit - the game was performing quite well at its initial $3 - but at least in my case it helped give the game a little longer shelf life than it probably would have had otherwise. In hindsight, I think the game is well suited to its $2 price point - its got more polish than 99 cent shovelware, but its not as complete or elaborate as a lot of higher priced apps out there right now. And from my reviews, I think most people agree. You have to just price based on what people are willing to pay, and sadly, most apps out there aren't even worth downloading for free. I don't think the fact that the average price of an iPhone app is so low is necessarily a problem by itself - I think its the fact that the average quality of an app is terrible. People are willing to spend real money on higher quality apps, this has already been proven. But I'm not kidding myself, Zombieville is not going to stack up to an average DS game. It's a couple bucks worth of laughs and nothing more. I'm aiming to make my next game worthy of a higher price point.
This is What I though so ;-), everybody now know and love our friendly Owen ;-). That's true, we have to get the right revenue. Which sometime can be difficult to figure out which one will bring more revenue. Is it pricing our games at 0.99$, 1.99$, 2.99$, etc... that will bring the most revenue. But they are definitely some price range that will probably bring almost no revenue at all (like $10 for a puzzle game, though if I look the same type of puzzle game on PS3 PSN they are often $9.99, $14.99). I am sure ill probably be going to have to experiment when I reach that stage. Fred
Exactly. A game's worth is the amount of money it brings in each day. As long as you're visibile in some way, the lower your price, the more copies you will sell. The trick is to discover the price that nets you the most cash each day.
Episodic Content? What do you guys feel about episodic content? Could this not help reduce many of the problems you are discussing? By releasing just the first part of the game for $1/59p you've made it accessible to skeptical potential customers without making it completely free. If your game IS worth more then future updates at $1/59p can be used to satisfy the gamer. This way even games with lots of content (and a large overall price) can compete in the flawed app-store charts. I've not read into the details about such a strategy but I gather it is possible/allowed in the upcoming software update.
@Therazor Episodic contents can work for some type of game such an adventure or RPG. Where you could more easily segment your game. But for example a puzzle game (which is the project I am working on) would be more problematic. Unless its design in a way with some levels that can easily be added later on. Btw this kind of episodic contents selling will be possible with OS 3.0 coming up later this summer. As Apple will make it possible for developers to sell add-on content directly from withing their apps. Apple shown an example of a space shooting game where you had only level 1-10, if you wanted to get level 10-20 you had to buy them extras. So indeed it is something that was asked by developers for making DLC, episodic contents, subscriptions possible. Fred
As I said at the start, I'm not in the least bit surprised that a $1/$2 sale often does wonders for your sales, and people tend to buy what they see other people buying, hence the additional success hitting the top #100 can bring. I do really worry about where the market can go from here, though. In the UK, the last three generations of console have all had a fairly constant pricing cycle. Console is released (PS1, 2, or 3 for example) and new games are £39.99. New released stay at this RRP for around three years, and then the shops start selling them all at £29.99 and this continues down as the next generation approaches. In the App Store, new releases are coming in at a $ or two, which means you would hope that over time the average price paid will actually increase - something that it's been proven is very hard to do. I appreciate MikaMobile's comment that his game isn't comparable to a DS release, and is priced accordingly. Of course, Gameloft recently released an improved port of a £30 DS game for £5.99. TherazOr and Intruder make excellent points about micro-transactions - it's something that has become quite common on the consoles, and people are certainly prepared to throw away a few pound on some extra levels. They did do it with Lumies on Xbox Live, though I remember a fair bit of outcry at the time. Of course, outcry is relative, as the correlation between itunes visibility and sales shows that very few people (as a % of total ownership) pay any attention to the likes of Touch Arcade. I suspect that MikaMobile's note about 4000 sales over the first two weeks for Zombiepocalypse gives you a reasonable idea of the sales value of this website, though of course one of the things that made me want to start this thread were the number of forum posts by customers complaining that prices were too high - primarily the ire directed at RPGGuy for releasing Dark Raider at $8.
