Why 8lbs Could Sink the App Store
It’s no secret that the App Store pricing is a mess for independent developers. Take a look at the top 100 paid apps — the only apps with prices over $2.99 are by large studios: Gameloft, Major League Baseball, PopCap, Dataviz, and the biggest contributor: Electronic Arts, with a whopping 6 apps above $2.99 in the top 100 apps. That Electronic Arts is one of the few companies able to sell games at these prices makes their new announcement even more terrifying.
EA announced their micro-studio, named 8lb Gorilla, which would be focused on releasing 99¢ games for the iPhone and iPod touch, on a one-month release cycle. This is a definite sign of surrender by one of the largest companies with a foothold in the App Store — why spend time making full-featured video games for the iPhone, when you can make a quick buck by pumping out what are essentially Flash games at 99¢ a pop?
What’s more, this doesn’t hurt indie developers simply by driving the already struggling prices down even further, it bullies them out of the App Store altogether. With a 99¢ price and Electronic Arts’ big name and marketing force, and new games being released every month, the top 100 will soon be flooded with cheap games made by a big-name studio. Indie developers will soon have no reason whatsoever to spend any time perfecting their apps — EA will always be able to do better in less time, and push their games to the top of the sales charts.
There’s no better anecdote I can point to than the release of Rolando 2 last week. With a successful predecessor in the original Rolando, a marketing blitz by the parent company, ngmoco :), and a quality application, Rolando 2 should have been in the top 10 in no time. But they had the gall to ask for 10 dollars for the game they poured months of work into. After only 3 days, they fell out of the top 100 apps, having peaked around #75. On any other platform (the Nintendo DS, the PSP, even the Mac), $10 would have been considered ridiculously cheap for amount of playtime Rolando 2 provides. But not the iPhone. $9.99 is just way too much to charge in the App Store.
I don’t pretend to have a solution for this issue. I’ve been doing the dumb thing, pouring tons of work into my apps. I’ve got a game, FingerZombies, that I’ve been working on for a *year*. When it’s released, it’ll probably be free, solely around to generate buzz for my other applications. Proximity has been in active development since the 3.0 SDK was released last March. It’ll probably retail for $1.99. It pains me to have to sell what I’ve poured hours every day into for so little. But I know I’ll have no choice. Such is the brutality of the App Store.
