The problem with app store
My first IOS device was an iPhone 3GS. Back then the app store had many apps published in two versions: the real app and a "free" version.
The free version would either be a demo / limited version or it would have ads. This way you could try out an app before you decide to buy it.
Today, many apps are free, but they do not have the paid version anymore. With in-app purchase this became possible. Unfortunately, it also became so much more difficult to see what the price of an app is.
In many "free" games you would have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to explore the entire game. If this is the price for such games, fine. But I wish they would then sell it for 100$ - at leat I would then know what I'm paying.
Imagine going into itunes store to rent a movie and the latest blockbuster movie is "free"! Happy days, you start watching, but then after 40 minutes the movie stops and tells you that you have to watch some commercials or pay 1$ to continue. So yoy watch 5 mins of commercials and continue with the movie. After 2 minutes, it wants money again and so on. This would be considered a "scam", but so should the situation with many games/ apps.
I think it's really sad that Apple allows this to happen. It is certainly not in their customers best interrest.
The free version would either be a demo / limited version or it would have ads. This way you could try out an app before you decide to buy it.
Today, many apps are free, but they do not have the paid version anymore. With in-app purchase this became possible. Unfortunately, it also became so much more difficult to see what the price of an app is.
In many "free" games you would have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to explore the entire game. If this is the price for such games, fine. But I wish they would then sell it for 100$ - at leat I would then know what I'm paying.
Imagine going into itunes store to rent a movie and the latest blockbuster movie is "free"! Happy days, you start watching, but then after 40 minutes the movie stops and tells you that you have to watch some commercials or pay 1$ to continue. So yoy watch 5 mins of commercials and continue with the movie. After 2 minutes, it wants money again and so on. This would be considered a "scam", but so should the situation with many games/ apps.
I think it's really sad that Apple allows this to happen. It is certainly not in their customers best interrest.
Comments
http://blog.vodafone.co.uk/2016/03/14/half-a-billion-people-cant-be-wrong-how-gameloft-took-the-mobile-gaming-crown/
This wasn't something publishers or developers forced on people, this is just the strategy that gave them the best return as decided by customers and it has been applied beyond mobile games. There are a lot of people who simply don't want to pay any money at all for mobile software because they don't think it's good enough to pay anything for. Most of the apps are disposable and had they never existed, people wouldn't really care, the apps are time-wasters or low utility. Only 2.3% of people who have played Candy Crush have paid money towards it.
It's not so much the amount of money that's the problem either, it's the payment cycle. In order to develop and support software, you need to pay employees all the time, unlike with movies. If you only have upfront payments, you can only make money once at one point in time. This doesn't work for the life cycle of a software product because you don't know how long you need to support those users. This is the same with desktop software that uses subscription models. It especially doesn't work when you have the massive scale of mobile devices, low upfront payments, apps that you'd buy once for multiple platforms and you can be supporting continuous data processing server-side. Processing and storing data in the cloud on a massive scale is very expensive with ongoing costs. Candy Crush has 10-20 billion events to track per day and they have 2 petabytes (2,000TB) of compressed data on how people play:
http://www.kdnuggets.com/2015/03/interview-vince-darley-king-analytics-gaming.html
Ongoing payments allows a business to pay for ongoing support, features, marketing and the income and expenditure scales directly with the people using the software. Fewer people playing means fewer people paying but also lower infrastructure costs so it's still sustainable.
Even if Apple listed every in-app purchase (which they do to an extent in the sidebar on the store with the list of popular IAPs), it wouldn't tell you how much you are likely to spend. You could spend zero, buy a single IAP a dozen times or buy all IAPs once or any combination of them.
I don't think applying IAPs to movies would actually be all that bad as long as the price was a rental. You'd get to watch the first 20 minutes or so of any movie free and then pay $3.50 to watch the rest of it or rather it can just give you a warning that if you continue watching beyond that point you will be charged $3.50 so that you aren't interrupted with a payment process. Another way would be pay-per-minute so if you do the equivalent of walking out of a movie or skip through it, you only pay for what you watched.
The benefit from free-to-play is discoverability, you don't have a pay-wall blocking you from finding out if you like something before you buy it and IAPs give users a similar model to donation-ware. If you only get an hour of use out of a game, your payments would reflect that. Someone who gets multiple weeks of entertainment would be likely to spend more. The episodic model and DLC model is another method that developers/publishers have used. If you don't like the first part, you avoided paying for the entire package upfront and regretting it.
While the upfront payment model is preferred by some customers, there just aren't enough of those kind of buyers willing to spend so much upfront to justify offering it on a large scale (it is still a model that works best for some apps though e.g Monument Valley). The mobile industry would shrink to a fraction of the size if it went back to upfront payments because there's only a single-digit percentage of people paying for anything. The rest are being monetized through data tracking and advertising.
The low amount of people willing to support upfront payments is a side-effect of being inundated with low quality software and feeling ripped off, even after paying $0.99. If people don't have an immediate expectation of good value in return for their purchase then it makes them hesitant to want to buy anything upfront. This can only be controlled by telling developers that their software just isn't good enough quality before it hits the store. Apple and other stores have decided to keep the store accessible to a large audience of developers and allow the customers to determine the success of the software.