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Does anyone else thing developers are not getting the point of the Mac App Store?

CavemanUK

CavemanUK

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 29, 2006
456
69
Rhyl, North Wales
I've been perusing the store for a little while and have bought a few little apps but in my humble opinion, developers are being a little greedy and i think it might be losing them sales.

One of the biggest benefits for developers is that everyone gets to see their apps. They get Apples audience and widespread coverage. Surely this should encourage them to reduce the price of their Apps considerably to take advantage of the shear volume of customers?

I've always believed that if you halve the price of something you could potentially sell more than double and make a profit. With software this is great because you don't incur production costs. Its all profit. Especially with the App Store because you don't even pay for servers!

An example of greed is COD 4. I can get COD4 for Mac delivered to my door from Amazon for £24.99 yet its £29.99 from the App store where every single unit sold carries no extra cost. I realise Apple takes its 40% but the the developers are getting advertising, server capacity and shear volumes of customers for next to nothing.

Come on developers, you need to drop the prices.
 
Halving prices does not always results in doubling of sales. Probably rarely does that. it will icnrease sales to a certain extent, but probably not double.

Also, halving prices doesn't do you any good if the increased sales haven't covered your costs.

You would be stupid to lower your cost if you can get more sales at the same price using the increased exposure of the app store. That makes no sense to me at all. You lower the price if you think it will drive up sales enough to make a larger profit, and thats the only reason to do so.

They do pay for the servers for the app store. They give apple 30% of their sales. Thats a lot.

Amazon routinely sells things for a lower price than manufacturers themselves sell items for. They are a terrible example to use. Besides, if they sell more units through the app store than amazon. they'd actually make more money. in fact, they can sell a certain percentage less at the app store and sitll make mroe money.

Prices will probably come down in the long run, but your reasoning seems a bit off to me.
 
Valve did an experiment a few years ago about game prices. They found that putting something on sale for a much cheaper price, pushed sales through the roof.

http://www.next-gen.biz/features/valve-are-games-too-expensive

So Left 4 Dead 1 (when it was new) normal price of $49.99 dropped to $29.99. Sales went up 3000%. That's HUGE. Just think, if they were selling 1000 units at $49.99 that is approximately $50,000 in revenue, during this sale that means they sold 30,000 units (during the same length of time) yielding $900,000 revenue.

Yes, it won't ALWAYS be that big of increase, but if it was 300% increase they STILL would have made more money; made people happy, and word of mouth would get out there because more people have the software.

Yes, I think dropping the price on many of these things isn't a bad idea; but I also know that many of them are fairly complex and take a lot of time and effort to make. But yes, people are expecting to sell only a few units at $100 each to break even; not realizing that if they dropped the price to something more reasonable ($10) they will get 1,000x increase in sales.
 
Since the App Store is so new, I think that you will see the prices drop in the future, it is much easier for a dev to drop prices than raise them.
 
The point of the App Store is to make as much money as possible, both for Apple and the Developers. It's not to sell you software at as low as price as possible.
 
Another thing to consider is that by Apples App Store regulations a developer can not charge for updates / upgrades. They have to make an entirely new entry into the app store.

So for devs who are used to selling a bit low initially and providing minor updates at no cost, but then charging a small fee for major update releases, they have to figure in the loss of the secondary revenue.

Just a thought.

I'm not a huge app purchaser. I love the devs who allow you to try their software first. I tend to buy from them when it's a good piece of software, or I'll even donate when they have some great freeware available.

Carbon Copy Cloner
MactheRipper
RipIt!
Storymill

Those are a few I've been more than happy to pay for.
 
There are a lot of apps that are free or cheaper on the MAS than they were previously. Plus, a bunch were on sale for a few days or a week when the store opened.
 
I think that the best system for AppStore profits is to price your app high and get a loyal (suckers) customers to buy it; then drop the price drastically and get increased publicity and sales.
 
I think people are missing the point, not developers. Developers got shafted hard with the iOS stores. The prices hit rock bottom and it is very difficult to make a living on apps based solely on App Store revenue. Too much competition, too much "rock bottom pricing" and not enough "profit" per unit sold.

The Mac App Store is a restart for many developers. They are NOT going to lower their prices. They need to make a living. They're already losing 30% of the cost of the app to Apple. They aren't going to lower the prices so that they're making significantly less than they were previously. The idea is that yes, more people are seeing the app now that they're on the App Store. But who says that you need to lower the price so cheapasses will buy it too?

Stop being cheap. Pay for software that you want. Don't buy stuff you won't use. The Mac App Store is not "impulse" buy territory. If you want that, go play with your iPhone or iPad.

Read any of the developer blogs out there, listen to Build and Analyze podcast. The developers are not going to lower the price just because people are used to it on the iOS side of the spectrum. The thing people need to realize is that the iOS store is not sustainable for most businesses unless they're huge (Angry Birds being an example). If you aren't in the top 50, you're probably not making much money.

Stop being cheap. Support developers so they can continue to make the apps that you like to use.
 
CavemanUK said:
I've always believed that if you halve the price of something you could potentially sell more than double and make a profit. With software this is great because you don't incur production costs. Its all profit.
Click to expand...

Support takes time == money. If you sell twice the number of units for half the price, you'll lose money.

And most Mac indie developers do take pride in providing first-class support to their customers, and the users have come to expect as much. Why should we change that deal just because there is now an app store?
 
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