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For Mac Developers, Armageddon Comes Tomorrow
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.'"
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 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 is now going to have to compete with Air Hockey 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.
My work here is dung.
Comparing some $2 iPhone/iPad game and a full-blown Mac game like The Sims 3 or World or Warcraft, as if there is parity just because they're both "games," is fucking retarded. These are "apps" not "applications."
Some young hotshit programmer designing a great little mini-game isn't going to drive down the price of Call of Duty 4, for Christ's sake.
Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).
Serious development still costs money. And the more complex your application, the more you generally have to charge for it. What sells on the iPhone/iPad for a few bucks will probably sell for a few bucks on the Mac too. But no one is going to look at these little apps as replacements for more serious software (the kind that costs $20+). Apple isn't going to look at some iVideoEdit app and say "Well, we'd better lower the price of Final Cut Pro down to $5."
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You don't have to use the App Store to sell software.
I don't imagine for one minute that large professional applications will ever be sold this way for the time being.
Goddamn! Every time I hear someone utter "price point" I want to stab them in the face. Just say "price."
You don't have to use the App Store to sell software.
But if you don't, your would-have-been customers will likely buy your competitor's close substitute from the App Store instead of your software from your web site.
Apple doesn't have a good track record of providing open systems. As a vendor, will you always be allowed (yes, allowed!) by Apple to sell software through other channels? As a user, will you always be allowed (yes, allowed!) by Apple to install software from some other channel?
Wow, it just occurred to me that after this, as far as a user is concerned the app store might as well be a software repository... If anything apple will allow to be tinkered with is available, and installs with a click or two... I'm not sure if i think this is good or bad. 1) Apple controls what gets in the repository 2) Macs ship setup to get software from it... ...
4) Profit!
The more I learn about Windows the more I am surprised it runs at all
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.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Other people have already begun pointing out the problems of comparing iOS games like Air Hockey with full blown, more "traditional" games like WoW. Here's my question though: How the hell does this translate over to other apps, ie: the ones people normally use. The articles only real mention of productive apps is photoshop, which he says "Sure, Photoshop might still be expensive. But how many under-$5 photo editing programs are their for the iPad? Answer: too many to count." But hey, there's GIMP for Mac OS too, and as far as I can tell Photoshop for Mac has been pretty successful despite the fact that GIMP is free. Office for Mac and other office suites? Neooffice is free, and so is Google Docs, MS Office Online, Zotero, etc. In the end, I highly doubt I bunch of apps meant for smartphones and iPads are going to compete with the traditional stalwarts.
Some start-up's simple photo editor isn't going to drive down the price of Photoshop (anymore than GIMP or any of a hundred other free photo editors did on the PC).
Without NeoPaint, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, and other second-string image editors, Adobe likely wouldn't have made Photoshop Elements. Likewise, startups trying to compete with Final Cut Pro (to take your example) may encourage Apple to add features to iMovie.
I've noticed something wonderful about the whole "app" phenomenon, something I haven't seen in a decade of working in IT.
Lightweight apps. Apps that get right to the point, and don't require lots of time to install and configure. After spending an hour installing Adobe's Master Collection and another half hour patching it, I say the desktop app revolution can't come soon enough.
Yes, I realize that "fat apps" will not be replaced anytime soon by "thin apps", but it could force people to really decide if the fat app is worth the headache and expense.
Finally, I understand the financial needs of developers - but the app store should allow devs to get more eyeballs on their product, and make distribution of their product easier. Sure the margins may be smaller, but the volume will probably make up for it.
-ted
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Free Call of Duty 4 when you buy Angry Birds!
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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?
I wonder if this might not balance out somewhat -- before you had to make physical boxed copies, and put it into as many stores as possible. People had to go out looking for it (or order it) and all that.
The App Store seems to provide you with a larger possible base, lower distribution costs as you don't need to make the physical boxes, and a ready distribution model.
Not saying this will help all software, but the App Store seems to give you a better chance at Economies of Scale than before. Hell, I see software on the App Store for iPads that runs $49.99 or $99.99, possibly even more. Specialty software will always run you a fair bit, but for some software shops, they could have a far larger market using this.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
...massively overpriced, which is why there exists such a huge community of pirates. How many of you have spent some time on Pirate Bay seeking torrents for CS5 because whilst you're honest, there is no way you can afford $$$$.$$ for your tools? Hmmm? This will force greedy publishers to produce better more reliable software - just as the iOS and Android developers have done. This is not Armageddon, it is the way forward. @oflife
a sky is falling story, really?
