iPhone Gaming Continues To Grow 131
1Up reports that the popularity of gaming on smartphones is growing, particularly on the iPhone. In fact, gaming on portable devices is growing even at home, where users presumably have access to more powerful platforms. CNN points out that the developer for Trism, one of the first popular games, has raked in over $250,000 in profits through the App Store. Apple exec Bob Borchers and various game developers recently discussed the future of games on the iPhone. "Patrick Gunn, director of marketing for EA Mobile, showcased Need for Speed Undercover, which will be available next month. Gunn says that EA has 'taken full advantage of all of the unique elements ... like touch, flick, accelerometer, and motion sensitivity' — and graphically, the game appears to be roughly on par with a PSP title."
Sorry Apple (Score:3, Funny)
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eat my shorts
1. Steal underpants.
2. ????
3. Profit!
If you don't get it, you must be new here.
I recognise automated meme-ing when I see it. (Score:2)
You just failed the turing test.
I'm not suprised its "growing" faster (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not suprised its "growing" faster ...because at the home gaming has been around for years and is highly saturated, popular, and is now just pushing out slowly after its major strides.
Smartphone gaming is new, and has everywhere to go now, being pretty darn new.
If phone gaming can approach at home gaming, then that will be news.
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Last gen you had the PS2 alone rack up over 140 Million units, then the Gamecube and Xbox racking about 24 Million each plus Gameboy Advance.
The N-Gage had alot of potential but was held back by design issues like taco looking side talking, game slot underneath the battery and screen taller than it was wide. Otherwise if you had a phone more like shaped more like Ga
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The iphone doesn't have hardware buttons.
It sucks for most games as a result.
Tactile feedback is a must for most games.
Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster (Score:5, Insightful)
The iphone doesn't have hardware buttons.
It sucks for most games as a result.
Tactile feedback is a must for most games.
Actually, it doesn't suck and it's not a must when you are talking about games on the iPhone.
You need tactile feedback when you are looking at a screen and your hands are not in view. If you are playing on an Xbox, computer, or a similar device then tactile feedback is important because it's incredibly difficult to watch both the screen and your hands at the same time.
Playing a game on an iPhone is very different since your input device and the screen is the same object. You can easily see exactly where you are putting your fingers and still follow the game action. Not only that but since a lot of games involve tilting and moving the iPhone you do get tactile feedback, albeit a different kind of feedback from how a button would feel. Many games are also taking advantage of the vibrate feature of the iPhone to provide tactile feedback.
There are tons of cool, fun, and definitely viable games that thrive on the iPhone despite the lack of physical buttons. It's a completely different gaming experience and the old saw of tactile feedback being necessary for games just doesn't apply.
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I don't have the iPhone, but iPod Touch. iPhone without the phone. And initially I was VERY VERY skeptical of the iPhone paradigm.
Now I am totally amazed... Apple hit this one right out of the park. I was very very critical on this topic and have said so. But I was wrong.
Re:I'm not suprised its "growing" faster (Score:4, Insightful)
The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it. The very first ARM Pocket PC, the Compaq iPaq, which had the horsepower and RAM to do some serious gaming (like run Quake), had a terrible design flaw. The D-Pad and 4 hardware buttons all resided on a daughterboard with its own microcontroller. Some bone-headed engineer had a serious lack of foresight, and the hardware was designed such that only one switch could register at a time. Thus if you were holding the D-Pad in a direction, then none of the 4 hardware buttons would register.
So the only solution to make things like Gameboy emulators playable was to throw virtual A and B buttons up on the screen. These were of course huge, so finding them wasn't a problem. However I can tell you that playing games like that, without real tactile response, sucks, sucks, sucks.
There's a reason that the Timex Sinclair's membrane keyboard didn't catch on back in the 80s, and why to this day people like the big IBM keyboards that you can hear click half way across the room when a button is pressed.
