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Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

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Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#321

Post by musicale »

MBCook wrote: post #11

I wonder if more apps will go for, say 50¢, instead of free + $1.00 IAP. I miss the pre-IAP days.

I don't dislike some DLC purchases like new levels etc.. I'm happy to pay for major expansions to games as well.

But I have little interest in games that rely on scammy paid gacha/loot boxes/slot machine mechanics, monetized play-and-wait/energy systems, paid in game currencies, progress paywalls, etc. - not to mention intrusive advertising for monetization schemes. I'm not entirely huge on paid cosmetic options either.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#322

Post by yreg »

bombcar wrote: post #25
ralmidani wrote: post #2

Genuine question: is there a market for a $10,000 app?

Isn’t the Tesla FSD available as an in-app purchase?

I believe you can buy it through the app but it’s not an IAP. it gets charged to your card associated with your Tesla account. Otherwise Apple would get their 30% and that’s not worth it to Tesla.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#323

Post by zamadatix »

gumby wrote: post #289
zamadatix wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchange rate fluctuation I think could be handled perfectly fine without price points but the price point "gravities" is a really good reason to use the system. Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many.

> Not sure why it should limit developers to that system but it certainly makes the system attractive/useful for many. Because most developers are presumably experts in programming* and whatever the domain of their app is* (game, drawing program, whatever) and not experts in the psychology of pricing (unless it's a pricing app I suppose!). Now so what? They could allow you to pick a predetermined price or type whatev…

The problem with appeal to authority on this is the same could have been said last week about why it wasn’t like this. It doesn’t make it any more reasonable it just explains it is the way it is.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#324

Post by musicale »

MBCook wrote: post #127
asadlionpk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this IAP model better for both users and makers?

In theory. So I have no issue with subscribing to many apps I love to fund development, or maybe paying an extra “tip” through IAP. Or just IAP for more content. But IAP and subscriptions enabled a few models I hate. Free game (either with ads, IAP, or both) have flooded the App Store and destroyed the market for quality games. Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of peop…

> Even the better made ones (like Candy Crush) are still designed to wring money out of people

Arcade games may have been designed to deprive players of their quarters/tokens, but they have nothing on modern optimized monetization schemes, including many which bring mobile games much closer to slot machines, in the hope that gambling addict "whale" players will spend the sort of money that they might lose at a casino rather than a Chuck E. Cheese.

So many games that I might otherwise enjoy playing in are simply not fun for me because of the intrusive monetization schemes. F2P games add this annoying metagame of "fight against the obnoxious monetization traps" which I usually don't enjoy.

Bad monetization schemes set up an ugly conflict between developers and players that degrades the gaming experience.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#325

Post by hsbauauvhabzb »

crystaln wrote: post #315
postalrat wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But take your choice: x.99, x.90, x.95. Beautiful design.

There's a reason most retail stores use price points and not random numbers. Pricing like this: $7.23 $5.48 $9.21 is just ugly and feels cheap. It's the same reason they have UX standards generally. Why does anyone care about 1 cent on a $5 purchase? Does anyone here care? The new price points seem to provide enough flexibility with less disadvantage. From a business perspective, if I had to guess the increased cogni…

Would it be reasonable to assume that the price points help them and not the buyer or seller? Decision fatigue matters more to me than which product you actually pick if I’m taking a clip of the sale regardless

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#326

Post by avianlyric »

chongli wrote: post #209
CameronNemo wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

??? If taxes are included in price, the consumer can just look at the price and compare rather than jumping through the additional mental hoop to determine if one item is subject to sales tax, and what its price is in tgat case.

If you have two items and sales taxes are included in the price of one but not the other, the only way you can know which one has the taxes on it is to go look at some government website that lists all of the categories the tax applies to and those it does not. On the other hand, if the taxes are not included in prices then you will see which one has taxes at checkout and elect not to purchase the item with taxes, pr…

> On the other hand, if the taxes are not included in prices then you will see which one has taxes at checkout and elect not to purchase the item with taxes, preferring the item without taxes.

Why would you care? Having taxes included in sticker prices doesn’t change how much it costs you, only what percentage goes to your government. The only situation where not including taxes is potentially useful is when you explicitly don’t want to pay taxes, but you’re still happy to pay a higher price, if it means less money to the government.