I do not play in the middle of the road
Although I have no experience with Mac development, how can you possibly compare a desktop game to a game written for an iPhone? It's like comparing a game written in flash to World of Warcraft. I'm not saying the flash game isn't good, but it's not going to replace desktop gaming anytime soon. The article assumes that one game is interchangeable with another. Devs just need to keep putting out quality products at reasonable prices and they should be fine.
As a vendor, will you always be allowed (yes, allowed!) by Apple to sell software through other channels?
That'd alienate a lot of smaller developers. It might even promote more contributions by businesses to GNUstep, a free clone of Cocoa on GNU/Linux, *BSD, and Windows.
As a user, will you always be allowed (yes, allowed!) by Apple to install software from some other channel?
If future Mac OS X were to refuse to run applications that were designed for 10.6 (Snow Leopard) before the App Store came to be, this would hurt businesses that depend on such applications.
If this app store works out for the desktop it may well do 2 things:
- fundamentally make b&m stores even more irrelevant for software
- increase software competition. The small developers will have a more level playing field re distribution.
Watch this carefully...if it works and is a game changer MS may well be forced into following suit and providing a forum for competition against their own very high cost products.
Disruptive technologies are pretty cool, especially if they are implemented correctly. Apple seems to get these sort of right more so than others. As much as I'm a hater Apple has to be given kudos for actually pushing the envelope.
I can see the small utility app market having a market correction, since a lot of those are fairly overpriced on the Mac platform compared to their counterparts on other platforms, but aside from those and possibly games of the same class as a smartphone game I wouldn't expect much change. Steam's been out for years and has millions of satisfied users, yet all the titles on it have regular prices within $10 of, if not matching, retail. They tend to go on sale more often and with deeper discounts, but that's in my opinion more related to the significantly reduced overhead of online versus retail allowing for much greater dips while maintaining the same profit margin.
Basically anything that is significantly impacted price-wise by the App Store was likely overpriced to begin with.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
Goddamn! Every time I hear someone utter "price point" I want to stab them in the face. Just say "price."
The Wikipedia article about price points states that "price point" refers to the sharp change in quantity demanded at specific prices. These changes appear as "points" on the demand curve.
Most applications designed for smartphones(iOS, Android, WebOS, etc...) are fairly small applications that do not have a lot of complexity compared to applications designed for a computer. This means that except for the casual games you find from Popcap or Shockwave, there isn't a direct apples to apples comparison. The Sims 3 for a mobile device or even a console will tend to be a lower end or cut rate version of what is available for a normal computer.
So, there will be price cuts for the casual games, which currently sell for $20 or so, but for anything else, you still have the issue where you won't see the price of ANYTHING drop unless it is very low end.
My wife will be thrilled...
Armageddon tired of these apocalyptic prophesies. Price is the intersection of supply and demand, nothing more, nothing less. If you think you can't sell your app unless it's at a $1 price point, then you're admitting that it offers only a trivial benefit to your users or that it's a piece of crap. Either improve it to where it's worth what you'd like to make, or drop out of the competition.
But somehow I find it compelling and cool anyway
All the apps I've built for the Mac platform have been free:
http://quadesl.com/macApps.html
They are not amazing, but losing 95% of my revenue of zero dollars won't keep me up at night...
Sheldon
For decades the Mac has had a viable shareware scene where you download apps and, if desired, pay a modest fee to upgrade to a full or non-crippled version. I don't see how anyone could possibly argue that a Mac App Store will be the end of the world unless they're a clueless analyst who thinks the only programs people run on Macs are Photoshop and Office.
the coolest club on
GNUstep has had many, many years to make something of itself, but it clearly hasn't been able to do so. The only reason it's not a long-forgotten dead project is because of Cocoa.
Part of the problem is that they've gone out of their way to keep the UI totally unlike anything else used on Linux or Windows. While the OpenStep appearance has its place and its benefits, the GNUstep developers' attitude and resistance has totally prevented it from being adopted.
