I've been thinking about revenue a bit lately, trying to work out how to improve things for everyone. Apple's iAd will help us developers a great deal. But, came up with another idea. What would you all think if Apple removed the "units" chart altogether and replaced it with "grossing" as their number 1 chart and "free" as their number 2 chart. Do you think this would be a much fairer way of ranking the popular games?
Yeah it would be fairer, however Apples primary revenue source is from hardware sales. I would expect if they sell more games and get people showing them to their friends then they generate more hardware sales. And because of this I expect unit sales rank higher in importance for them than the actual game sale revenue. Essentially I expect there interested in volume sales far more than a 1000 or so units at £10 each.
If Apple only presented top-grossing lists, it would discourage sales and 0.99 cent pricing, both things companies resort to to try and establish/improve chart position. If you think it through, though, this wouldn't result in "more games" being sold. Customers would end up seeing more expensive offerings, and all things being equal, less inclined to purchase what is "in front of their face." The iPad Appstore is set up to work more like this, to an extent. The top grossing is more dominantly presented. There are not yet any category top lists under games, so the main way to find things is via searches. Searches are biased to show more expensive offerings first. And most of the featured stuff there tends to skew expensive as well.
I think games would be a bit more expensive, but I don't think they'd be a LOT more expensive. I think a more balanced game market would be the result. I imagine that people would experiment with pricing more and it'd probably settle around the $2-$3 dollar mark. Enough to get people to impulse still. Most developers must be losing money - or making very little - with app store development. The worry for Apple is - if Nintendo or Sony or Microsoft or anyone come up with a store that generates better revenue, a lot of developers will jump ship. Just like they jumped ship on the Casual download market.
Additionally, if expansive games such as Space Miner can get a foothold and charge $5 for their games (where such a title is clearly worth it), then the App Store will have much better games on it. Don't get me wrong, I loved the bite sized titles like Fruit Ninja and the Donut Games catalogue, but with a price structure that doesn't reward bottom tier pricing, I think we'll see a broader range of titles for sale (and succeeding).
I agree that most developers must be losing/making very little money. This has very little to do with the pricing of apps however, and everything to do with the fact that there are just too many of us competing for the same money. It's not like the customers would suddenly start spending 4 times the money if the prices were quadrupled, they'd likely just by a fourth of the apps they are currently buying. There are about 200.000 apps out there(!) And not every iPhone user will even buy apps, not taking into consideration that families will only buy an app once. If you compare this to the Nintendo DS it only has about 1000 available titles. Also any DS user will buy at least one game if he or she wants to use the device at all.
If you removed Units sold and only has Gross sales, you would skew the charts for apps with a lot of in-app purchases.
You say that likes it's a problem! Actually, you would only "skew" the charts for apps with in-app purchases that people are actually buying, which means the app must be popular. That sounds OK to me.
