Epic: Infinity Blade "More Successful" than Shadow Complex

[Narcogen]

I wish people would realize that if you just price something down a bit you will probably get more then enough sales to counter the lower profit for each unit

That works right up until you make less and less on more and more until you make nothing on everything.

Selling in volume is harder than imagined, and margin, once surrendered, can never be recovered. There's a reason companies avoid the race to the bottom.

That said, yes, the App Store does have a broad enough base to make products viable at lower price points.

I still think games would make much more money if they were only 30 bucks, more people would buy new since used would only be so much cheaper and the used market would be smaller since you would get less back for them

That isn't how secondary markets work, though. Used games are almost pure margin, and a 50% reduction in the starting price has very little impact on it. If new games cost $60, and gaming stores pay $10-$30 for used copies at trade-in and resell them for $30-$50, then moving the initial price point to $30 will just move the used buy price to $5-$15 and the used sell price to $10-$20. Used sellers are still getting back about the same percentage of their initial outlay, used buyers are still getting a significant discount, and used resellers are still making a good percentage return on a marginal business that requires no additional facilities, existing cheap labor, and small amounts of capital-- actually no capital for places who only give in-store credit.

The shift in pricing has to be much more dramatic. The OP is talking about futher drops from XBLA prices ($10-$20) to App Store prices ($1-$5). Only when you get down that far are the margins too thin to support a secondary market. Of course, for downloads, there is no secondary market to worry about anyway-- at least, no legitimate one.

 

[Worgen]

I wish people would realize that if you just price something down a bit you will probably get more then enough sales to counter the lower profit for each unit

That works right up until you make less and less on more and more until you make nothing on everything.

Selling in volume is harder than imagined, and margin, once surrendered, can never be recovered. There's a reason companies avoid the race to the bottom.

That said, yes, the App Store does have a broad enough base to make products viable at lower price points.

I still think games would make much more money if they were only 30 bucks, more people would buy new since used would only be so much cheaper and the used market would be smaller since you would get less back for them

That isn't how secondary markets work, though. Used games are almost pure margin, and a 50% reduction in the starting price has very little impact on it. If new games cost $60, and gaming stores pay $10-$30 for used copies at trade-in and resell them for $30-$50, then moving the initial price point to $30 will just move the used buy price to $5-$15 and the used sell price to $10-$20. Used sellers are still getting back about the same percentage of their initial outlay, used buyers are still getting a significant discount, and used resellers are still making a good percentage return on a marginal business that requires no additional facilities, existing cheap labor, and small amounts of capital-- actually no capital for places who only give in-store credit.

The shift in pricing has to be much more dramatic. The OP is talking about futher drops from XBLA prices ($10-$20) to App Store prices ($1-$5). Only when you get down that far are the margins too thin to support a secondary market. Of course, for downloads, there is no secondary market to worry about anyway-- at least, no legitimate one.

its not really about what the stores will do, its all about how much a customer will pay for something new and shiny and how much they are willing to sell something for, a 30 dollar game will only be bought from a place like gamestop for like 10 bucks even at launch probably, I dont know about you but there are very few games I would be willing to sell for only 10 bucks

 

[guntotingtomcat]

I'd like to see how Angry Birds did compared to these.