Apple's iWork suite (Pages, KeyNote and Numbers) is rumored to be coming out at $20 per application, c.f. the current version at $80 for the bundle. That's a significant price drop but hardly a collapse (and could be self-compensating if it leads to more sales) - and Apple are probably in a position to price that as a loss leader to promote the store.
Something like Plants vs. Zombies (excellent casual game) is $3 on the iPhone, $7 on the iPad vs. (currently) $20 for the mac, which is a bit more of a price drop (I think the Mac version has a few extras, but there's an awful lot in the iPad version). Note that there's already a precident for charging more for iPad versions, so there's no expectation that Mac versions will match the iOS price. PvZ for Mac has already been on offer on Steam for less, at times.
Then there's things like CoPilot and TomTom at (UK) price points like £19.99, £39.99, £59.99 for iPhone - Probably not good candidates for a Mac version, but they give the lie to the idea that everything on the iOS app store costs $0.99. (Apologies for the currency mixing - but this is Apple so $1 and £1 aren't a lot different...)
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
i have to say, this will be the most interesting thing to watch and i'm dying to know the outcome. i don't think many people realize the gravity of this situation.
usually, the idea of an app store on Mac/PC's is the worst idea ever. as with digital distribution, u don't see prices automatically decline over time. example, take bf:bc 2. it's now selling for like $10. u won't see that. it'll stay at 60, maybe now it would be $40-50 (8 mo. later), and they would do a special for a week (that most likely u'll miss) for like $20.
BUT...
in this case, there are so many apps that have competition, and the trend of the app store that if it's over $4, no one wants it (or for big apps, over $10 and no one wants it), it will keep prices beneficial for the consumer. also, i think the idea of a software repo that actually works (sorry Linux, apt and yum will always have dependency problems and there will always be a few pieces that won't be in the repo and you can't get because it won't work compiling from scratch), is brilliant.
That's one big thing. Now here is the other big thing. I'm curious to see what actully happens. Unless it's for promotional sake, or promo'ing the brand (like say netflix, just getting it on as many platforms as u can), or someone huge (like adobe), every developer that has made a complex and useful program will just pack up and leave. There will be a mass exodus to windows. MS was considering an app store. They might see developers flood to windows for that reason. And since MS's strategy is to support devs, it will actually can the idea of an app store. Yes, they may not make money on them, but it strengthens window's hold because no one wants to develop for Mac.
Yes, there will be tons of developers. But for once, I feel bad for the prices they charge. How do you make a living selling a DTP app that you spent years making for $2? You can't run a business like that. The only ones left will be small one-man shops. Because certainly no business can run on those kind of revenues. And the problem will be just that. You won't see a full featured complex app because the only ones able to make it are businesses and they all left because they couldn't make money.
I really am dying to see what happens.
...to the mac store, it's not going to matter. Once they do that I'll personally have 1 more reason never to buy another Apple product.
iPad and iPhone and iPod apps are cheap because they are small and lame, not because they're sold on the app store. If anything they'd be cheaper if sold in a less restricted market place.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Seriously, the lower price points will allow many more people to purchase many more titles. It could be a definite shift in the market, but the impact will be similar to the impact of $0.99 song downloads, which obviously killed the music industry.
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.
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On the other hand, for many of us it is difficult to shop for Mac software, yes you can buy online a bunch but it is not always safe to input your credit card digits all over the net. To me it will facilitate to buy software -which could be bad for my finances but good for developers- with confidence and much less troubles. my 2 cents
People must be thrilled that Adobe will drop the price of Photoshop to $0.99 tomorrow!
The prices will only spiral down if the developers do it. Notice that they have not made the same mistake on the iPad. There we haven't seen the same race to the bottom like on the iPhone/iPod apps.
No way adobe photoshop will be in this with out some big changes.
No way adobe will yet buy photoshop 1 time and run it on 5 systems.
No way adobe will give 30% of the price of photoshop + $99 year to apple just to be in the store.
Also the app store may not like phototshop plug in system.
Say good buy to user maps , mods , and more on app store games.
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.
HOORAY! Now when do I have time to actually play any of these games?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Has the plethora of free software available already for the mac ruined the market for paid for utilities and professional apps? Has Steam, which is probably the closest thing to the app store you can get for PC games and where you can get plenty of indie games for a couple of dollars each, ruined the game market for big professional developers?
No.
I could see Adobe selling a light edition through the store, though...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Wow there are a lot of explosive emotional comments on this - WAY more than typical Apple posts on Slashdot. Lets review the posting, shall we?
