

I Can Save The AppStore - comatose_kid
http://demiforce.blogspot.com/2008/11/i-can-save-appstore.html

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DenisM
I think he's trying too hard to sell his new onyx venture.

But the idea has merits, so let it be. It'd be nice if it wasn't just for
games though.

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petercooper
He took a very long time before he got to it. The point the top 50% makes it a
pretty good one. There's a real race to the bottom going on on the App Store..
:(

~~~
DenisM
I kind of agree. Unique apps have a small chance, easily substituted apps have
no chance.

It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets
work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from
the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your
application competing with you side by side. _That_ really gets the message
through.

The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior
entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 /
year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also
easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly.

The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market
where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition.
The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.

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andylei
While Onyx sounds like a pretty good idea, the argument that low prices are
killing the App Store don't make much sense. If selling games for cheap leads
to losses, how do big developers not go out of business? There's no "loss-
leading" here. Once BigDeveloperCo sells you their crappy version of Tetris
for 99 cents, there's no secondary product to get more money from you. They
just lose money. They'll go bankrupt. If lower prices don't cause big
developers to lose money, then small developers should lower their price
points too, and they wouldn't lose money either. In the long run, prices for
games will converge to their economic costs of producing them. And yes,
competition means that its hard to make money.

The App Store is not dying. Perhaps you don't like the quality of software
that most people like, but people are buying Apps like crazy. If they weren't,
there wouldn't be lots of developer competition to bring down App prices.

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mattmaroon
He's sort of missing the way markets work. In time one of two things will
happen: 1) People will find way to make very good money off of free apps. To
my knowledge this isn't the case yet on iPhone, but it's certainly happened on
the web and facebook. or... 2) People will start making their apps cost money.

It's an unfortunate fact of markets that you have times like this, where it's
still in transition.

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kwamenum86
In response to 1)...free products and services are not always monetized so
easily. Most free things on the web use display ads for revenue (which is
rarely a GREAT way to make money) and Facebook loses millions a year.

I think the Onyx plan is interesting but I don't think it will "save" the
AppStore. It is a cool little framework for building communities into GAMES.
Fine. I take nothing away from that it is a great concept. But there are
plenty of apps that are not games [Disclaimer: assumption on my part because I
don't own an iPhone].

What keeps the AppStore going is great applications, regardless of price, not
frameworks.

He really presented a poor argument. Came off looing like an advertorial.

~~~
teej
Key phrase: "on Facebook". People are making a non-trivial amount of money
from non-advertising revenue streams from games on Facebook.

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qqq
partial summary:

the app store promotes whatever sold the most units yesterday. this gives an
incentive to sell more units at a lower price, even if that's not the ideal
pricepoint. it should promote whatever sold the most real dollars yesterday,
instead.