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The iPhone comes out, and suddenly everyone forgets that touch-screen devices of the exact same form factor have been around for over a decade. All of this has been hashed and rehashed. I ported Wolfenstein 3D, Quake 1 & 2, and a Gameboy emulator to Pocket PC, as well as doing extensive game development on new projects. For analog input, touchscreens are okay. However for binary input, aka fire / jump buttons, d-pad, etc, it sucks tremendously. I think you're confusing "tactile feedback" for "knowing where the virtual button is". It's not just about knowing where to hold your thumbs, but knowing that you've pressed the button hard enough to trigger it.
First of all, the iPhone uses a capacitive touchscreen. This means that next to no pressure is needed to press a virtual button so there is very little need for feedback when you press a virtual button. The iPhone's screen is also multi-touch and has a high touch resolution and it can accurately measure the size and shape of the areas pressed.
Secondly, the algorithms that the iPhone uses to measure where you pressed are very advanced. The iPhone puts all this additional data to good use and it can accura
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Way to miss the point. This is like saying it's OK for blind people to drive, but only in pitch darkness with the headlights off.
What that actually means is that there's no way to have tactile feedback on that hardware, not that there's no need for it. Sure, there are other kinds of feedback - audible, visual - but the great thing about tactile feedback is that
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I think the point that the poster was trying to make is that the tactile feedback is your finger touching a surface.
I think the idea here is that rather than resting your fingers on buttons and then getting tactile feedback from pushing them you hold your finger just above the screen and the tactile feedback is from your finger touching the screen.
If there is no doubt that a slight touch will trigger the action then that should be enough tactile feedback for a button press.
Sometimes in technology things cha
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think tactile feedback will be around awhile. I don't see touch screens replacing keyboards for long time, and I don't see touchscreens replacing buttons on controllers anytime soon.
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I think the point that the poster was trying to make is that the tactile feedback is your finger touching a surface.
This is one of my points. My main point is that the iPhone has inspired many other ways of providing tactile input. How about using the tilt of the device as input, making it feel like you are using a steering wheel in a racing game. Or holding the device and tilting it like one of those old put-the-ball-in-the-hole games in order to move your character through a maze. Or shaking the device at certain points in the game to do a special attack. Or using the current orientation of the device as the direc
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Man, I had a Quickshot joystick back in the 80s that worked this way with my ZX Spectrum. Used mercury tilt switches. It was cool'n'all but sucked in use.
Asphalt racing on the iPhone looks nice graphically, but steering the car by tilting or by using the onscreen, non-tactile steering wheel, also sucks.
If you want to be able to reliably press buttons whilst directing your attention a
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Graff, grab some coffee. You completely misunderstood gp's point.
I saw two points in there and I addressed one.
The first point, the one I addressed, was that you need tactile feedback to know when a button has been pressed. This is usually due to there being a trigger threshold of a certain amount of pressure to activate a button. On an iPhone there is nearly no trigger threshold due to its technologies so there is much less need for tactile feedback.
The second point, the one I did not address, is that some games need to have a d-pad or other type of button input that
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I'm trying to determine whether to put any credence in what you posted, and to that end I have to ask: have you actually tried developing for the iPhone, or is all your experience with previous-generation touch screens?
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Way to comprehend, genius.
I said LACK OF HARDWARE BUTTONS, not THE ADDITION OF A TOUCHSCREEN, that makes the iphone an extremely poor device for most types of games.
Try this experiment: Play the first level of Super Mario Brothers on the NES emulator for the iphone.
It's excruciatingly terrible and hard.
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So your point is that games not designed for the platform they're run on makes for a poor experience?
Water is wet and the sun rises in the east.
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So, you reply about a game with a gimmicky control scheme?
Nice.
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Adults wont buy a PSP or a DS but they already wanted an iPhone.
The gaming market on the iPhone is likely to be a good one to exploit, especially for casual games because your not counting on people spending 200 bucks on a portable gaming system. Instead you are exploiting the fact that many have already spent 200 bucks on an iPhone.
I have been waiting for gaming on phones to take off here. I think the iPhone and the next gen of smart phones that it has inspired might just be the platform to do it.
