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Dinner Dash is a very popular game and its made its way to your iPhone! First I congratulate the developers on getting the game onto the platform and I look forward to what they may have coming up the in the future. However, that’s where the joy is going to end for me and by the looks of the initial reviews - that’s where it is ending for a lot of people.
Why you ask? Price … Price yet again. Over and over I’ve seen what could be killer games come into the AppStore and over and over I (and many) have looked the other way because the prices are way too high. Now, understand I AM NOT saying that the AppStore needs some kind of fixed pricing model, and I fully respect that developers can and should set their own prices, however too many developers are coming from Windows Mobile, PC, OS X or other platforms and have completely missed the fact that they are entering the iTunes pricing model.
What does that mean? Click on to find out -
That (to me) means that while you may be able to charge $49.99 for an XBOX 360 game, and you may be able to charge $19.99 for a game on the Nintendo DS - iTunes is a low priced environment. Its like Wal-Mart for digital content. Yes, Amazon digital downloads are sometimes cheaper … but you get my point. iTunes has been built on a model of low priced digital downloads. People go on iTunes and they expect to pay $0.99 for a song. Heck, $1.29 for non-DRM was too much to ask for most and Apple ended up dropping the price down to $0.99 for those!
If I had to guess (I haven’t looked at the numbers) Apple most likely has a hard time selling movies because the prices for those are too high as well. I mean seriously - for $14.99 I can buy a movie on DVD and “back it up” to whatever format I want. iTunes I get the download and that’s it. You delete it by accident - and you’re buying it again. But there in lies my point - if you charge too much in this environment your sales may be decent, but they aren’t going to be sensational.
There really is turning out to be what I would call a sweet spot for games and that’s the $2.99 - $6.99 price range. $2.99 is sort of like a no-brainer purchase. The game looks like it could be fun, is getting good reviews … I’ll click “buy” without a lot of extra thought. Why? Well because its not going to break the bank and if it sucks then I don’t feel bad because the heartburn is no worse than the 2 Taco Bell burritos and a soda I skipped out on for it. $6.99 is more of a multiple hour decision type of game. For $6.99 I’m missing out on ice cream with my daughter … so the game needs to be good and have decent replay value. If it turns out to suck then it hurts a bit more and I’ve then wasted what could have been good times at Baskin Robins.
Alright - I’ve rambled on long enough on this I think. Reality is that when you develop a game and you think you can get away with charging $9.99 for it - take a look at your competition and the demographics. At $10 you’re competing against the likes of Sega’s SMB and Pangea’s Enigmo. You’re competing against top notch games with killer graphics and tons of replay-ability. Most importantly, at $10 you’re cutting out a huge percentage of buyers. Many simply can’t or won’t justify $10 for a game on their phone but those same people will happily drop $2.99 without a second thought. So I ask you this - With an estimated 14 million iPhones to be sold by the end of the year … are you sure as a developer you want to price your games at the highest price point and get the lowest number of sales? I personally think millions of sales vs. thousands of sales would be more inviting.
Oh … and please don’t try to sell me a game for $10 when I can play it for free on my laptop. I’ll pay a couple bucks for the convenience though.
P.S. - My apologies to PlayFirst. You just happened to be the folks who set me in motion on this. I’m sure the game is excellent. But at that price I doubt I’ll ever find out as there’s just too many other proven games in that price range.
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by Ragart, on September 4 2008 @ 12:16 pm
Couldn’t agree more, Brandon. And as a quick note — Enigmo is down to $5.99! I bought it at $10 just a few days before :S
But now that I’ve seen the quality of $4-6 apps, I really think $10 apps have to step things up big time. I’d probably pay $10 for a deeper, more time-consuming game that wasn’t casual. I’m talking an RPG or detailed racing game.
by birdsoft, on September 12 2008 @ 1:12 pm
Ok, Im not saying your right and Im not saying your wrong, but….
Do you have some inside knowledge on numbers of sales and the like…??
I dont really know for sure but some problems I see are:
1. In the WM world I saw on countless blogs and forums of people saying, well if you lower the price on something from $15 to $5 bucks than you will get WAY WAY over 3x the sales…Well the market doesnt work this way at all, at least over there… Its a nice assumption, but…. Its not a true one! A lot of us tried it! I have this feeling it may not be working on the store like you think either….
2. All these big companies are riding the early waves on the App Store. I hope it can continue but will we continue to see this kind of traffic once the App Store is older to justify the pricing for this high volume. And now once the game/app ages, they have no where to go with price to keep seeing any return…
3. I still expect to see a leveling back up on prices at some point. Its nice of you to think a Song is worth the same as 200-500 hours of Development(which is billable at anywhere from $45-$150+ an hour), but Im sure at these low prices we are going to have a LOT of people dropping back out of the market because of no ROI. Right now you have a lot of the excited Hobbyist types(and obviously some with a lot of talent) that have flooded this, but …..
If all these companies making the big games dont get sales numbers at prices like they get on Desktop and console games, do you think that investment on new games will stay around….