"David Gewirtz's blog post over at ZDNet warns of ..."
I think that's all we need. You can see where the problem is.
It's an opinion article, not journalism. Simmer down folks. And quit clicking on links to blogs. You're embarrassing yourselves.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
User maps are often times free, and thus a very "Good buy" as you say. Perhaps you mean to say "Goodbye"?
In fact I won't be surprised to see WOW and/or MS Office themselves available on the Mac App Store. Why not?
As I understand it, Apple requires that applications in the Mac App Store MUST NOT "require license keys or implement their own copy protection" or "present a license screen at launch". Furthermore, Apple rejects applications "containing 'rental' content or services that expire after a limited time". This appears to rule out any application designed solely to connect to a proprietary network, such as a Netflix player or any MMORPG client.
In addition, applications in the Mac App Store MUST adhere to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, MUST "use system provided items, such as buttons and icons", and MUST NOT "change the native user interface elements or behaviors of Mac OS X". A lot of full-screen video games violate this on purpose; instead, they have a set of customized buttons and icons that match the game's setting and tone.
Furthermore, applications in the Mac App Store MUST NOT use "deprecated or optionally installed technologies" such as Flash, Java, Carbon, X11, or Wine. A lot of ports of applications from other platforms use these. This means that at least the front-end (the "view" in model-view-controller or the "presentation" in three-tier) has to be written from the ground up in Cocoa. And if the back-end isn't written in Objective-C++, that involves a line-by-line rewrite by hand, introducing the complication of manually maintaining two parallel copies of the same program with the same behavior.
Apple appears not to like common in video games, rejecting applications that contain "realistic images of people or animals being killed or maimed, shot, stabbed, tortured or injured".
Even an FTP server or web server could be considered to "enable illegal file sharing"; I saw no provision for substantial noninfringing use along the lines of Sony v. Universal.
In my economics class I learned that the lack of consumer information keeps prices higher then they would in a perfectly competitive marketplace. These apps stores greatly improve consumer information allowing them to easily compare all available products and are nearly a perfectly competitive marketplace.
Another thing I learn is that in a perfectly competitive marketplace profit approaches 0.
In the GCC 2.8 days, the "developers' attitude and resistance" led to an experimental fork called EGCS, which eventually became GCC 3. Should Mac OS X and Mac hardware become locked down as tightly as iOS and iPod touch hardware, I imagine that a coalition of ex-Mac developers might fork GNUstep in a similar manner to allow migration from Cocoa.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The summary is overlooking Adobe completely. I see no reason to expect that they are going to drop their sotware prices by 90% tomorrow. Being as they are the most important software company for the Mac today, that is a huge player who won't be in the game. They go out of their way to prevent piracy, they certainly aren't about to start distributing their top titles as downloadable applications for $5 a pop.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Photoshop's "lite edition" still has an MSRP of $99.99... Amazon sells it for $70 (not counting the $20 MIR ending today).
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Well, I don't know if Mac application prices are going to fall radically, but the business model for applications will change radically, which may 'allow' prices to come down. The app store model ensures that users of software closely correlates with purchasers of software. In the current environment a developer has to assume that some (high) percentage of users did not actually purchase the software. Therefore the purchase price for legitimate copies is necessarily higher.
Why?
This is a submission from from troll editor kdawson. Thanks Taco.
yes goodbuy apple lock down is big on IOS and what stopping from mac os store being the same!
This all seems to be based on the idea that without a Mac App Store, the market for Mac software has always been crippled, unable to achieve the level of efficiency that allows developers to sell software for $3 -- but then the Mac App Store changes all that, making what used to be impossible, possible.
This guy reads like an Apple flamer, but actually he's got his nose all the way up Jobs' ass, buying into the idea that an Apple store increases efficiency rather than being just another middleman to skim off profit while also adding (judging from how things went on the mobile devices) a bunch of ludicrous restrictions that work against the user and therefore give users a disincentive to use the store instead of traditional markets.
Or maybe he's saying the IOS developers are all supermen, that this "horde" is just plain more competitive. Riiiight, the birthplace of the idea of a for-sale "Fart App" is where great productivity and creativity comes from. Uh huh.
