For Mac Developers, Armageddon Comes Tomorrow 429
kdawson writes "David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of an imminent price collapse for traditional Mac applications, starting tomorrow when the Mac App Store opens. The larger questions: what will Mac price plunges of 90%-95% mean for the PC software market? For the Mac's market share? Quoting: 'The Mac software market is about as old-school as you get. Developers have been creating, shipping, and selling products through traditional channels and at traditional price points for decades. ... Mac software has historically been priced on a parity with other desktop software. That means small products are about $20. Utilities run in the $50-60 range. Games in the $50 range. Productivity packages and creative tools in the hundreds, and specialty software — well, the sky's the limit. Tomorrow, the sky will fall. Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye.'"
Apples to Oranges Plus Fear Mongering (Score:5, Interesting)
The news for the traditional developers is not good:
These are all games and one did have a price difference between iOS and Mac, but it was a buck.
Compare that with Mac games listed on Amazon today. $38.99 $19.99 $27.54 $29.35 $54.99 $24.38. These are traditional PC prices.
As of tomorrow, games priced at $20-60 will be competing against games priced at 99 cents to $4.99. The most expensive iOS games are around ten bucks. In effect, game pricing will drop by 90-95% -- on average -- overnight.
Question: Why didn't you list out those titles that you found at $20-$55 like you did with the iPhone titles? Oh, I know, it's because they're so far from similar it would be embarrassing to reveal that the heart of your argument is on shaky ground at best.
I don't own a Mac. I don't own an iPhone. But I've seen people play games on both. From your suggestion of Amazon's bestselling Mac game titles [amazon.com] let's look at the top page without duplicates: The Sims 3, Bejeweled 3, World of Warcraft, Civilization V, Nancy Drew, and Spore. With the exception of Bejeweled (and the other Pop Cap titles), I think you are comparing apples to oranges when you say that World of Warcraft [youtube.com] is now going to have to compete with Air Hockey [youtube.com] and that Blizzard should tuck its tail between its legs and run because the $40 price point versus $1 price point means they're going to die. And in the only applicable case (Pop Cap Games), they will be the ones moving their apps to the Mac Store. So they should be afraid of themselves?
Here's how I see it: gaming on Mac has always been sort of unsupported. It's gotten a lot better recently but not all publishers see a value to it. Now, with this Mac Store, you're going to see the same publishers sell at their price point but gaming could explode on the Mac given this opportunity to transcend iOS and target OSX as well. I don't think that the applications and games that exist in the iPhone sphere are going to do much to the revenues of desktop counterparts because they're simply beefier applications. Furthermore, if they do modify those price points to compete, I'm of the opinion that the Steam Effect will take place and instead of selling 10k copies at $20 they're going to sell 100k copies at $4. The bottom line is that this software store will do little to traditional Mac sales and instead expand the subscriptions of the mobile games a bit.
Your friends are also going to have to figure out how the input on a mac with a single mouse is going to handle those times when they were sensing two or more touch points on the device screen. So even if you're right, Armageddon is not tomorrow.
Apple wins. Many of their very loyal developers will lose.
The Rapture is upon us, repent now before it is too late. Steve Jobs is a ruthless and uncaring god! Seriously man, you're blowing this up into something it's not.
Awful (Score:5, Interesting)
What a terrible article. Does he interview any actual developers? Does he talk to software resellers? Does he talk to iPhone developers considering the move to the app store? Does he have any statistics at all? No, he did his research by looking at Amazon and MacConnection. He came up with a whole bunch of scary sounding analogies, though - I guess that should drive traffic to his site.
I think that, in the short term, the App store is going to compete with the traditional shareware market, which has always been pretty active in the Macintosh community. The solution for those developers is simple: make their products available on the app store. It will probably help them in the long run.
What about steam and impulse? (Score:4, Interesting)
The author must have worked very hard to avoid examining the history of steam and impulse on the PC, where a wide range of prices happily coexist.
Either that or hes one of those "I've never used a PC" people.
Once Flash is no longer in your cache (Score:5, Interesting)
But wait, I can play dumb flash games over the web for free.
Not on your MacBook on the bus/train/carpool unless you pay $60/mo for mobile broadband. Locally installed applications are more often designed to work offline. Does Adobe Flash Player even support anything like HTML5's CACHE MANIFEST [whatwg.org]?
Total FUD (Score:5, Interesting)
Price vs volume (Score:1, Interesting)
Software is simply overpriced, vendors have been getting away with charging ridiculous amounts for years because they're greedy. Software sales are 99% profit, which is why developers on iOS can sell their apps for $5 (with a big cut going to apple) and still make a profit.
With lower prices comes higher volume and reduced piracy.
Software really is a penny bazaar product, sold dirt cheap or given away despite proprietary vendors trying to artificially inflate prices so they can get away with 99% profit margins.
It's the natural end result, for years hardware has been getting cheaper and cheaper and its now down to a point where the profit margins are extremely small but there is a limit with hardware and other physical products, software on the other hand has a much lower price limit as proven by the huge amounts of free software available.
Re:Oranges and...well...Apples (Score:4, Interesting)
Photoshop with it's £550 price tag is a professional product, aimed at the professional user - a user whom it's assumed will be audited at the end of the year, and therefore can't avoid paying for the product. The app-store will do nothing to change that, and certainly will not harm photoshop sales in the slightest....
You are paid what you charge (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing with both the Mac and the iPhone app store is, you are paid what you charge.
That is to say, a lot of developers have chosen to charge very little. But some software developers built impressive applications that really were worth more, and charged for it.
This was reflected in top GROSSING apps usually being on the expensive side.
Also, another aspect of Mac store pricing is this - most "good" iPad apps are $10. So I'd expect serious mac apps to be at least $15-$20.
Also the whole story is way to games focused, Games have a whole different ecosystem than just about any other kind of application.
Re:Total FUD (Score:4, Interesting)
I could see it being the end of the world for Kagi....
Ahhh, the numerous Kagi e-mail receipts for Mac shareware I've got archived. Dating back to System 7.5.3 on a Performa 6300CDAV. It's amazing I still use Macs after that one.
Re:Oranges and...well...Apples (Score:4, Interesting)
I think that's a component of the feeling of "rightness" that you get when you see the box on your shelf or have the serial number for the legit copy stored away somewhere.