ebaur's Profile

The part that I don't understand about your proposal - or, more to the point, I think you need to address - is why arbitrarily raising prices is not necessary with other types of software. In the non-mobile software space, there are no restrictions on price. I can give my software away for free, charge a dollar, or 50 cents or $500. It seems difficult to argue that price compression is somehow Apple's fault, or Apple's fault, when this type of thing doesn't happen in the larger software markets. Personally, I think a better solution is demo/trial software. If Apple supported the ability for a developer to release a full version that would work for 5 days, or 10 launches and *then* charge a user (after a verification, of course), I think that would help. I mean, would you spend $500 on software that you'd never used before? Probably not. I think that people just don't expect much from a mobile app. Even if Word or Excel gets ported to the iPhone, I wouldn't pay as much as I might to use at work, because it won't get as much use. I think there is a perception that games are just worth less there... Finally, since some things are ad supported, if you got rid of the 99 cent price point, many things that were there won't go away, they will just become ad supported "free" games. Since they won't go away (indeed, they'll be free!), I don't think you'll see the effect your hoping for.