Apple reducing the margin that software developers can get on selling their wares, isn't going to lower prices. If a developer has to charge $n to break even when selling directly to users, then the app store price is going to have to be more than $n, because Apple is going to want something. Failing to wet their beaks isn't how Apple has become so profitable. Wake up, dunderheads. Apple is all about skimming and reducing efficiencies. Prices don't go down when the market has such a destructive force siphoning from it.
I actually predict pretty much the opposite. iOS developers are able to charge what they can for their tiny apps because of the locked down device that doesn't allow you to install whatever you want.... their competition is each other. When you start talking desktop, you can go out and grab open source software for many of the same games and tasks or play flash versions. iOS developers will probably not be able to get away with charging such a high premium for their apps when people can go get free ones that do the same job. Traditional developers will probably be unaffected.
I don't frequent /. as much as I used to. It's good to see, though, that kdawson's inflammatory "sky is falling" articles (which usually--like in this case--link to an idiotic opinion disguised as reporting) are still um...
Actually, it's not good at all. kdawson is one of the two main reasons I don't bother with /. most of the time. (the other is the idiotic new posting window with dog-slow preview.)
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
"Tomorrow, the iOS developers move in and the traditional Mac developers better stick their heads between their legs and kiss those price points goodbye."
One of the primary market forces is the sheer number of developers. Even if many developers jump over there will still be far fewer developers for the mac than the iPod. In my opinion there still are not enough Mac developers.
Another big market force is number of possible sales. There simply is not the number of Macs in use as there are iPod/pad/phones. To make the same profit you will have to charge more.
It might have a small effect on prices with competition in certain categories, but there are still far fewer choices for the Mac compared to Windows for example. I really don't see a problem here.
Seriously, just the easy of access to it by developers.
There has been an Apple ran 'Mac App Store' on Apples website for at least a year (didn't own a mac before that so I don't know how long its been there).
The only change is now they've documented and made public access the requirements for getting an app on there.
Guess what? You've been able to buy all sorts of Mac apps on it ... including iWorks ... The price didn't even change.
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You are most likely making money off of it.
You're the lumberjack who doesn't think he should have to buy an axe.
this is the same "problem" that the music vendors and movie vendors have, if they don't make some huge number of [currency] per "unit" they will be ruined! What BS.
These are digital bits, it doesn't cost you a fraction of a penny to make another sellable copy. If you had one customer at fifty bucks a "unit", hey, if your typed up crap is that good, maybe you can now sell your precious to ten people at five bucks a "unit", or a hundred at 50 cents!
Stop fixating on "per unit" pricing, and start thinking that there are six billion people on the planet as potential customers instead, and new copies of your stuff to sell can be made so close to zero that it might as well be.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I can't believe people are still paying for softwares.
wake up guys !
donate to open source project you love, dont pay for software you might use.
Seriously, did anyone actually read the article before this got posted? Huns, Romans, Star Trek and not one actual fact, just gross speculation that somehow $1 iPhone games is going to make Adobe Creative Suite and World of Warcraft cost $2...um...no.
Ave Molech Setting
Noone thinks that this App Store is going to replace traditional distribution for things like Photoshop or AAA games.
But the Apple market for small utilities and indie games is still very similar to the old PC shareware market of the early 90s and this is what will be changed by an influx of cheap app developers.
Pretty much any utility which has a freeware equivalent on Windows or an open-source counterpart on linux has some guy (sucessfully!) charging money for it on the Mac.
Just as the default expectation of a linux app is that it is open-source, the default expectation on the Apple side is that it will cost you upwards of $20. This has been possible because the developer pool lacks competition and Mac buyers are used to paying a premium. This is what the App Store will hopefully provide some price pressure on.
Sure, the margins go down. But so should the costs (perhaps reduced logistics and marketing costs). And volumes will likely go up. Things are changing, but that doesn't mean developers won't be able to benefit from the new system.
This author was barely even tricky or clever.
They are taking the opposite stance for the purpose of subverting an opinion.
They aren't trumpeting in the arrival of cheaper, higher-quality software. Did anybody else pick up on this? He was a Mac developer himself.
He's trying to build justification for iOS devs to start charging like off-the-shelf software does, id est 8~15* more. He doesn't *want* to see the prices drop as he charges, that's why he makes it sound so horrible.
The only reason why he would promote his theory with such confidence is to use that confidence as leverage to change the market opinion. So he's not making a prediction, he's making a bull racket.
