

Making A Living (Barely) On The iPhone App Store (aka The Numbers Post) - adamhowell
http://gamesfromwithin.com/making-a-living-barely-on-the-iphone-app-store

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city41
The reviews in the app store for Flower Garden tell another side to this
story. For example:

"It costs 2.99 just for the base app. It costs 99 cents for more pots. 99
cents for fertilizer (to get your flowers to grow faster, since some flowers
take as long as a week) and now, for the new seeds of winter, you have to pay
another 99 cents."

That seems like a legitimate complaint. But his numbers do suggest the IAP
helped a lot. I wonder if he could have found an even better balance and eaked
out a bit more money.

~~~
jfarmer
I don't understand those complaints -- if it's too expensive, you won't play
it!

It's the developer's responsibility to play around with pricing, etc. to see
what maximizes long-term revenue.

(Also, AFAIK, you can't charge less than $0.99 for an in-app purchase, and
each IAP has to be identified uniquely.)

~~~
patio11
_I don't understand those complaints_

If you recruit most of your customers from a population which steals most of
their software, then aggressively socialize them to think the software which
isn't convenient to steal yet is fairly priced at $1 and expensive at $3, and
then ask their opinions about your business model, what were you expecting
their opinions to sound like?

~~~
city41
This is the culture of the iPhone, 99 cents rules the day. The fact that the
iPhone arrived at this is far more Apple's fault than the customer's.

In the current iPhone world, 2.99 + a lot of 99 cent charges to essentially
just use the app is _outrageously_ expensive. Especially when you consider the
app is a rather simple "toy." Just off the top of my head, Train Conductor is
a full fledged (and beautiful) game, and it's entirely playable with no
additional fees at 1.99. In comparison, Flower Garden really does come out
looking ridiculously overpriced. My question is if he had priced his app more
in line with what iPhone customers expect, would he have made more money? Or
maybe he really did make more money by more "realistically" pricing his app to
what he feels it is worth.

The bargain basement iPhone app pricing is a huge problem, for sure, but it's
not going away anytime soon. Is it better to just go along with it, or can you
make more money by standing firm?

~~~
DougBTX
_In the current iPhone world_

The three top grossing apps in the UK are priced at £49.99, £59.99 and £26.99,
and the rest of the top 25 average around £2-3 each. Looks like there is some
scope for more expensive applications.

~~~
akronim
But the most expensive apps, like tomtom, are iPhone versions of expensive
products, so even though the iPhone app version is high for an app, it's less
than the alternative. That doesn't really work for iPhone only apps.

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outotrai
I'm very interested in that sort of business model - selling real or virtual
products within a free application. I remember reading an article last year
([http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/06/eas-new-motto-
ple...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/06/eas-new-motto-please-
pirate-our-games-er-storefronts.ars)) wherein the CEO of EA Games claimed not
to mind piracy of certain games which had products for sale in-game. Many
websites and applications seem to be using it to great success - IMVU and the
social site Gaia Online come to mind. Somehow it seems strange to me that
users who are so hesitant to buy something outright will pour their money into
it when it is ostensibly free.

~~~
jfarmer
Every single Facebook game uses this model.

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thinkbohemian
Thought this was a very well written interesting article. What chart/graph
software are you using, or is that a tool provided by apple?

BTW, graphs without labeled axises are a huge pet peeve (you can thank a
certain georgia tech professor for dropping me a letter grade for that one).

~~~
llopis
I used AppViz for most of the charts (it's a great program to keep track of
your sales and visualize them in different ways). The chart with colors it's
just generated from Pages since I had to do some aggregating of the different
IAP items myself.

You're right about the lack of labels (that's how the program does it), but I
made sure it was explained in the sentence following the first chart. I wanted
to stress that the vertical axis is profit in US$ and not unit of sales (since
Flower Garden is $2.99).

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maxklein
Everyone's sales have gone up 100% post christmas. It's now what he did. By
the way, if anyone wants to get into iPhone development or has an app, send me
an email, I know a lot of tricks I can tell you that I don't want to make
public yet.