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Although you could say exactly the same thing with "phone" instead of "Iphone". Phones have been doing games for years - and one would expect games to get more advanced, and gaming on phones to become more popular. I'm not sure why it's suddenly news just because Apple show up late to the party.
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Because the iPhone is a much better game platform than many of the phones that have come before. Its a very popular phone so there is a large installed base and previous phones which had good gaming were targeted at gamers (a small installed base) rather than at everyone like the iPhone is.
Its not because its apple, its because someone finally made a popular phone that was a good gaming device instead of only getting half of the equation right for this market to grow.
It's more convenient (Score:2, Informative)
Sure... (Score:2, Insightful)
Why do people want to do things with a PHONE that will make it so that they can't use it as a PHONE?
Hang on, I was playing a game and my batteries dying.
How often have we all heard that one.
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Why do people want to do things with a PHONE that will make it so that they can't use it as a PHONE?
You've seriously never had a situation where you were idling, wishing you brought a book? Say, waiting at a dentist's office or during a 45min break between classes because of scheduling issues?
Having entertainment on-hand can be pretty damn useful, even if it comes at the cost of limiting the phone's usefulness before the next charge. Pre-smartphone I did my best to keep a book on my person 24/7, but now I can just pull out my blackberry and browse slashdot et al, even though that eats into my battery
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Turns off all the radios and possible sources of interference and still lets you play games.
Check out the pic!!!!!!! (Score:1)
Please can somebody tell me where I too can get a copy of Flash, I need to look at redtube NOWWWWWWWW
BTW... (Score:2)
Trism is done by the same guy who translated and did romhacking for the NES and SNES.
God ol Neo Demiforce still at it, after all these years.
Thanks to Mono! (Score:1, Insightful)
Unity3D and Mono seem to be making it easier for developers to write games for the iPhone, this is just awesome.
Especially since Unity3D will be ported to Linux afaik.
DSi (Score:2)
Looking at the iPhone and the new Nintedo DSi, I was surprised to see that the DSi did not include motion sensing technology. Maybe the DSi2 will end up having it, since IMHO this is going to become a big part of mobile gaming.
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Consider this quote: "The overhead and barriers to entry [for iPhone development] are so low that virtually anyone can afford to take a crack."
Does that mean that the first "HIT" is free?
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No, actually. I know your comment is in jest, but Apple charges $100 for that "first hit" (the SDK). You have to pay them money for the privilege of developing an application they reserve the right to deny you the ability to distribute.
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And if you can't make that $100 back in short order, you're not really trying. Seriously, $100 is cheap. I know Google subsidizes their development program all the way down to $0 by diverting funds from their advertising business, but that's a business decision that doesn't really change the basic economics.
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That isn't the point. The article contends that the iPhone developer program "democratizes" game development. Closed platforms are not democratic in nature. The size of the fee or how quickly a developer could possibly make it back is irrelevant.
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It's only irrelevant if your purpose is upholding ideals rather than making software.
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That's not quite accurate. The SDK is available after a free registration at Apple's iPhone Developer site. I got a copy just out of curiosity even though I'm not a developer.
You do have pay them their ninety-nine dollah if you want to distribute your software through the App Store, though.
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How do you suggest he be compensated? He wrote the software with the expectation of at least some financial reward, and he hit the jackpot. What's fair, in your opinion?
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A business model which doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. Many iPhone applications are free and use advertising as a business model. Another option is subscription services (this works well for games) in which you pay a recurring fee for the service of receiving a steady stream of new content (think MMORPGs). Merchandising is another opt
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Fair enough. But in the meantime, hats off to him for making a bundle.
Come to think of it, the "alternative business model" could simply be the App Store itself. It's convenient and easy for any non-technical person to buy stuff there very cheaply. Maybe it's simply worth paying the five bucks for the sheer convenience of it all. I mean really, five dollars? It's just not worth it to look for the app elsewhere. It's not like he's charging $100 for the thing.