Also in Europe we have a very simple solution to this problem. Every price tag has two numbers. The number in big font includes taxes, the little number underneath is without taxes. If you’re desperate to avoid giving cash to the government, then you just need to find items with the smallest delta between the two numbers. Retailers are also obliged to display both numbers, and provide a tax breakdown on your receipt, so you penny pinch your taxes to your hearts content.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#327

Post by rootusrootus »

pasc1878 wrote: post #154
kybernetyk wrote: post #90

Will this solve the issue that the $49.99 tier equals to a 59.99 EUR price? I get a ton of messages every week by would-be Euro customers complaining why the fuck I am fleecing them with a 59.99 EUR price when the US price is $49.99 and the exchange rate is currently roughly 1:1.

The EUR price includes VAT, Americans have this odd thing of quoting prices without tax which tends to be illegal elesewhere. OK the US does not have a sales type tax on digital goods,

> Americans have this odd thing of quoting prices without tax

I am American, and I don't pay sales tax.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#328

Post by sushid »

BulgarianIdiot wrote: post #113
JonathonW wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple uses price points rather than having developers explicitly specify prices because they're currency-independent: you specify a price point and Apple chooses appropriate prices for each of the ~175 different storefronts where your app could be available. Apple then periodically adjusts the international prices as exchange rates fluctuate, to keep them in parity with the US prices at the same tiers. The alternativ…

Thank you for clarifying this. This is such an Apple thing to do. Frankly it doesn't matter what the exact price is. All economics are approximate.

It kind of does, no? Would you want your recurring charge to fluctuate randomly just because the developer converts everything to their currency? Or what about getting screwed over and being charged an exorbitant price because you live in a poorer country and the developer wasn't considerate enough to add regional pricing based on your PPP?

You'd have to use a third party to remedy this but Apple handles it for you.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#329

Post by rootusrootus »

oblio wrote: post #310
eYrKEC2 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"quoting prices without tax which tends to be illegal elsewhere" Cui bono? Personally, I like that US citizens are constantly reminded how much flesh the State is extracting.

Quoted post unavailable.

> First past the post

... which is used in plenty of places in Europe, yes? And not every place in the US uses FPTP. In fact, every election seems to add another locality to the list that use an alternative.

Re: Apple announces ‘upgrade’ to App Store pricing, adding 700 new price points

#330

Post by 015a »

jimbob45 wrote: post #107
015a wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree with most of what Musk does; but if this is the kind of innovation that requires a team of highly compensated tech employees and warrants a press release; something is actually, seriously wrong with efficiency in companies like Apple, and maybe he's actually right that Twitter, or many companies, could run better on far fewer employees.

When software and systems become sufficiently large, change becomes extremely difficult. Even strong architectures have their limit. I have to imagine that Apple has hit that limit serving payments worldwide. The real lie isn't that this was a difficult and costly change for their top-notch team. The real lie is that this works at all - some dev out there is waiting with no fingernails left for the bugs to start pour…

Absolutely; but I think this new "feature" is the most pure crystallization I've ever seen of the inefficiency inherent to big tech.

Most people who read this press release would probably respond: Woah, that's how pricing on the app store works? Devs can't just set whatever price they want? The natural and totally reasonable followup question should be: Why? There are: reasons! There aren't no legitimate reasons why it is how it is (exchange rates is probably the most legitimate one). But the most significant illegitimate reason why is undeniably: momentum. This is how the system works; this is how the people proximate to the system, internally and externally, understand it to work. We linearly extrapolate how the system works today, to how we want it to work; fill in the gaps on the number line.

That extrapolation is genuinely where the inefficiency bloat of big tech comes from. Kyla Scanlon recently did a great economics-focused summary of big tech's "predator problem", born from decades of extremely low interest rates [1], which I think covers the situation really well. Apple & the App Store haven't had a predator. There has been no pressure for them to become more efficient; to rethink the platform from fundamentals; so you end up with teams whose task was to linearly extrapolate the wrong thing. It probably took many people; a long time; and there are almost definitely extremely smart on-call engineers right now biting their fingernails hoping it works. Its entirely the wrong thing; but it was the easier thing over alternatives without the natural pressure of a predator to add weight to the right thing.

When software & systems become sufficiently large, changes become difficult. Predators prey on an inability to change, but big tech hasn't had a predator to do this.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrHfhrqsZuY

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