Wow! Is this the only thread in all of TA without ANY spam, and lots of quality and detailed posts? Its refreshing to see such good discussion. Alright, I haven't read through all of the posts, but my thought on pricing is this: You have to play according to the economics. If one dev. starts trying to change the policy of the appstore, not much is going to happen. It's simply the way the appstore works. But one pricing method that I think is the most effective and spurrs sales the most, is starting small and getting bigger. If you know that a game is going to increase in price, you will want to buy it as soon as possible. If you know a game is going to decrease in price, you will hold off. Starting a game at 99 cents as an introductory price gets the game off to a good start, receiving a lot of impulse buys. It will then reach its peak, and then start slipping. You can then increase the price, perhaps with an update with more content (such as what Bounce On, Touch Ski 3d, and what Pocket God is planning). A while later, you will increase the price to its highest point, with all of the planned updates and level increases introduced. At this higher price, it will gain more per buy than lower. Along with this pricing technique, a lite edition is important. Another important thing is to strike the right chord with the mood of the public. Simple, fixable things make a whole lot of difference to initial impression. Good screenshots, a good icon, and a good description are essential. A gameplay video and grassroots hyping help a lot. A pre-release generation of hype must not be overblown and quickly forgotten, but more subtle and secretive, keeping the people guessing and coming back for more. Even a good name is important. Finally, I think that there are two more important things that help an app. Multiple review sites giving good reviews and visibility in iTunes. Getting featured, and especially making the top 100, will help bring buzz to the product. A high average rating and good initial reviews that end up on the front page of the product are important. Giving promo codes to review sites is important also. The bigger the review site, and the better the review, the more buzz it will get. But also, there are a couple other things to mention. The most important thing for your product to do well, is for it to be a easy to learn, polished, and fun product. This will cause the reviews to be great, this will help the grassroots cause, this will make people who try the lite get the full version. Secondly, striking the right chord with the public is essential. Even if the game is good, sometimes it just doesn't gain traction. It isn't fitting with what the public wants at that time. Finally, there is simply luck. In order to be successful with an app, you have to have a portion of luck - there is no other way to say it. That is why some crappy games reach high lists and hidden gems remain hidden.
Does anyone remember the times when you'd only buy one game, and you'd play it like crazy because it's the only thing you had? If you spend more money on a game you're going to feel obligated to play it more because you want to get your money's worth out of it. With all these 99c games it's like bad game overload. I get the feeling people buy the cheap stuff because they are constantly searching for something that doesn't suck. With a game like Dark Raider I know that it's a bigger game than most people expect on the iPhone, and that's why it's priced higher. People have come to expect little from their games and have short attention spans. I don't think $8 is too much for a game like Dark Raider when we have games like Tiger Woods where you hit a ball around the entire time for $10. (Sorry I'm not a fan of golf really). People can complain about prices all they want, but until they've played the game all the way through they don't know what it's really worth. Invest the money and also invest time to finish some of the bigger and more expensive games and you'll probably have more fun than buying a bunch of crappy 99c games that hold your attention for 5 minutes.
Once Micro-transactions is an option, the entire pricing model is going to change. People are going to release premium apps that are .99-2.99 with functionality that is barely above a lite app. Then expect consumers to buy the rest of the levels inside the game. That way, premium app companies can keep prices low to generate lots of sales, while still making back what they would normally with a high priced app through the in app purchases. An example: with in app purchases, Assassin's Creed would be released at 2.99 with the first 3 levels open for play. Many people would try out this app at the low price point to help it skyrocket to a high position in the app store. Then, those who bought it and like it would purchase the rest of the levels (ten at a time or so) which would add up to about $9.99. Therefore, more people are buying the app, getting more publicity, while those who like it are extending the gameplay and paying what they would currently. This is just my prediction as to how the micro-transactions will effect premium games. I think by this time next year, almost every game in the app store will be less than 4.99 and in app purchases really determine if the app has a premium price point.
Accurate prediction That sounds even more chaotic than the status quo. Hopefully, some changes to the way apps are measured and more avenues of promotion from Apple will arrive too.
