Price Increase Experiment $0.99 to $1.99 - Starting Soon!

Be interesting to see the results from this. I've heard other developers doing similar and their sales didn't move at all, meaning their revenue pretty-much doubled.

But we'll see…

 

I've also done this for Cheese Collect. Sales have dropped a little but I'm earning about the same, perhaps even a little more.

 

Be very careful with that. I just tried the same thing.

I raised the price of Charmed from $0.99 to $1.99 because were were ranked in the mid-to-high 30s in the Puzzle category. We were featured in Hot New Games on the iDevices. We saw sales as "high" as 200 per day.

After raising the price, sales dropped from 130 to 88 the next day, and then to 56 the day after (which was yesterday). Was definitely not a good move in this case.

 

really?
aww man!

 

maybe the xmas shopping craze is over.. if you read the article above; if you are in the top list; you don't do this. i've mentioned it in previous threads that if you are not in the top lists; people tend to look for your apps specifically and will pay for your app regardless if it is 0.99 or 1.99.

 

Yeah I think the flaw with MinJuice's experiment was doing it while he was already riding the wave of the feature. When something is featured I'm willing to bet a lot of purchases are impulse buys, not many people are going to bother doing any research about the game. Raising prices when you're not being featured probably results in what mobile1up suggested... the majority of people who find your app, are the ones who were interested anyway and actually searched for it, so a $1 increase shouldn't be too off-putting.

 

That might be true, and it makes sense.

The unfortunate thing is that MindJuice actually reduced the price to $0.99 while it was featured in order to get as high in the ranks as possible. So $1.99 is the original price point and it is one of the few puzzle games that I can say is worth it.

Unfortunately, we don't have the knowledge of whether or not the Charmed price reduction was worth it in terms of sales. Certainly it helped in the rankings- unless higher priced apps have a modifier that push them higher in the ranks. Anyobody have info on that?

 

I think I blew it by reducing the price too soon. I should have waited until it peaked from being featured and THEN reduced the price (or even just left it the same).

Sigh! The App Store is a harsh mistress!

 

I wouldn't say you blew it. You really didn't know the effect, and none of us had a solid answer.

Overall, I think you can use your ranking as a REAL NUMBER when you are promoting. You hit the Top 50 Paid in one category, didn't you, almost the Top 25? That is pretty substantial IMHO.

 

Ah, that was a big mistake.

I've been monitoring certain popular apps as they're introduced, and then watch developers experiment with lowering and raising prices. One thing I've observed is that a dev often raises price when the application gets popular, only to see it fall dramatically out of the charts.

Two particular examples I noticed were Rock Band and Doom Resurrection. I noticed Rock Band was in the top ten holding quite well around 5/6, then the publisher lowered the price $9.99 -> $6.99, I can only assume to try to increase sales. It barely seem to move at all, going up maybe one position briefly. So then I saw the publisher put the price back to $9.99 and almost immediately it dropped out of the top ten, they quickly re-lowered the price to $6.99 but didn't regain their position again. I would guess someone got fired for that. With Doom I saw it steady around the 35th position in the charts, but then the developer tried increasing the price, but then they rocketed down almost out of the charts.

I certainly can't claim to be an expert from observing a few key apps and I could easily be wrong in my assumptions (maybe the $9.99 -> $6.99 price cut hugely increased sales for Rock band… I don't know…) but there is definitely one thing I'm going to keep in mind on releasing my own apps: Start high and slowly lower the price over time. I'm going to avoid increasing the price at any point, which means resisting "temporary" sales, and I'm never going to go down to $0.99, because I see that as being effectively screwed.

Saying that, I agree with what Midian said. If you're not even in the charts there isn't much to lose in increasing the price.

 

Charmed hit #37 briefly in Puzzle/Games and #24 in Board/Games with Charmed on the US charts. It got to #30 and #20 in Canada on the same respective charts.

I was quite happy with that, although I really would have liked to hang out there longer!

All those gains came from the week-long feature in the Hot New Games category on the iDevice. Being featured in the New and Noteworthy section has had zero observable impact after that. I am actually quite shocked that the N&N feature made no difference.

