Take-Two CEO Says XCOM's iOS Success Shows Consumers Willing to Pay Premium Prices on Mobile

I hope more big devs see this and start producing more console type games. I would pay 20 to 30 dollars for big titles. Hats off to take two for taking a chance with their pricing model.

The question is how many more copies would they have sold at $10 or $5.

I've done this experiment, lowering the price of an app to see if more copies would sell. What happens is there is an initial burst of downloads for about two days. Then the number of sales drops to where I am averaging less revenue per day than at the higher price, resulting in me making almost 2X lower daily income for a price drop of 2X or more (but increasing my potential support costs because of all those additional customers). The additional number of copies sold don't make up for the lower price.

This seems to prove to me that most real buyers for my apps are willing to pay significantly more than 99 cents. So, IMHO, many iOS developers should raise their prices if they are using their app business to help feed their families and pay the rent. $19.99 seems like a perfectly good price point for a well polished and reasonably unique iOS app.

Especially important now that iOS 7 is bringing gamepad support.

Yes! Mobile game developers, please keep making more premium titles and less freemium games.

I've done this experiment, lowering the price of an app to see if more copies would sell. What happens is there is an initial burst of downloads for about two days. Then the number of sales drops to where I am averaging less revenue per day than at the higher price, resulting in me making almost 2X lower daily income for a price drop of 2X or more (but increasing my potential support costs because of all those additional customers). The additional number of copies sold don't make up for the lower price.

This seems to prove to me that most real buyers for my apps are willing to pay significantly more than 99 cents. So, IMHO, many iOS developers should raise their prices if they are using their app business to help feed their families and pay the rent. $19.99 seems like a perfectly good price point for a well polished and reasonably unique iOS app.

I concur with this. Infact I found increasing my price has INCREASED sales as if people see a quality product with a proper price tag and good reviews it makes more sense to them than something offering the earth for 99c (to good to be true).


The age of the 99c app/game has to end as unless you have a massive (and I mean MASSIVE) hit you don't make enough to survive.

I hope this leads to an era of very powerful games on mobile devices.

I can't wait to see what devs end up doing with the game pad interfaces that are planned :D

I hope more big devs see this and start producing more console type games. I would pay 20 to 30 dollars for big titles. Hats off to take two for taking a chance with their pricing model.

I feel like this'll be happening more and more when iOS 7 comes out and there are MFi gamepads. Next gen iOS devices should be able to play games close to PS3/360-quality games, which will be awesome.

I hope companies like Nintendo are seeing this and realizing the huge market they're missing out. Some of those DS games would translate pretty well on an iPhone.

I hope companies like Nintendo are seeing this and realizing the huge market they're missing out. Some of those DS games would translate pretty well on an iPhone.

That'd be nice, but the chances of Nintendo releasing any of their games on a platform besides one of their own are about slim to none. They'd probably make their own smartphone before doing that.

Great news, I too hope more devs act on this (yes, Civilsation ( a good version) please!).

That said, XCom still crashes a lot for me. I would put this down to iOS 7 beta, but a lot of people have complained about it who I doubt are all using iOS 7.