Thanks for a really good discussion. As a developer coming from the world of AAA consoles games, now going indie I would like to comment on the initial claim that .99 apps are devaluating the market and that generally you need to adapt a strategy like gameloft (with higher priced apps in order to maintain certain integrity in terms of quality). As a general statement I fully agree with this. However I think what is missing in this discussion is the alignment between development strategy and marketing/business strategy. I think that everybody can agree that there is a number of apps out there that end up in the top 10 your buy them like everybody else and cant believe you actually just paid $0.99 for it. Then there are other apps where you think my god that is great value for money I made at bargain $0.99 this game is really woth $5 or $10 to me. I think there is an inherent problem in developers trying to develop games in the same way as bigger development houses. The problem has to do with portfolio management. A company like gameloft can afford the make several highly polished games because they can spred their risk between many IPs and games, where as indie developers do not have this luxury. This opens up what for me is the real question should you compete with gameloft in this market. The short answer is obviously no and if you do you should properly aim at getting a publishing deal with a iPhone publisher. Reason being this development strategy requires large upfront investments, and you will be forced to take a price reduction just to sell something. I think this is the scenario that many developers fear. On the other hand there are huge opportunities if you can create a business strategy that matches your available financing (in the case of indie developers close to nothing). The only way to do this in my opinion is to develop gameplay concepts that scale well both in terms of business and in terms of development. For those of you who are familiar with software development methodologies this is exactly what agile development frameworks are trying to address. Short iteration cycles that work from the core of the application freatures and out, delivering the most valuable features first. Pocket God as already mentioned in this thread is a good example of an alignment between business and development. The initial investment from Bolt was limited, had the game had disappointing sales they would not have lost huge upfront investments. To conclude on this I think that many developers are trying to make games like they were developing for the DS platform people are thinking in SKUs instead of thinking how to align development with concept and business. Personally I think we will see that the games that will be really successful on iPhone will have different content and development structures than what we have seen on traditional gaming platforms.
This is from this thread: a) I strongly recommend against this for good apps and games. If it is a crap app and you think it is worth the price of a soda, then yes. Otherwise you are killing the app store. Apart from the customers, who of course want things as cheap as possible (who wouldn't?), it is very bad idea for numerous reasons. First of all, you can never raise the price again. IF you do it, expect a lot of people waiting for the next "sale". I wouldn't buy anything that used to be cheaper and then all of sudden is twice the price. I would would feel like I would be getting a bad deal. And wait for the price to be lowered again, which could of course mean that I would wait forever. Second, expect a lot of bad reviews. A lot of people will buy stuff for $0.99, just because it's cheap, and not necessarily because they actually want it. I like to have a good reputation and build a brand. I want people to expect quality and innovation from Illusion Labs. Also, if you price something X, and lower the price to 0.5f*X, you will double the sales, but only for a short while. In other words, you will make the same amount of money, but just for a limited time, and after that you will start making less money than you initially did. But then you may suggest that you raise the price again, see my first point. Since the current top 100 lists are solely based on nbr of sales, you will need to sell a lot of games to make it. Do this by making a good app, and not solely by giving it away for free. Also if you look at some of the apps/games, you can see that a lot of them a terrible and have a very low rating (3.5 or less). Why is a bad app on a top 100 list anyway? I hope Apple fix the ranking problems and rank after some other criterias. Google/Android for instance use install time, price and rating to compile their top lists. Imagine in six months, all apps are $0.99. Customers happy. Good luck making a living on your App Store sales. --- I also read in this thread that a Lite version is always a good thing. Well, it could be, but it's not a fact. You can just ask Jani (Frand here at TA) at Secret Exit how sales were affected for Zen Bound when they introduced a Lite version (sales dropped), or how we did with Sway. The reason is that people don't give the game an honest try -- they just play it for a very brief time (1 min). For Touchgrind or Sway, most people don't spend the time it takes to learn the controls, and new never-seen-before controls certainly takes some time to getting used to. Especially for Touchgrind, we will never release a Lite version for it since it is not for everyone, and since it takes a great deal of practice to get good at, just like skating in real life (which I think is one of the reasons it's done well). And thanks for an interesting thread by way.
