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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.
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.
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!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
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?
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.
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.
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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.
Considering Apple has explicitly stated that they have zero plans to force people to use the app store, perhaps the better question would be why you consider it even remotely likely that they will?
You're right, Apple doesn't have a good track record of providing "open" products, but Apple also doesn't have a track record of *ratcheting down restrictions on what you can do with your device after you've purchased it.*
Please cite examples of where Apple has "taken away" the ability to do something with a product after it was released that would lead you to conclude that this is not only possible, but likely?
What precisely do you mean by open systems in this context? If you mean ability to install/run any executable you want, they have a track record of more than 25 years of that on Mac systems. That's certainly a good track record.
They don't allow it on phones because malware is a far bigger threat on phones than on PCs.
Now think! If Apple created a version of OSX where you could no longer install software that wasn't available from the App Store, then most of their customers would not upgrade to it, because their existing off the shelf apps would no longer be installable. It'd have an adoption rate even lower than Vista. So why the fuck would Apple do it?
Apple think things through better than you do.
Adobe knows damn well that something like 85% of their users are pirates. But the 15% that aren't are mostly corporate users who are part of volume license agreements and therefore won't be using the app store anyway. It works out well for Adobe: amateurs pirate the software, learn to use the app well enough to produce professional work, and end up paying retail when they start making money from it. The piracy essentially locks any significant competition out of the marketplace.
This comment is fully compliant with RFC 527.
Price points are not the same as prices. Prices are every numerical price from 0.01c to the most expensive thing you can imagine. Price points are attractive numbers that products tend to retail at. 95c, 99c, $1.95, $1.99, $2.95, $2.99 etc.
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.
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
Horseshit. Pure horseshit.
Having worked as a professional developer for 13 years before my current job, unless you have a stable codebase which nobody is changing, you have expenses for developers, QA, documentation and tech writers, sales, marketing ... plus you have to pay the accountants, lawyers, admin staff, IT staff, office costs, and executive bonuses.
There is no freaking way that software sales are 99% profit -- nowhere close. Building commercial software is an expensive, and resource intensive task. Anybody saying otherwise has likely never done it.
Just because some people can afford to/are willing to give away their labors for free (and I'm certainly a fan of free software) doesn't mean there isn't a cost associated with it. These people are either doing it because it's fun, or because they're students. In either case, they still need to pay their bills and couldn't afford to write free software if they weren't getting paid from something else (or had nothing better to do with their time).
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Yes, it's just that simple~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Keep in mind that Apple is a company that dictated what programming languages developers could use to develop software for one of its platforms. Do you realize how absurd that is? Do you realize how absolutely wrong it is?
No, in fact I don't realize that, maybe you can elaborate? How is this different from about *every freaking other* integrated consumer electronics product on the market? Can I program Java on WP7? Can I program C# on Android? Can I program Java on the Nintendo DS? Can I program Visual Basic on Blackberry?
Here's the thing: Apple created an operating system, a buttload of frameworks, devices that run them, and a set of development tools, the latter of which you can even get for free. All of this was designed and implemented with a number of technologies in mind that fit the hardware and the platform. In terms of programming languages that's Objective-C, C, C++, Fortran. In terms of application and UI frameworks that's Cocoa, UIKit, etc. In terms of development tools (including packaging, provisioning, code signing, and submission to the application store) that's XCode. It's actually all pretty complex, and probably took a lot of time and millions of investment to get everything together. Because Apple provides both the hardware and the retail channel for applications running on the hardware, it is very important for them that applications use the features the platform offers as much as possible, because a crap user experience will hurt the perception of their own products. Which is why they spent a lot of time on the SDK and the development toolchain. Ask any iOS developer and they will tell you that they did in fact do a pretty good job.
Now how absurd and wrong is it that they don't allow every idiot who knows some random programming language to distribute their stuff via the iOS app store? If you want to program Haskell on your iPhone, go ahead, nobody is stopping you, but don't expect Apple to put your work in the app store, just like Microsoft will not allow you to publish a GW-BASIC program on the Xbox 360, or Sony will allow you to distribute a Java application through PSN. Other companies also provide SDKs that you have to use to publish on their platforms, there's nothing absurd or wrong about that. Stop seeing a phone platform as some kind of hobbyist playground that should allow you to do everything with it you desire.
When was the last time you complained you can't reprogram the scaler in your HDTV, or write a Java program for your car ECU?
Wrong! This is a real distinction with semantic content.
People don't experience prices linearly. They experience prices in a somewhat disjoint manner, where crossing a particular arbitrary line makes a large difference in peoples' perception of prices.
Wikipedia on price points.
Now, the "factual accuracy of this article is disputed". So it may be false. But even if the theory is wrong, the term "price point" is not just a synonym for "price".
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