Publishers cut game prices, hope to secure top spot before App Store holiday freeze
EA recently lowered the price of roughly 70 of their iPhone and iPad App Store games to $0.99, now Gamevil has as well and soon other will join them as the holiday iTunes Connect deadline fast approaches, more may follow. Mike Schramm from TUAW explains why:
Apple is freezing the charts on December 23rd, which means that any games in the top 200 at that time will remain there over the all-important Christmas holiday, the point at which we've seen the biggest jumps in App Store sales (due to all the new hardware out there under the tree).
So when everyone gets their brand new iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and heads over to the App Store to get their game on, those top selling, top free, and top grossing leaderboards are going to be marketing gold.
Now who's next?
[TUAW]
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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I would buy cut the rope yesterday afternoon for $1.99....
Wait isn't cut the rope 99 cents?
Cut the rope was .99 when I bout it about two months ago.
At least a couple of the prices don't seem to match what I see in iTunes (via iPad). Ms Pac-Man, for instance, says it's $4.99 (iPhone-only, sadly).
Sorry, Namco's sale hasn't started yet. I'll update when it goes live.
Rene
Its good for the enduser.. lots of choices and good price.
Im crossing my fingers, hoping that NOVA 2 or Infinity Blade go on sale!
I got cut the rope for my iPad for free. I think it was the Christmas edition or something, I'm not sure if there's a difference, I haven't played the regular one.
Between cut the rope and angry birds, Apple (actually the devs) has succeeded in making me enjoy casual gaming. Ive always labeled myself as a hardcore gamer, so that's a big leap. I even returned a Wii I bought a couple years ago
@ mike- I don't see either going on sale for awhile.
Interesting marketing strategies. I wonder how it will work out. Definitely good for the consumer.
Hrm, Gamevil's on sale now. A lot of the things I got on sale for Black Friday are also on sale for Christmas. Plus, some items are on sale now that weren't on sale Black Friday. So I guess this is a learning experience. If you don't make the Black Friday sales, don't worry, you'll probably see them for Christmas as well.
so if they're freezing it, what happens if the developers change a free app to a paid one?
@Kibbler, my understanding is it is all frozen updatewise until after Christmas (staff's out).
I've bought several of the EA apps for my Ipad the past couple days. Wasn't about to pay $9.99 for them, so I'm glad they're on sale. Wonder how people feel about paying full price, then seeing a 90 percent price drop now? I'd would have been super pissed!!!