Why does Civilisation's price keep chopping and changing? First it was £6, then £3, then £6 again and now £3. I think that's the best way to put off customers.
Exactly. The fluctuation in price typically reflects the developers impatience with their sales. At $4.99, the game sold very well, when it jumped to $9.99, I imagine sales came close to a halt. This is why intro sales are sometimes a bad idea. Once sales slow down at the $4.99 price tag, you can bet your banana hammock that the price will drop again.
FYI - I'm not sure of the situation with Civ Rev, but I know that when I put our game (Townrs Defender, blantant plug) on sale, iTunes would randomly report each of the two prices (sale and pre-sale) every time I looked up our game for the first day or so. I think iTunes may use a distributed caching system that reports the old data randomly. Were the price fluctuations you saw over the course of one day, or several?
Also every time the price drops, it re-appears on everybody's price drop lists... Either way I bought it when it was originally one sale for $5, very happy with the game for that price.
http://appshopper.com/games/civilization-revolution Aug 19 $9.99 -> $4.99 Aug 17 $4.99 -> $9.99 Aug 16 $9.99 -> $4.99 Aug 12 $4.99 -> $9.99 Aug 10 New App: $4.99, v1.0 Now this is an odd one http://appshopper.com/games/art-thief Aug 17 $.99 -> $3.99 Aug 17 $3.99 -> $.99 Aug 17 $.99 -> $3.99 Aug 17 $3.99 -> $.99 Aug 17 $.99 -> $3.99
I'm just glad I bought it at the intro price. It's become my favorite game on the device and I haven't worried about the price fluctuations. What surprises me is why they don't try $7.99 or something else between $4.99 and $9.99. The $9.99 price must not be pushing the sales numbers they had hoped for.
I'm pretty sure had they released it at ten dollars and kept it there it still would have sold reasonably well. All this mucking around with the pricing just seems silly, and at this point it probably would be best for them just to keep it at five.
I just bought it at the sale price, but to be honest, I was reasonably impressed by the lite version, and how guys here have reported that the full version is quicker than the lite, that I was prepared to buy it at full price. Of course, I wont complain at it still being at sale price. I do agree with the above comments that intro sales rarely work in the developer's favour. Once gamers have a taste of a low price, they rarely will ever buy at anything higher. I think even Doom Ressurection should have stuck at $10 too, but that's going off topic.
Yeah, but the devs also have to consider what's in the mindset of the average joe population of the App Store game buyers. I like the fact that a few people research for good online reviews before buying but most people just check out what's in the Featured List, Top 100s and finally the buyer's ratings (average out of the 5 stars) in the App Store. Seems to me that 2K Games is cramming their best to stick around in the top 10, but imho, won't do well for the long run if they want a $9.99 pricepoint, except if they'll decide to remain $4.99 from now on.
That was a hicup in the itunes store. The price was only actually changed once, i.e. when the introductory sale ended. So if you see sudden fluctuations in the the price of an application it might be something internal in the appstore.
