Re:Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad
by zmmmmm on Thursday April 16, 2015 @08:19PM
(#9391589)
> "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true
But isn't that the crux of it? If you are charging $5 per game and you spend $100k developing then you simplistically need 30k installs just to break even. When the app store was small and you had a good chance of being the only app in your category that was not hard to achieve. When you are just 1 of 100 other apps in your same category it is 100 times harder to achieve. If you could charge $20 or $50 which was historically how software was priced then you could tolerate 4x - 10x less installs, but the app store culture has been permanently set now such that it will not tolerate that. 99c apps got Apple off to a great start, but it has locked in a situation where only the largest (or most sophisticated) developers that can reliably get to the top of the charts can stay afloat.
But isn't that the crux of it? If you are charging $5 per game and you spend $100k developing then you simplistically need 30k installs just to break even. When the app store was small and you had a good chance of being the only app in your category that was not hard to achieve. When you are just 1 of 100 other apps in your same category it is 100 times harder to achieve. If you could charge $20 or $50 which was historically how software was priced then you could tolerate 4x - 10x less installs, but the app store culture has been permanently set now such that it will not tolerate that. 99c apps got Apple off to a great start, but it has locked in a situation where only the largest (or most sophisticated) developers that can reliably get to the top of the charts can stay afloat.