I dont know if anyone else noticed that the price of apps seems to be creeping up on the app store. It seems like these days $4.99 is the low price point for full scale games. Which is good news for us indie developers because it could mean return of the 99c game! But as the quality goes up so does price. Since everything is creeping up I'm even thinking of raising the price of my game to $1.99 after the next update.
We're going to intro our game at $2.99. It seems like the conversion gap between $1.99 and $2.99 is really small (at least after researching Trainyard's numbers). It feels like you can have more flexibility for running sale promotions also.
The casual stuff is still where its at, i hope you dont view the latest relases from gl & co as that sign.. Rage hd sold for 2$. If you have any steady sales at tier1 changing that to tier2 or 3 will get you knocked back. If you have no actual sales to talk off going higher usualy ends up earning you more one copy a day at 3$ earns you more than one at 1$ and both are as likely to happen.
Good... The AppStore need too ramp up price of game if they want real game to be made for the iPhone ... I think 9.99$ is a good price... Dev need to make some money
yep that's a good point I think my new strategy will be to go for $2.99 price since large amounts of sales probably wont happen I need to raise the price and improve the quality instead.
price Yes it seems if you make something more fuller than you can charge more. My next game will be a solid 2D action game. I know the users are looking for more than just clones and simples games. They want games that are fun,intense , and full. Endless games should be a mini-game , not the full version. I plan on stepping up big time for my next venture.
We might be going the opposite direction. Big Mountain Snowboarding took about 6 months to make initially (not including all the patches and ports), but there was a lot of engine work to be done. OverPowered has already taken that long with a killer engine in place...too big! 6 months ago we had a chance of being one of the best looking games on the app store, but that's gotten a lot more difficult recently. We're trying to make a couple small games as a stopgap measure to get some more stuff in the store and get some funds while the big game gets finished. Also I make more money from snowboarding at 2.99 than I do at $1.99, $0.99, and thus far $3.99. OverPowered is probably big enough that I can charge a premium, the market will say. Meanwhile I'm glad the big companies keep raising the prices, leaving holes at the bottom for us. Rage at $2 was a pretty scary prospect.
I don't know... I think it has a lot to do with how much hype you can generate pre-release. If you can really get your game's name out there and people are really anticipating it, then sure, 2.99+ will probably be totally fine. People don't mind spending more money on a product that they think they know will be good. However, people are a lot less likely to buy a game for a higher price if they don't know about it or have never heard of it (even if it does look really cool). Heck in my mind (as a more hardcore gamer who keeps up with game news) if I see a game like that I'm thinking "if this game really is as good as it looks, how come I haven't heard or seen anything about it anywhere?" Casual gamers probably just wouldn't be willing to throw down the larger amt of $$ just because they are casual gamers. It sucks, but personally I think I'm kind of over the whole "price based on principal" thing. With N.Y.Zombies we found that it makes the most money at the $0.99 price point, so thats where its stayed despite our belief it is worth at least $2.99. We'll still probably price our second game Bug Heroes at a lower price because lets face it, we are Foursaken Media... Foursaken Who? Exactly... our hope is that if Bug Heroes does at least as well as NYZ then we may start to develop a tiny blip on the radar of developers... once this happens THEN we feel we can start to charge what our games are actually worth bc people will be more confident that they will be getting a quality product from us.
This makes sense in theory, but I've personally found it to be different in reality. I think the only time to consider pricing your game lower is if you're in, or focused on getting into, the charts. If your game is relatively obscure, I think that's a more legitimate time to charge a bit more, primarily because the people who come across your app have specifically searched or clicked onto it (a captive buyer)—and i've been in that situation many times, and when I'm one of those customers, i'm gonna pay a few dollars, because the price seems to matter less when you're in the depths of the app store; prices seem to become more real. But also, a higher price actually conveys higher value of an app or game. Whoever's right though doesn't really matter. I've also noticed prices rising steadily (I think it comes hand-in-hand as the general quality has risen too), and those are both things I'm very happy to see evolving on the app store. I think it shows it has the potential to mature further into a very robust market.
I'll share a few of my thoughts... First of all, yes, prices are rising. And at a pretty good pace. Personally, at a reviewer's standpoint like mine, prices going up can mean bad business. Many games I have to pay for out of pocket to review. Yes, occasionally promo codes get thrown into the mix, but generally it costs quite a bit. PLUS not having a new device makes the HD versions pointless, though this is my fault for not upgrading. I like quick action games. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, etc. Cheap, fun, addicting, simple, the list goes on. But I personally don't like Gamelofts releases anymore. They are huge files, they look bad on old ipod, the kill battery...overall not great to have. Not to mention high prices. If I switch to dev mode, yes, I would want to get a bit of extra cash. Some of you were talking about how the difference between purchases of 1.99 and 2.99 were nill. Well, to me I would take a few days contemplating about the 2.99. I might pounce if it were 99 cents though. Those are my thoughts!