Anyway, it's here to stay until market forces say
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The market may not care about my ethics right now, but inevitably some day it will. Obviously most people aren't going to be thinking in terms of whether or not artificial scarcity is ethical. What's going to happen is people are going to prefer the free download over p2p venues rather than the not free download from things like the App Store as is the case right now with Bit Torrent vs. the iTunes Music store. It's just simple competition. You can't compete with free, and less and less people are finding p
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You're absolutely right that it is not our responsibility to subsidize obsolete business models. However, if you don't want to subsidize a business model, then buy from competing business models or don't use products from that market at all.
Piracy is not a competing business model, it's just piracy. Just because a business model is obsolete doesn't make it ethical to do whatever the hell you want. You don't walk up to a newspaper stand, say "hey look, the Free Times right over there pays for itself with jus
Crazy talk man... (Score:2)
A business model which doesn't depend on artificial scarcity. Many iPhone applications are free and use advertising as a business model.
You are the first person I have ever seen that proclaims an advertising model beats advertisement free work, both from the producer and consumer side.
My hat is off to you for having let go of reality with both hands and then giving it a good kick to send you further away as fast as you can go.
Once you have a culture that embraces p2p and rejects artificial scarcity, making
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You are in deep denial about where this is all headed. Your argument assumes that the percentage of users of your iPhone applications who are pirates will not rise and that the percentage of people will not find piracy unethical will also not rise. Both are rising right now and will continue to do so until artificial scarcity is unsustainable.
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Interesting enough, I clicked the link to your homepage. I notice at the bottom web page there is a copyright notice.
Why should I respect your notice?
The cost to you for me downloading your images and reusing them are zero.
It assumes nothing (Score:2)
Your argument assumes that the percentage of users of your iPhone applications who are pirates will not rise and that the percentage of people will not find piracy unethical will also not rise
Not at all. It only assumes that buying the application will be easier than piracy, which is basically always true. No matter how easy you make pirating it involves extra steps.
As noted, you are the one in utter denial about market forces. You are obviously one of those people who would have claimed iTunes would ne
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The bottom line is artificial scarcity cannot be technologically enforced.
Yes it can, with a game that only costs $5 most people will pay just because its more convenient than pirating the game. Why spend time cracking a phone and risk getting a virus when it only saves you a few bucks.
Many iPhone applications are free and use advertising as a business model.
When given the option I prefer to pay a dollar or two if it keeps me from having to watch advertisements.
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The inconvenience of putting pirated apps on the iPhone will not always be so. In all likelihood, Apple will be forced to open their platform due to competition and general outrage over it being closed, in which case pirating apps and putting them on your phone will become far less inconvenient.
In
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In all likelihood, Apple will be forced to open their platform due to competition and general outrage over it being closed
No. Really, no. This is the cellphone market we're talking about, "open" is a foreign term there. Even the Google phones are getting locked down.
In the broader scope, pirating stuff in general is getting easier and easier and will continue to do so until anyone can do it.
It has ALWAYS been easy yet people kept buying software.
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Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with free software zealots, such as yourself, is that you have no concept of business. The only thing you're accounting for is the download distribution cost. What about the equipment that Demeter used, the opportunity cost, the training and experience. None of those things are free.
You also don't understand the concept of risk. Demeter's application could have never been approved for sale, his concept could have proven to be boring, or he may not have been able to promote it. If any of those things happened, Demeter wouldn't make any money. If I'm going to invest $10,000 in a project that has only a 10% chance of succeeding, if it does succeed I need to be able to generate revenues of at least $100k just to cover the cost. There is no way that I would give an iPhone app even a 10% risk assessment, that's way too generous, considering all the potential risk factors.
Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda (Score:5, Insightful)
So a company spends 4 years and $100M to hire a team of 1,000, provide them with office space, equipment, and resources, and you believe that all they should be able to charge for the game is the cost to press the disks. You're either a troll or hilariously naive. And do tell where you can higher people to mow lawns for $5 an hour, the companies here cost much closer to $25 to cover the cost of the equipment, trucks, staff, profit, and management. Perhaps you'll understand the real world a little better when you have some bills to pay and are on your own.