That kind of behaviour is what I'd expect from shifty, overweight people who snort oxycontin. Maybe even for sedentary, has-been developers who don't want to change-up or find a second leg to stand on.
But I don't consider it news and I don't think it was a very professionally composed attempt to subvert the market opinion. If you're going to social hack, get some composure, first. Guard your integrity.
I don't even know why I'm typing this here, I should send it to the fruitbasket who wrote tfa.
Anyways, his position is so wildly overstated as to make it incredible.
Inherent *in* his position is a dichotomy distinguishing between two different qualities of not only development but of product.
The producers in both camps know exactly where they stand and how they're viewed. There's no illusion to shatter.
And it's very likely that prices will drop somewhere between 5% and the 13.5~18.5% range, but there's no justification for dropping more than the traditional markdown to markup. The only reason anybody drops more than 50% is clearance and the software companies have no reason to clear house at this point. They just opened up a new point of sale -- if anything their market hold just got stronger. The only reason to drop below 75% is a firesale or closeout. Again, companies aren't going out of business over this, if anything they just got a whole new vista of opportunities to fill for relatively little effort.
Whereas ten employees could work a year designing the update to one app, the same ten can in their spare time each design one or two tiny apps of less function and lower quality, a piece. The ten to twenty apps selling at a buck a piece equate to the same twenty bucks for a powerful, robust app running on a more powerful structure. So it comes out the same, and in the meantime even less effort was spent, fewer programmers were needed so the entire process of organizing an overhead structure for the code project never even occurs, you end up with 10-20 coders instead of 30-200 (oh wow, don't even have to outsource, whaddayaknow) and so the profit margin increases wildly. It's lucrative. It's quick and decent. People eat it up. And best of all, you don't have to charge rock-bottom one-dollar for your myriad of tiny apps because you're a reputable company with something "real" to offer. You get to charge two bucks or maybe... three. Damn... five bucks. Before you know it, you're multiplying profits a million times.
That's great, that's fine. That's why that model continues to work. It has no bearing, no relevance on the world of software that has to be developed using a giant code-sharing framework, with tons of employees specialising in different layers or functions of various parts of the code, and with a whole dev team just to get it off the drawing board. And nobody *thinks* it does, not even the person who wrote the article.
So if anything, opening the store means companies will want to hold prices steady to firmly demonstrate the difference between the two tiers of software quality apparent in the dichotomy, considering neither one threatens the other in any way, shape, or form.
God, what a terrible article.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The grandparent is spreading FUD. GNUstep has theme support and the project leader spent Christmas working on
Christmas was less than two weeks ago. I prefer to assume good faith: not having checked on a long-standing situation in the past two weeks is lag, not FUD.
a GNOME theme that mimics the currently-selected GTK theme [...] There is also a Windows theme that does something similar with the UXTheme API
Good steps.
Unrelated WTF: Why can I no longer paste into Slashdot text boxes? Is this some kind of anti-troll thing?
The JavaScript used on idle.slashdot.org and *.slashdot.org/story/ is defective. Google Chrome won't let me paste into a "Reply to This" textarea on a /story/ page unless it's empty. You can try editing the entire comment in Notepad or Gedit and then paste it once it's finished. The JavaScript used on comments.pl works better; try opening a comment ID (e.g. #34766084) in a new window before you click "Reply to This", and pasting into a textarea will work fine. Or under Firefox, you can middle-click "Reply to This" to get the pre-D2 comment interface.
So, you set preferences to exclude any drivel posted by kdawson, and what happens? CmdrTaco posts it for him. Nice, thanks, Taco.
To make this post on-topic: The meat of the article also explains why free software like Gimp, OpenOffice, and Linux have forced the corresponding commercial tools to be available for free...wait...nevermind, this story should have been aborted.
- T
Buying from your website: no middleman.
A software firm can run its own web site, take payment itself, develop its own system to distribute copies of a program to users, develop its own technology to measure whether running copies are authentic, and make sure the program is listed on popular lists of applications. Or it can concentrate on its core competency and hire Apple for the rest.
I think a Netflix player wouldn't _contain_ any rental content.
I'd advise against construing "contain" so narrowly. Consider that Apple rejected the Project Gutenberg app that didn't "contain" the Kama Sutra but allowed the user to download and read any of a large set of books, one of which was the Kama Sutra.