Are prices really rising though? Not to be a pessimist or anything but honestly, I don't see much of a change... The top 200 still seems to be dominated by $.99 games after a quick glance, and a very high % of the higher priced games are from high profile companies like EA, Gameloft, etc... I see a couple of action/RPGs up there, but the ones made by com2us, gamevil, etc usually always do fairly decently initially, and then taper off quick.
the prices are not rising.. there are just more high profile games out this xmas who are priced above average.. all gameloft games start around 6-8 dollars.. so if they release a ton.. you see alof of thoose rage was sold for 1$/2$ ... so one can't even say that the high profile stuff is always "expensive"... i would actualy say the prices are falling even more, because of the huge mass of free promotion going on this year.. compare to last year.. its like there are thousand free calendars out there pushing the general price down ... so i personaly can't see any huge increase or decrease.. at the end it doesnt matter.. crappy games won't sell either way.. if you have some quality stuff and have a known brand you can release game with a starting price of 5$+ ... if youre not your game needs to be hyped beyound recognition to make this stunt work.. the huge dl rate of all the freebies and the general nonstoping moaning that everything is too expensive *cough* .. shows that actualy nothing has changed much in the last weeks.. but alot changed to last year.
high prices I dont think everyone is looking at the same thing. I always look at 148 witch has the top 148 apps and games. Based on what I see there yes the prices are overall higher than normal. Yes there are different factors but what 99 cent gamer sees is right. Gameloft,Capcom,GameEvil,etc have all released thier games. There are a couple of games like zombieville and soosiz that sometimes 99 cents but now are $1.99 , they been $1.99 for a while now. But there is alot of pure crap too in the free games section.
Hi Slimothy I see where you're coming from I'm still on a touch 2G so like you these newer full scale games are not muh fun on my device. If you run a smaller review site it's almost better to stick to the smaller or 99c games anyway. There's no shortage of reviews for major releases like Rage but a lot of lesser known games get skipped over. I'll submit my game Rollatron to your site once the next verson is approved. It's a major upgrade I think you'll like it
well you can't look at a snapshot and make assumptions based on that.. and using zombieville and soosiz is a bit odd.. i can show you thousand apps who are more expensive than they where last weeks, so that means what? nothing.. the average price of apps is pretty unrelevant if 90% of them do not have any! sales.. like i said earlier.. if you are selling 2 digit numbers you can rise your price without getting much drawback and earn more.. alot people realize that there is more to be competive than just price ... being tier1 doesn't automatically mean more income or even more sales.. the vast majority off apps on the the store are not visible and therefor not avaiable for spontanious buys from visitors to the toplist of the appstore.. so if someone start to actuals search for some kind of app he is more willing to spend more money on app A than on app B, if he thinks app A has more value to it (and not kust a higher price tag)
As a developer how much worth do you price a game? For our next game I was thinking about $4.99... It should be priced higher with the amount of work that went into it, the frame rate is astounding on it (I would say on an off two years has been spent on it), it will be the first genre on the App Store for this game type, a lot of developers will wonder how the hell we are pushing so many alpha polygons around in 3D with no slow down. But what is it worth? The trouble with been an indie dev is that we are sheepish to set the real price that the game should be set at. Personally I would like to see the game in the $6 range but we will gauge things from the pre marketing.
App price average data here: http://148apps.biz/app-store-metrics/?mpage=appprice The chart is not very precise and there is no start date, but it appears that the average price has declined slightly into period ending Oct 31st, 2010. Code: App Price # Apps # Games Total # apps: 266,306 44,063 310,369 Total cost to buy all apps: $738,380.52 $48,489.91 $786,870.43 Average App Price $2.77 $1.10 $2.54 Page last updated: 2010-12-11 05:56:06 -0800 PST
I hope your game can still be run on older devices. Unfortunately It seems like the other trend is to abandon old devices in favor of graphics. But if it is one of these games only possible on 4G then that's probably enough to justify a higher price.
The game started life on the older devices... It was running pretty good on iOS 3.1 then iOS 4.0 was released and destroyed about a years work of optimisation. At this point it was decided to drop the older hardware, switch to shaders and ramp up the effects and really stretch what is possible on 3rd gen hardware. But this brings up a good point to bring in the discussion of what the price of a game is worth. Apple do not care about the older hardware and the ones like the 2nd gen iPod and iPhone 3G that can still be upgraded iOS wise have lost a hell of a lot of power from when they ran on iOS 3.1. So if you want to compete with the bigger publishers now you need to deliver a better product from a year ago, and that means better gfx and such. When we switched to shaders, we knew the price could not be lower than $5 because we lost half the market... All these things cost money just to compete and I hope the gamers who buy these games don't expect them for 99c or to go on sales weeks after release because a lot of developers will go out of business. Firemint have the right attitude towards price points but they are a business to make money - spend money to make money... In their case 2 million dollars to make Real Racing 2 and they need to make profit or go out of business. The biggest problem are the hobbyists who make a reasonable game, release it, expect to make money, they don't, panic and drop the price hoping it might take off. Sometimes they get lucky and sometimes they don't... For the game buyers these reasonable games, that can be fun to play, have spoilt people in expecting all games to be set at low price points. This is actually putting off the professional developers to invest in console quality games for the iOS platform. Anyway, 2011 will be an interesting year when quality will go up and the prices as well. On a side note, eventually the hobbyist games makers will be pushed out because they will not be able to reach the higher quality standard that the buyers will be expecting. Soon developers will have to invest some hefty sums of money and charge what the game is worth just to carry on for the next game.
TueAxis I think you're right and It's not exactly a welcome trend. The one saving grace for hobbyists may be the small screen size makes graphics less important. So there is still room for simple hobbyist games. And that's where you'll see most originality and creativity because once the budget gets in the 2 million range it's harder to take those kind of risks.