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No, disks are not economically abundant goods. They cost >$0 to press because physical resources are expended making the disks. An internet download, on the other hand, expends no physical resources and costs almost nothing to transmit.
Thanks for the correction. You do realize this only helps my argume
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perhaps $.50 - $.75 in food and $2.00 in gas (you appear to not want to calculate person time, or overhead into costs)?
That means the person charging $25.00 (still way low, I charged that when I was a kid, the pros get closer to $50 or $75 if they have real equipment) is marking things up 10 times, and when gas was cheaper it was closer to 15 times.
Your argument about pay can be flipped around too you know. Anybody who makes something that tens of thousands of
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Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
What about the cases where there might only be 10 consumers of a product that takes thousands of man-hours to produce? You don't think that that the development costs should be included at all? There are quite a few products out there where the development costs are significant compared to the production and distribution costs and any real business HAS to include ALL of the costs in the prices of its products.
It's a completely unreasonable position to take that a business shouldn't include all of its cost
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Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
There is no should, there is only what does happen and what does not happen.
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Take a basic course in business economics some time.
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Thus development costs are arbitrary.
So is the value of the software.
Development costs should play no part in how a price is set.
Wrong.
It would be like me charging $2500 to mow your lawn.
No, it wouldn't. Lawn mowing != unique software. If you don't want to pay $2,500, you pay the neighbor kid $20 to do it. Provide Edward Scissorhand's service and you can charge that much.
Thus, digital information should be monetized using a business model that doesn't depend on artificial scarcity.
It's not based on artificial scarcity. It's based on value and that is determined by what people are willing to pay. Maya, for example, should not be a $50 app. It solves a million dollar problem. I'm not sure why I even have to explain this.
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Your argument is a red herring. Development costs should play no part in how a price is set. I might require only $20 an hour and 40 hours to develop something that would require you $40 an hour and 80 hours to develop the same thing. Thus development costs are arbitrary. Prices should only be set based on cost of reproduction plus a reasonable markup for profit.
Why not? If a company spends $50,000 developing a program (A reasonable price for 1 cheap developer employed for 1 year) and then distributes it digitally, you're saying they should only sell it for like $.05/copy? They would have to sell a million copies just to break even.
Not to mention that when a program is shipped, ongoing costs don't just stop dead. There's maintenance, support, sales, advertising, and other such ongoing costs you have to deal with.
And incidentally, unless your app is featured in one
Re:CNN's article reads like Apple propaganda (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, sure, compared to the ludicrousness of consoles. But how about PCs? Or even Mac OS X on anything other than an iPhone? The barrier to entry on any of those platforms is zero.
On the PC or Mac there are costs for any practical, commercial venture. You need to pay for hosting the downloads, processing payments, and marketing the product. All of these can be done on the cheap, but you're not going to pull in $250K in a couple of months that way. The iPhone cost a hundred bucks to put an application up, but then it is in front of all the users and the download costs and payment processing is taken care of. It's a decent cost proposition in comparison to shareware on the Web, for example, and easier for many developers than trying to manage all those admin and marketing details.
I continue to be astonished by how people consider getting rich off of digital downloads to be at all a good thing. I respectfully submit that anyone who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a few months of work "in their spare time" is being grossly overpaid.
That's capitalism. You don't honestly think most CEOs making a thousand times what their median employee does works that much harder to earn that money do you? The difference here that catches people's attention is the opportunity for the little guy to make it big, something becoming more and more scarce in our current economy.
And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero.
But the development cost is not. Some of us have heard of this newfangled idea called "copyright" that allows people to create novel works without being paid in advance and profit from a (theoretically) limited monopoly on distribution of that work.
That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times.
Umm, interesting math.
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A negligible cost.
Cheaper to do it yourself then let Apple take 30%.
You still have to do that on the App Store. Sure, people will stumble on your app, but the real top contenders have external marketing.
You haven't substantiated that.
That argument is addressed here [slashdot.org].
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And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero. That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times. No wonder he got so rich, huh?
