I’m saying those games charge $1 because that has become the standard price for iPhone games. $1 became the standard price because the vast majority of the tens of thousands of developers were struggling to get noticed and dropped their prices to try to stand out.

The 85 million users is irrelevant. You should never lower your prices just because a market is larger. Your aim is to maximize users times marginal revenue, not just users. $1 is the sweet spot on the App Store supply/demand curve because the supply is so much greater than the demand. And in any case where supply greatly exceeds demand, the vast majority of suppliers end up failing to make a profit.

So are you saying Angry Birds, Spy Mouse, Where’s The Water?, Bejeweled, Cut the Rope, Tiny Wings, and Tetris were all $1 as a desperate attempt to make money? No. The people who make crappy games charge $1 as a desperate attempt to make money because they know they can’t charge any more than that for their crappy games.

GOOD games under a SMART company charge $1 because they know there are like 85 million app store users out there (according to an old Steve Jobs article, so it’s probably way more now) and they know their game can reach people and top the charts better at $1 than at $3. It’s not because they are desperate.

Also, Apple doesn’t put prejudice on a $1 game over a $5 game on their “New and Noteworthy” list. A good game is a good game and will make that list regardless.

Success on the app store has NOTHING to do with desperation, for the companies that actually put out quality games. You need to learn a little about marketing before you make bold statements like “you are completely wrong” and then proceed to not know what you are talking about.

That’s completely wrong on the App Store. People charge $1 out of desperation. As the App Store became popular, prices raced to the bottom in an attempt to stand out. Now there’s hundreds of new games every week, so people have to charge $1 to get stand a chahnce of getting noticed.

A $1 game on the App Store isn’t making good money unless it’s in the Top 50 sellers or so. In app purchases can change that to an extent – it’s far harder to get people to make the initial purchase than it is to get them to spend more, assuming that you’re offering something they want.

Oh and I’m referencing the picture of the race car game you put in the middle of your review 😉

In my own experience, I charged the max of 400msp for a text-based drinking game, and it sold disgustingly well. Then I made a cute twin-stick shooter with 30 player online and charged just a buck – I don’t think a total of 30 people bought it.

In the end each dev must do what’s right for them. Do I want maximum exposure, or to focus on my best fans? Is the price meant to be perceived as an insignificant barrier to more fun, or a cost paid to own a quality product? Do you want to fight to get your New Release into another list ASAP, or will you focus on marketing outside of the built-in XBLIG channels?

I think if more developers took real risks, stopped fighting for top downloads and top rated, and instead focused on building an indie community that exists within and outside of xbox, everyone would profit – and we’d stop seeing as many zombie-anime massage-gallery “games” meant only to follow a fickle zeitgeist.

And to that end, IndieGamerChick.com is a beacon of hope. I just hope you don’t continue the fallacy that just because a similar, free game exists, a developer who put possibly 1000 hours of work into something doesn’t deserve to charge the same as a small starbucks latte. And that $3 (or $5) is for a product that could have real, lasting value.