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EA cheating the system?

Nice article, seems interesting but in my opinion this is not cheating and is fine for me, if they want to cut the price in order to get up in the charts then they are not earning some extra money that they would if the sold the app at $5 or more. Its a win and lose situation, and maybe if this works then other companies would end up doing this sort of stuff and we will find ourselves buying really good apps every day for only $0.99.

I have bought many apps at $0.99 that were once priced really higher and I really think this is great for people and developers.
 
It's marketing, not cheating, never buy EA games for more than 1$, they will always get flushed into sales
 
Picked up the Need For Speed Hot Pursuit game to go with the other 2 I bought for full and half price respectively, so I was thrilled to get it for .99 cents. I think it's the best of the 3 available for the iPhone. That on-rails feeling is gone.

I also got Reckless Racing that I have been waiting for. I know it's already been .99 cents, but I figured I'd note it since all of their titles have dropped.

I'm also considering picking up The Sims, but I'm not compelled. I think my taste for EA stops with cars.
 
I'm not opposed to them offering all of their titles at a discount, regardless of their motives. I'm smart enough to go past the top 25 or 50 apps on the store when I am looking for something. I picked up a couple of games for $.99 and took advantage of the sale so I'm happy.
 
The real story isn't EA's marketing strategey, it is Apple's crappy way of selling apps. The App Store looks like something from 1996.
 
I grabbed Ea's racing game for 99 cents. usually it 10 bucks. i would have grabbed monopoly hd also but it wasnt included in the sale. i think its just to new. Im still pondering scrabble. i never got into the game but it looks nice.
 
McRCN said:
Since when is selling an item at a discount cheating?
Click to expand...

I can sort of understand this from some peoples point of view, and also, in the UK anyway there was some law about real life companies using cross subsidisation to be able to lower prices and damage the competition.

I'm unsure about the law in the USA, perhaps someone can explain it to me.

Let me put forward a scenario:

You are a small business and you employ say 10 people making motorcycles for $10,000 each, and have a great product people love.

I'm a large company that makes cars, boats and private aircraft and I want to get into the bike business.

I see you bike market and feel I'd like to get into the business, make bikes and become the leading bike seller.

I look at what you make, and match your bikes for quality, but I don't like you around as I want your customers.

So, I price my bikes at $2000 each. It actually costs me £4000 to make them, but hey, I can soak up the loss as I'm making so much profit from the other sides of my large company.

You struggle and struggle and lose more and more customers as they see they can buy something just as good at 1/5th the price.

You end up having to let your workforce go, and close down your business as you cannot afford to compete with me, as the bikes were your only income source.

If that allowed in the US ?

Whilst I'm aware this is not exactly totally relevant to this EA thing, one could argue a little that a small developer with say 3 people on the team need sales to make their income to continue to develop quality apps, whilst a large software company could, if it wished take a loss on iPad apps, just to ge their brand big time on the system.

I'm sure they are not doing that, but they could afford to. EA are not going bust if they don't make a fortune on iPad titles.
 
Piggie said:
I can sort of understand this from some peoples point of view, and also, in the UK anyway there was some law about real life companies using cross subsidisation to be able to lower prices and damage the competition.

I'm unsure about the law in the USA, perhaps someone can explain it to me.

Let me put forward a scenario:

... flawed analogy snipped ...

Whilst I'm aware this is not exactly totally relevant to this EA thing, one could argue a little that a small developer with say 3 people on the team need sales to make their income to continue to develop quality apps, whilst a large software company could, if it wished take a loss on iPad apps, just to ge their brand big time on the system.

I'm sure they are not doing that, but they could afford to. EA are not going bust if they don't make a fortune on iPad titles.
Click to expand...
Your analogy is not applicable because apps are not as interchangeable as motorcycles by different manufacturers. Whether or not SimCity is selling for $0.99 or $9.99, if that's the game you want then that's what you're going to buy.... The lower price may increase the probability of you making the purchase, that's about it.

Bottom line, although apps are price sensitive their salesare not strictly governed by price.
 
azentropy said:
Brilliant marketing move on their part, although it will be interesting to see if they change the prices back BEFORE the freeze.
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A no-no to quote myself, but was nice to see that EA kept the price cuts into the freeze. So it wasn't just purely a move to get their apps on the top 10 lists and then raised the prices back up for Christmas buyers who might not have known better.
 
If anyone should be punished, Apple should be for any price freeze!!!

Now any competitor of EA will not be allowed to competitively lower prices.

If a publisher wants to have a Christmas Sale and lower their prices, who is Apple to tell them otherwise.

Yeah I know iTunes is Apple's baby, but without developers creating Apps, what would they have left to sell?



Scrabble for .99 cents ..... we love that game here and now it is on the iPad !!!
 
harcosparky said:
If anyone should be punished, Apple should be for any price freeze!!!

Now any competitor of EA will not be allowed to competitively lower prices.

If a publisher wants to have a Christmas Sale and lower their prices, who is Apple to tell them otherwise.
Click to expand...

Nothing was stoping others from having a sale. The timeline and rules of the freeze were announced a month ago. They had until December 24th to set their Christmas prices/sale.
 
azentropy said:
A no-no to quote myself, but was nice to see that EA kept the price cuts into the freeze. So it wasn't just purely a move to get their apps on the top 10 lists and then raised the prices back up for Christmas buyers who might not have known better.
Click to expand...

I was rather surprised by this, I thought the prices were certain to go back up just before the Christmas price freeze. If you got given an iPad for Christmas you've now got the choice of a whole load of good, cheap EA games.
 
There is nothing wrong with what EA does. Fact is, when I walk into a grocery store, I buy the generic house brand aspirin because it's 50% cheaper than the ridiculously priced brand name. Or, I buy ibuprofen at $1.99 that says Equate on it instead of Advil for $4.99. Is this cheating? Of course not, Advil can easily lower their product to $1.99 or even $1.89.

This may be a novel concept to those in Europe with it's socialism, but here in the United States, we love free enterprise capitalism. At the end, the consumer wins. Because Walmart is allowed to sell it's products at whatever it wants to, Advil has to stay competitive. Otherwise, Advil would charge $15 for a bottle of pills.

EA builds software, and they can sell it for whatever they please. Would it be "cheating" if they made their apps free? Would you buy a competitor's racing game if NFS was free? Sure, if the competition made a better product.
 
Amazing! Someone will always bitch and moan about something. Bitching about a company dropping their prices regardless of their motive, customers win. If they didn't run a sale, people would bitch about that. I myself have purchased 5 games I normally would not have. I win! Like it was stated before, other devs could have run sales but choose not to. Their loss.
 
bowlerman625 said:
The customer wins!
Click to expand...

Does he? Isn't that the unsettled question? As we all now know, temporarily depressing prices by a large market player is not always good for consumers because it may be anticompetitive or have long term results of limiting consumer choice. Still, I doubt that it is fair to say EA is "cheating the system." Since Apple's store is somewhat unique, it's too soon to know what is good for consumers. But, the OP was probably a developer and the competing software game developers are the proverbial canarys in the mine on the pricing practices in the appStore.
 
to thread starter


I had no idea the selesct EA games were 99 cents

but thanks to you i just bought 3

DOH



so for me, your post was counterproductive...
 
i forgot about this sale. thanks for the heads up. I just bought 5 games haha. wish monopoly would go down to 99 cents tho.
 
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