I kill-filed kdawson so I wouldn't have to listen to his inflammatory sensationalist drivel. Yet here he is, still on my front page. It vexes me. I am terribly vexed.
On the iPhone, apps are toys that make the phone more interesting, so people are willing to pay $0.99 for them but not much more. On the iPad, you expect greater functionality, or at least better interface, because the screen is bigger and it's a more apparently useful device on which you can do more, or do the same more easily. The Mac is just the next rung on that ladder, and will command higher premiums for a better experience.
If Harbormaster offers the identical version on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, it'll cost the same. But what we've already seen is that the Ipad version is bigger and better, and costs more. Any app with a more enriched Mac version will carry a price premium for it, quite appropriately, and people will pay more for it.
The glut of devs and available apps will create some downward price pressure, but anyone offering anything that takes advantage of the greater capabilities of the Mac will still get a higher price for it. The iPad didn't get trapped in the iPhone's price swamp; the Mac won't get caught in the iPad's.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
More than $15 for most utilities is a ripoff.
Most ports of applications require nothing more than C and/or C++
Not all apps are written in C or C++. A lot are written in Java or C#.
The Cocoa wrapper for a C++ game for example is minimal.
What does the Cocoa wrapper for a C# app or game originally written for WPF or XNA look like?
Where are these price points exactly?
All your argument does is prove that piracy can act as free marketing for a product.
The same crowd that would use a pirated Photoshop when free or cheap shareware alternatives would have served them just as well are the ones perpetuating the idea that Photoshop is a "superior product" worth having. (At the same time, they obviously aren't the target market for Photoshop sales, and wouldn't resort to shelling out many hundreds of dollar for a legal license if it was forced upon them. They'd just make do with those cheaper or free alternatives.)
If only a small segment of true professionals ever installed and used Photoshop, I'd say Adobe would have to spend far more on advertising (cutting into their profits) to keep up the level of name recognition and respect they've gotten for free from all the "wanna be" users praising and passing around pirated copies.
There's a lot of validity to it, too. Most of the software you see for, say, an iPhone or iPad, is relatively small in size and developed by a single person or very small team. When these same individuals decide to port it over to sell for OS X in the Mac online store? They're just re-using the same codebase with modifications for screen resolution and input devices, in most cases. (In fact, they may have even started out designing it to handle the larger screen resolution of a Mac anyway, if they were "future proofing" the iOS app for HD displays that might come along down the road.)
You're comparing this type of project to large commercial undertakings .... Two vastly different scenarios.
And in some of the big commercial projects? I'd argue that a lot of money is wasted, too. I've said before, for example, that too much money on modern game development is wasted on licensing "name brand" soundtracks. When I go to play the latest EA Sports title on my PS3, I don't need it to have a whole CD's worth of music tracks from bands like Nickelback or Fallout Boy on it. I'd rather have the game for $5-10 less, and just have original or royalty-free background music tracks in the thing. It doesn't have any effect on the quality of the gameplay itself. And documentation? That's almost laughable, considering practically ALL the software I ever purchased that I have real books or printed manuals for are 10+ years old now! Basically, as programs got more advanced and expensive, they tossed out the idea that good documentation was worth including. These days, they want you to basically figure it out on your own with the aid of built-in help dialogs, and to pay for training/support (often from the software vendor themselves) for help beyond that!
For most of the type of apps you see on phones and iPads, the Mac (or PC) equivalent are available for FREE.
What this means is there will be a way for solo developers of shareware to be able to put stuff into the marketplace and actually see a return, instead of seeing only 1 in 10000 users actually pay their shareware fee. ...about 10 years too late for me.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Breaking news: sky blue, grass green, water wet, predictions of looming macpocalypse drive clicks, ad revenue. Details tonight at 10.
0 1 - just my two bits
Most of the stuff in the iphone store I wouldn't pay for at all on a windows or linux box. They are not as easy to find I guess as an app store but I am not sure easy to find makes it work an infinite amount more money. While there is a world of difference between the price point of games on the iphone and the PC/Mac, there is also a world of difference is quality. If you compare similar products you will find that they are of similar prices.
