To the original author: you might want to consider your marketing. I've never heard of your app, and it's the exact kind of game I like.
I'm not impressed by your site, either, because it does practically nothing to sell me.
Your giant header graphic says nothing at all about the game.
The actual name of the product is hard to read and in a poor location (not to mention, unremarkable).
The headline "Streaming Color Studios Presents" is useless, because I neither know who you are, nor do I care.
The screenshot is cuteish, but not compelling enough on its own. The app honestly looks too busy, and busy in a chaotic way, not in an awesome multilayered way like Stone Loops of Jurassica.
"Now on the App Store!" may be impressive to you, but it's not to anyone else.
Your call to action is practically hidden because it's light grey on a light grey cloud, and the smallest thing there. The whole banner isn't clickable, which is, if you ask me, insane.
On your main page, on my 30" monitor, WHAT Dapple is isn't even above the fold. And I keep my browser size about 85% of the vertical height of my Cinema Display.
And on and on. I could go on forever. And I regularly pay more than $1.99 for my iPhone kicks.
Your article's overall premise is pretty silly, given that the very existence of the iPhone proves that cost is only a differentiator in a market full of mediocrity.
Your game is admittedly "another color matcher."
Its design doesn't jump out.
Your site does little to sell it.
I haven't heard of it by any other means (and all my friends, like me, are deeply into puzzle/matching games).
Maybe that's why you can't sell your game. It's easy to blame price, but feh. Price is a symptom in your case. I see you wrote how you had a temporary spike after you dropped your price. That doesn't mean that price is the main reason your app isn't selling, just that at a lower price, those other problems are slightly compensated for.
It seems like your only source of sales, to me, is people browsing the App Store itself. Well, that's just not going to cut it, for anyone except a few statistical outliers.
Yes, it takes a lot of exposure or a lot of prepping to convince to buy something over 99 cents, that's true.
But if you do that exposure and prepping, and be a Purple Cow, you can easily charge more.
Do yourself a favor and spend less time writing articles about iPhone app prices, and study the art of making sales.
Your critique of his marketing is spot-on, but I think his analysis of why the prices are so low and why people will only pay that much is still valid. His problem is mainly marketing, but the pricing issues affect every app.
I don't think he addressed THE main issue from what I can see: utility. I pay $2 for a single bus ride because it has high utility to me (going somewhere is important), and similarly I have paid $5+ for iPhone apps that I thought I would use regularly and would provide a good benefit to my life.
His game, like most iPhone games, provides low utility. It would at best be a 2-minute distraction while I wait for the bus. In other words, it provides a minimal utility that I can live without. This drastically lowers what I'm willing to pay.
If a game offered the immersive, cinematic experience that a movie does, then yeah, I'll easily pay $10 for it. The Mass Effect game for example is awfully tempting.
But as it is that is not what most iPhone games are. Most iPhone games are time wasters so you're not interminably bored at the metro station - that to me is not a high-utility use case.
The amazing nature of humanity, and business, dictates that most people are not you.
You must be shocked daily at what other people choose to spend their money on.
I make a living off this very fact, because nobody else in my field has the balls to presume that people would spend money on their stuff. (And I can shout about it all I want on HN and know that nobody will ever use my "secrets," because they'll never believe it.)
I'm not impressed by your site, either, because it does practically nothing to sell me.
Your giant header graphic says nothing at all about the game.
The actual name of the product is hard to read and in a poor location (not to mention, unremarkable).
The headline "Streaming Color Studios Presents" is useless, because I neither know who you are, nor do I care.
The screenshot is cuteish, but not compelling enough on its own. The app honestly looks too busy, and busy in a chaotic way, not in an awesome multilayered way like Stone Loops of Jurassica.
"Now on the App Store!" may be impressive to you, but it's not to anyone else.
Your call to action is practically hidden because it's light grey on a light grey cloud, and the smallest thing there. The whole banner isn't clickable, which is, if you ask me, insane.
On your main page, on my 30" monitor, WHAT Dapple is isn't even above the fold. And I keep my browser size about 85% of the vertical height of my Cinema Display.
And on and on. I could go on forever. And I regularly pay more than $1.99 for my iPhone kicks.
Your article's overall premise is pretty silly, given that the very existence of the iPhone proves that cost is only a differentiator in a market full of mediocrity.
Your game is admittedly "another color matcher."
Its design doesn't jump out.
Your site does little to sell it.
I haven't heard of it by any other means (and all my friends, like me, are deeply into puzzle/matching games).
Maybe that's why you can't sell your game. It's easy to blame price, but feh. Price is a symptom in your case. I see you wrote how you had a temporary spike after you dropped your price. That doesn't mean that price is the main reason your app isn't selling, just that at a lower price, those other problems are slightly compensated for.
It seems like your only source of sales, to me, is people browsing the App Store itself. Well, that's just not going to cut it, for anyone except a few statistical outliers.
Yes, it takes a lot of exposure or a lot of prepping to convince to buy something over 99 cents, that's true.
But if you do that exposure and prepping, and be a Purple Cow, you can easily charge more.
Do yourself a favor and spend less time writing articles about iPhone app prices, and study the art of making sales.