Another point working against us is that we released the holiday version, Charmed Xmas. Now it is selling equally to Charmed and may end up surpassing it as we near Christmas. Here's hoping Apple features Charmed Xmas starting tomorrow!

 

Makes sense in retrospect. I believe we were going to slowly fall out of the charts already based on the trends I was seeing, but I think we could have held on quite a bit longer if I had not changed anything.

 

I don't know if you've seen the blog posts by the taptaptap developer. He was quite open about their results and sales for their pretty popular apps, and covered a few things such as trying to 'hold on' to the charts through an increased push in marketing, and lightly touches on their marketing approach as well.

It's one of the more interesting App store experiences I've read. It details slowly moving down from the top of the charts and what's needed to stop from dropping out. It's particularly interesting because they don't make price cuts to do it!

 

I think the entire blog is interesting.

One of the more interesting points within that blog:

For any iPhone developers out there that are considering making a run for the charts, it’s definitely worth noting that even with a minimum of 1,100 daily sales (Friday’s level), and averaging around 1,200 per day for the past week, that it wasn’t enough to keep it in the Top 100. Compare this to around the time the App Store opened and all it took was around 100 daily sales to get into the Top 100.

Let's do some quick math just for 3 days: He had about 3,600 downloads and STILL fell out of the Top 100. I assume this was the ALL APP category and not just GAMES.

We came very close to breaking the Top 100 Paid Apps (all apps) at #103. Our sales during that time were about 1300 over a 3 day period. During that time we were also FEATURED.

Now I am thinking that a Modifier might be applied to Featured Apps to put them higher into the rankings. We shouldn't have even been close to the Top 100. This would also account for why games tend to rise so quickly when they are Featured, and then rapidly fall when the Feature is gone.

Sorry if this has already been mentioned.

 

When we launched Castle Warriors, we decided to launch at .99 to reward the early buyers. We knew raising the price later would be risky, but wanted to give it a try. After stalling in the top 50s (games), we increased the price to 1.99 and dropped out of the top 100 faster than you could say "chalupa".

"Launch Sales" are still a good marketing tool, but only if you can run them indefinitely

 

Super Juicy has never been featured by Apple and never appeared in any of the top 100 lists. On the other hand, it has gotten absolutely terrific reviews on many websites (some saying its one of their favorite games, some saying its one of the best of 2009, etc). It also has an unbelievable conversion ratio well above any I've seen mentioned. Presumably all of our sales are from people searching specifically for it (makes sense right, no visibility so all sales are specific and nearly all lite versions are converted to full).

A while ago I tried raising the price to 1.99 and saw even my meager sales drop straight to zero after a few days. So I think it is destined to be .99 forever and you can't just say that if an app is not in the charts that its safe to raise the price.

Greg

 

Maybe I can give two thoughs into your discussion? I am not a developer at all but I have a little knowledge about marketing.

I think, that the main problem is the (you can call it: magic) barrier between 0.99$ and 1.99$.

If you take normal people, customers, than 0.99$ is not even a buck - so it is cheap. Everything under a dollar seems to be a good price because it is not even a dollar. There is only one cent missing, but: not a dollar. That's in the people's brains.
When it comes to 1.99$, there is this buck and then you have to put nearly another $ upon it. A dollar must be earned and is sort of a symbol, I guess.

So, another guess, the higher the price, the less the people care about differences.
From 0.99$ to 1.99$ means, that the price has doubled.
The step from 4.99$ to 5.99$ is a lesser problem, because you have to pay already a few bucks and the price only went up 20%. So, the lower the price is, the higher is the difference in the point of view when it comes to one dollar.
That could be one of the main causes in the loss of sales.

Btw., I seldom saw a game drop rapidly out of the charts when the price changed between 3.99$ - 4.99$ or 6.99$ - 9.99$...

Sorry for my english, it is a little rusty - but I am trying hard to improve...

 

After my game dropped out of the top 100, sales declined steadily, and after a few weeks of watching the downward trend, I changed the price from $.99 to $1.99. (I was encouraged by several reviews which basically said "why is this only a buck?") Sales stopped declining soon afterward and my income went up, so it was the right thing to do in my case.

--Eric