This article has so many holes that swiss cheese is jealous. I'm not sure if it was sarcasm, a joke or something else. This App store may turn out like Ping. This may help a few developers but are people going to pay .99 for Air Hockey when some free Flash version resides on some website? I'm not sure if this will even drive gaming on the Mac, We'll take a "wait and see" approach with the Mac "App Store"
God DAMN this is a silly article. Nothing more to add really, sorry, it doesn't need it.
Mac can run IL in Mono, but the Store guidelines prohibit it
Quote the rule that prohibits it.
"Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected"
I mentioned this rule against "deprecated or optionally installed technologies" in another comment. I imagine that any rule using the JVM as an example would likewise apply to the similar CLR.
That's why developers with portability in mind tend to write their model in C.
I understand the reason behind this. But some interesting platforms cannot run third-party C code at all, such as BlackBerry, Windows Phone 7, and Xbox Live Indie Games.
The Windows Shareware market died a long time ago... the market filled up with mostly free knock offs, and the quality dropped. There is some try-before-you-buy demoware, and some nagware, but no real "shareware" except a handful of IT Applications that old time IT guys are happy to buy.
Meanwhile, the Mac Shareware market has been doing alright. Versiontracker.com was THE source for Mac Shareware applications, but now it is as distributed and messy as the Windows one. The funny thing is, I have bought a couple of $20 - $40 utilities on my Mac, and small sized applications, and the process is annoying.
As a result, lots of shareware level software for the Mac has sold through Apple resellers and now the Apple store in boxed format. If you ever go to a Staples/Office Depot/Office Max, you'll see rows of that for the PC, the market still exists, we just ignore it because it doesn't cater to techies.
If I can setup a simple account with Apple - or use the one I use at home for ordering prints of the kids for great grandparents, etc., then I might buy a bunch of $1 - $10 utilities.
And that's great for the Mac ecosystem.
Will prices drop, probably.
When I see a program in an Apple Store for $50 (also available on their website for $50, probably contractual obligation), how much of that goes to the actual developer? $15-$20? (guessing retail + distribution channel grabs a lot).
If the developer puts it on the App Store for $30, he probably gets the same $20, and sells a lot more units because the price is lower.
This is going to be a HUGE boon for Apple developers.
What do you want them to do? Provide a bunch of C wrappers all of which do nothing but translate C idioms to Objective-C idioms?
Ideally, it'd be an Objective-C front-end and a back-end in some other language, using model-view-controller or some other multitier architecture. But some platform gatekeepers dictate what languages can be used even for the back-end, encouraging development of a new application from the ground up over porting an existing application from another platform.
I seem to recall Android's done in Java, and I'm not aware of any support for using Objective-C for Windows XP, Windows 7
GNUstep is a free clone of Cocoa for GNU/Linux and Windows.
Windows Phone 7
This is because Microsoft provides no way to P/Invoke native code or load unsafe IL on Windows Phone 7. Objective-C includes C as a subset, and C does not map well onto the CLR.
Android
DroidStep is a free proof-of-concept clone of Cocoa Touch for Android NDK, based on GNUstep.
The iPad is *meant* to be an appliance. [...] The MacBook and iMac and Mac Mini and Mac Pro lines are *meant* to be general-purpose computers.
Apple has chosen not to make a low-end netbook; instead, it makes the iPad. So people looking for an Apple product below MacBook Air are forced to either choose an appliance instead of a general-purpose computer or drop Apple.
The iPod is *meant* to be an appliance. The AppleTV is *meant* to be an appliance.
What alternative to the iPod touch or Apple TV should I choose if I want a general-purpose computer?
And as far as "java code being deprecated", that's bullshit and you know it.
From page 3: "Apps that use deprecated or optionally installed technologies (e.g., Java, Rosetta) will be rejected"
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.
Yeah, because that's exactly what's happened on the PC (read: Windows, not Mac) since there are thousands and thousands of open-source and cheap apps competing against traditionally-sold software--wait. No, it isn't like that at all.
If Apple's products don't address your needs, then don't buy an Apple product.
Which is very close to what I meant by "or drop Apple".
The Nokia N900, from all the stuff I read about it here on /., seems to be a ridiculously powerful handheld computer that runs Linux.
I just wish the N900 were available in my city to try in a store, as opposed to having to ship one in to Fort Wayne, try it, hope I like it, and pay return shipping and a 15 percent restocking fee if I end up not liking it. Somehow Apple managed to get into stores where Nokia failed.