Almost every iPhone app to cost a buck someday?
As many people have noted before, all this doesn't bode well for Nintendo or Sony in the portable gaming category. To get people to pay $30-$40 for a title is going to get harder and harder--even for AAA franchises that have traditionally sold millions of copies. The fact is that a $25 iTunes gift card goes a long way for parents having to fund their children's gaming habits. You're looking at supplying your child with a dozen or more games versus one. That's a big difference.As a consumer, you have to like where all this is going. From a developer standpoint, things become trickier. Yes, if your app's a big hit in the App Store, you're going to rake it in, even if it sells for 99 cents, because the market is so large (at last count, about 65 million people owned an iPhone or iPod Touch). But you also hear plenty of stories of developers who invest good money in creating an app only to see it virtually disappear and earn almost nothing.Will the price erosion ever stop? I think the only way for that to to happen is if Apple raises the minimum price that someone can charge for an app. It may just have to do that someday, because the competition among developers is so fierce that if Apple set the minimum price at 49 cents, you'd see plenty of app makers rushing to lower their prices.Of course, the other alternative is to bundle multiple apps into a single app and charge 99 cents, just like Triniti and a few other developers do. The way it's going, we may start seeing more of that. And if the limited-time-only $4.99 e-book package of three early Michael Connelly novels I bought on Amazon the other day (it's now $9.99) is any indication, we might start seeing a lot more bundling in the e-book world, as well.Let me know what you think. Is this price erosion bad or good? And what are your favorite 99-cent apps?