4. Are applications that are the same Exact code as on the Desktop even worth $10 less on iPhone? Why? Because they have to compete with the Music Files? Diner Dash isnt a FREE desktop program, the real version still costs $19.99…
5. You have to sell a TON of 99 cent Programs with your 70 cent cut a month to make a pay check that you can pay a mortgage with… Im sure the adoption rate is loads higher but expecting to sell 3-4000 copies of a percieved cheap app, with all the mindless idiots 1staring your application for any reason they feel the need to without having to even purchase it is not that easy, and with the lack of any real sorting ability…
Im obviously coming from WM and am still working on my first iPhone go around, so… I just want to understand this new mentality better. I’ll be able to play the game myself with a quality application in a few months to figure it out, and am probably being more negative in thinking than I should be, but Im not sure all of my assumptions are wrong and/or your idea on how it works are right(or at least will stay that way)….
HMMMMMMM…..
by Brandon, on September 15 2008 @ 6:56 pm
@birdsoft -
1) No I don’t have any inside knowledge other than what I read on feeds everyday around the various iPhone blog sites and in the appstore reviews. But, I can say that pricing is a common complaint not just by me. However - from the sales numbers I have seen on the web so far, a smaller developer like yourself could possibly turn a “decent” income from WinMo into a “killer” income depending on how well your apps do. Its just not the same ecosystem as you’re used to with WinMo. And frankly - yes I do think a song and an iPhone application are of the same value depending on the application. I’m pretty sure that those artists who make the music didn’t just spend the 3 minutes it took to record the song and call it done. There’s writing, re-writing, recording, re-writing, re-recording and everything that goes along with it. I don’t think just because they produce something that’s a couple minutes long that they’re of less effort or value than your ability to sit at a computer and type. And I’m fairly sure they bill more than $45-150.hr.
2) Out of curiosity (and no I don’t really want you to answer) but do you sell 500+ licenses a day? Some (and many) iPhone apps are and have been since day 1. If you can’t get a good ROI on your 200 hours from 500 sales in a single day - you might be doing something wrong. You may not sustain sales like that over an entire year, but if you can do it for a month or two you stand to make a good $20k which frankly isn’t too bad an income from a single app.
I guess the long and the short of what I’m saying is that while I don’t argue many of your points, I think an understanding of the mentality of the ecosystem is important for a developer to prosper. There’s been a definite “sweet-spot” pricing developing from the buyer’s perspective, and as a developer you’re either going to have to adapt to that or struggle to make it worth your while. One more thing - and this is a bit off the “iPhone app” topic, but I don’t necessarily agree with a lot of desktop application pricing either. Some of those apps they may try to sell for $50, but that doesn’t make them worth it. Perceived value is more of how I base my purchase decisions - if I don’t think an application is worth $50 I’m not likely to buy it, especially if I can find one that meets my same goals for half the price.
EDIT: - here’s a link for some “recent” sales:
http://www.taptaptap.com/blog/final-numbers-for-july/
by birdsoft, on October 20 2008 @ 5:16 pm
Never saw your response until now.
I agree with you and was/am very curious on the iPhone market and its higher volume and what that means. And I have watched it very carefully. Unfortunately the market is about 4 MONTHS old, and people jump to the conclusion that because the early rush was AWESOME, it will somehow stay like this. It won’t! Id like to see taptaptap’s same sales figures for October. Im sure by volume still way higher than most on WM, but if you really think MOST of the developers are still selling 500 copies a day, you are a little(Ok a lot) off on the thinking as I know a lot of developers that have since shared with me… You have seen the 3 or 4 smaller developers that were willing to share their sales when they were the first ones into the market. July was not the same market as it even is now. Why are they sharing, well because they have surprisingly big numbers. But they are still the minority. And unfortunately this “sweet spot” idea and the maybe ‘2 month’ real shelf life so far on applications and big competition in pretty much all genres is already taking its toll driving a lot of the hobbyist developers(some with boatloads of talent) to bail out and drop their applications to free as they dont get their ROI and are just looking for the rush.
It was rather funny when because TRISM has sold x numbers already, everyone assumed his sales figures wont drop and he’ll be a millionaire by the Spring…Good luck to him and I hope he is.. BUT VERY VERY UNLIKELY, he isnt Top 50 now.
But I probably wont agree with you that a song is the same as a fully coded game. The market already demonstrates that on EVERY other platform. Yeah, the top artists may be able to demand more than $150/hour, but….. I will guarantee you that a lot of those artists dont actually have the same type of time invested in a single song(though yes the label probably has a few days with technicians into it) and they are selling these same tracks for EVERY platform, so their ROI is spread out over CD sales as well. A CD is worth about $10-15, a game anywhere but iPhone, $10-20… iPhone, $5 or less… Do you really think there’s not as much if not more ‘talent’ in “Sitting at a computer and type” as say Britney Spears has…
I have a feeling that that alone will end up driving the big players back out of the market (or limit development for it dramatically, it obviously has some value as “advertising’ for their real titles), just like it has when they have dabbled on other mobile devices. We’re already kind of seeing that effect too…
And/Or the prices will sneak back up….