Well that depends on your marketing strategy, a number of apps have been successful with sales or giving an initial discount while raising the price once more content is created (at least that is what many plan to do). Why? do you have any data to back this up. I can't see how selling the same game for a higher price would give you better reviews - if it is crap it is crap no matter the price. My experience is that it can generate a lot of positive feedback to give gamers great value for money. Do you have some data to back this statement up? I would imagine that this is heavily dependent on your update strategy and what kind og game you are making. I think there is an inherent probloem with the rating system in the appstore - check out this thread http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=268118#post268118 This is a problem for all price ranges not just the low priced apps. Second that - and hopefully improve their rating system aswell Completely agree - I assume you attended Jani's talk at Nordic Game Conference. It was actually quite suprizing for me to see the negative effects of the Lite version. Something that goes against all gamer logic.
Sure, it works for some. It's just my personal thought, if I missed out on a sale, I would be reluctant to buy it at a higher price. I know it is silly considering it's the price of a cappuccino, but it's the way it is. Intro price may be fine if you actually discount it for a day or a couple of days. A month isn't really an "introduction" regarding the short life span of an App Store app today. I rather not name drop any apps. It CAN generate good reviews too if you do a good and polished game, but it better be good. People will buy everything for $0.99. If you would ask people to review their purchase history in iTunes, and check how many $0.99 apps they have bought, and actually how many of them they enjoyed and thought was worth $0.99 or more, I'm pretty confident that the percentage would be rather low. Ive heard it from many devs, and Jani actually said this on his talk during NGC Yup I was there If your game is special in some way, people will be disappointed in the game (it wasn't for them, simply put). Of course, you will get fewer unsatisfied customers too.
Ahh, we moved the pricing discussion over here. Nice My experience is that any new app needs a marketing strategy - a way to get you app seen by as many people as possible. Having a low price, even free, can be part of this strategy for those without the time and resources to otherwise promote their app. I'll drop names. I can only discuss the very low end of the scale, free to $2.99, as that is what I have direct experience with. We introduced all of our apps at $0.99. For Black Friday weekend, we dropped the price of most of our apps to Free. "Sales", as expected, shot through the roof. The few reviews we got were more negative. And, in retrospect a most obvious consequence occurred, our ratings dropped by 0.5-1 star across the board due to the huge number of people download our apps without knowing or caring what they were getting, and then promptly deleting it (and dinging the rating) when it didn't meet whatever unreasonable expectation that had for it. We have since vowed to not have free versions of any of our apps. We removed the free Lite version of our game from the store and we raised the price of all of our apps by $1. My son even raised the price of his Hold On! app, which had been free since the beginning of the store. I'm not suggesting that our experience would transfer. I think it depends on the application, it's target market, and how well that target market aligns with the set of people who download free apps.
I have to add NimbleBit to the discussion. I'm not going to discuss the worth of the games - I am NOT saying they are crappy games. That said (and owning 4 Nimblebit games, none I got for free), I probably won't pay for another one. Why? Three of the four have been made free now (latest being SkyBurger, which was released a little over a month ago). That's assuming Textropolis never went free, but it has been a buck. I don't think it's a good pricing strategy, because it's just going to make me wait next time. Do I get a dollar's worth out of the games? Probably. But there's such a glut in the app store of quality games that you DON'T have to buy things right away, there's still tons of other games to play in the meantime. Do this enough and I think sales are going to start going in a downward spiral. I think 5 weeks is a little too soon to give a game away.
Depends on when you want to play a game. You can save $1 on most games if you wait 5 weeks. I pay $7.50 to see movies when they come out or wait 5 weeks and they will be at the cheap theater for $2. 5 weeks is a long time in entertainment.
You can also get pretty much any game for free if you wait 20 years, or as long as it takes for the original company to go under and the game you're looking for to be safely classified as abandonware.
5 weeks != 20 years. If the app store was barren of good games, then I can see not worrying about price drops at all. But there's hundreds of games being added a month. Developers have created a system in which you can get free and $1 excellent games all the time. The only way this will change is if everybody starts doing $5 games and up. If there's no more $1 and free games, people will start buying $5 games. But I don't see this happening.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and to elaborate on this from Anders' earlier point that more or less was "don't lower the price it will kill the appstore" (sorry if this is bit over exaggerated Anders ) - I think that what is really killing a lot of business is the Lite versions. Especially because the sell through rate is so small, so unless you can have some advertizing revenue from your lite apps, I don't think it is worth it. Also you are properly better off spending time on pleasing the people who actually likes/buys your game vs. a lot of random downloads.