Among those likely to own an iPhone, we could guess that $5 probably represents somewhere between 1/2 to 1/8 of an hour of work. It's about the same price as a McDonald's lunch, and less than the price of a movie ticket. Those who purchase a game like this are indicating that the entertainment value of this game is worth the indicated price to them. Tell me, is it so outrageous to trade 15 minutes of your workday for a product which may keep you entertained for many hours?
I understand your argument, but
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You're ignoring the physical resources expended in the production of the McDonalds hamburger which have a much higher cost of reproduction than digital information.
As for "how we value products" you're making a pretty standard "people charge what the market is willing to pay" argument and I think you'll find that can change very quickly. Many, many people no longer believe mp3s are worth even $1, so they turn to p2p.
The same is happening with all forms of digital downloads. Everything from books, to softwar
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And as p2p gets easier and easier and people slowly begin to realize p2p is not morally wrong, what monetary value people place on digital downloads will, for better or worse, slowly crash to zero.
At which point people will virtually stop producing content because only hobbyists can afford to make stuff available for no cost. Professionals depend on making a decent living off the content they produce in order to be able to eat and have shelter over their heads, not to mention covering the costs of producing the content.
This is the part of P2P that is morally wrong. Apply the Categorical Imperative [wikipedia.org] to the act of freely distributing content without the author's permission. If all produced content wa
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You are blissfully ignoring all of those things in your own argument - Trism didn't just 'appear' out of thin air, just as the burger didn't appear out of thin air.
Production costs are a lot more than the very last step of actual distribution.
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As for the iPhone/iTouch growing in mobile app use, I would highly doubt that it is only because of the low cost of entry but do to the fact we are able to have a phone, a popular music player, and games with what was at the time innovative inputs (motion sensing). I feel that the real reason is nothing more than
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Really, so the guy/
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And when you really think about it, paying any price for a digital download is simply price gouging anyway, since the cost of reproduction is zero. That means at $5, Trism is marked up 500 times. No wonder he got so rich, huh?
You seem to have a moral objection against high mark up percentages. Your first error is discussing margins in terms of percentages of costs. The only case where this is meaningful is when there is a risk involved with the cost. Since you disregard development costs, marketing costs and write-off costs, the remaining cost (distribution + "replication") carries no risk.
The markup percentage has nothing to do with how "rich" you get. Your profit comes from absolute margin times volumes sold. An acquaintance o
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So 0 times 1 is $0.01, times 500 is $5, ergo there is a 500x markup. You really are a moron. It's not about the cost to duplicate, it's about the cost to produce.
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I've addressed that argument here [slashdot.org]. And ad hominems are immature.
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No you didn't. You just said that $0 x 1 = $0.01, such that to go from nothing to $5 is a 500x markup. Kind of hard not to call a spade, a spade.
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I did not say $0 x 1 = $0.01, I said 1 cent is the lowest you can set a price before making it free. Thus, 1 cent is the basis for my markup calculation.
You can't use zero, because $0 x anything is $0, so if you're contending that there's zero markup on a $5 app, I'd call that a pretty ridiculous statement. But I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll simply ask how would you calculate the markup?
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End Price - Cost To Acquire - Cost to Stock - Cost To Distribute
You are making the assumption that cost to stock and distribute are ~0; I won't argue that, since I don't know what it costs to run the store selling the App, and Tax et al. Interesting that you ignore the 'cost to acquire' since its fixed and you only have to pay that once in this case (ignoring maintenance and support) but it is still notable.
It's kind of like you're talking about the efficiency of an algorithm, constants are always ignored.
O
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I read your argument that the price should rely solely on the cost of production. That is wrong.
When wondering about what to charge what you base it on is the internal rate of return. This determines whether or not you should invest in a project.
Scarcity or whatever else plays a role insofar that it allows you to increase or decrease your IRR. The advert model is not a means to an ends. In fact the advert model makes it very difficult to know your IRR. It is a leap of faith and in these difficult times mayb
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I've addressed that argument here [slashdot.org]. And ad hominems are immature.
So is repeating the same stupid argument over and over again.
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So 0 times 1 is $0.01, times 500 is $5, ergo there is a 500x markup.
Zero times one is zero. Therefore, times 500 is zero.
Stop being bitter and pulling numbers out of your ass.
This is Slashdot, you must be new here.
An idiot two ways over (Score:2)
I was wondering how you arrived at your odd conclusion that there was a 500% markup on what you maintain is a cost of zero. In that case of course, the markup was infinite. So then I figured you were just an idiot.
But then you decided to try and justify your lunacy, and show that not only are you bad at math, but that you have no ability to research things:
because $5 is 500 times one cent, the minimum price he could have set without making it free.
The minimum price you can set (without making it free) is
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No, 500% markup would be 5 cents.
Let's walk through it. 100% of 1 cent is 1 cent. 200% of 1 cent is 2 cents. 500% of 1 cent is 5 cents. 1,000% of 1 cent is 10 cents. 10,000% of 1 cent is 100 cents, or $1. 50,000% of 1 cent is 500 cents, or $5.
Actually, I like your percent approach better. 50,000%
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Okay, firstly, the latter is not what you actually said. Second, even if it was, it still wouldn't be reasonable because it implies ad hominem. An "idiotic" argument could be fallacious or flawed in some way, but there is a burden of proof on you to specify what fallacy or flaw there is. You can't just call me an idiot, or even my argument idiotic and call it good.
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You're an idiot, your argument is idiotic. The preceding statement is nothing but goodness and light.
Seriously, when your starting premise for a
Alleged Apple hater math (Score:2)
You could have at least used Apple Hater Math, and worked out the markup starting from the development registration cost and the 80-Core Quad Blue Halogen Mac your kind claims you need for iPhone development.
That might be a slight exaggeration. Someone who already owns a desktop PC running Windows or Linux doesn't need the 80-core Mac, just a Mac mini, a KVM switch, an iPod Touch, and a developer certificate, and possibly a cheap USB keyboard or mouse to replace a PS/2 one. This $1,000 is more than an impulse buy for an underemployed programmer like myself but still a lot cheaper than what's needed for a game console. The real Apple hater math involves the money spent feeding and housing oneself while developin
Easier Math (Score:2)
The real Apple hater math involves the money spent feeding and housing oneself while developing an application that Apple ends up rejecting.
The truth is anyone can tell what kind of app might be questionable, and work on something you know can be accepted. The fear of Apple rejecting apps is vastly overblown, there are just a few categories to be careful of.
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The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup. Software is digital information, and digital information has a marginal cost of reproduction of zero because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
You forgot overhead and labor.
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I have not forgotten, I have deliberately ignored it as it isn't relevant. I've covered that argument here [slashdot.org].
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I hope you don't design aircraft: I have not forgotten about drag or gravity, I have ignored them as they are irrelevant.
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because copying digital information with a computer costs nothing.
So running all the datacenters and having all the staff and paying all the electricity bills and designing and building the app store app all "costs nothing"?
The price of anything is determined by the cost of reproduction plus any additional markup.
That's not correct. The price of anything is determined by the amount the buyer is willing to pay.
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Red herring. An alternative business model can more than adequately subsidize such costs. Being efficient doesn't hurt either, e.g. using Bit Torrent. I wrote in more detail regarding alternative business models here [slashdot.org].
That argument is addressed here [slashdot.org].
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Red herring. An alternative business model can more than adequately subsidize such costs.
No, that's bullshit. You can always subsidize any cost but that doesn't make the cost go away, it just means you take the loss because you think it's acceptable to further another goal. The markup is still sales price - unit cost and the unit cost still includes the systems needed to run the download. Whether there are other ways to make money is the real red herring, there always are but this specific method is being u
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That argument is addressed here [slashdot.org].
That argument is addressed here [slashdot.org].
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Dude you have no clue here...
Again read about IRR (Internal Rate of Return).
The basis of IRR is the question would I be better off putting this money into a fixed rate return investment, or putting it to work in a project.
If the IRR indicates that I am better off putting this into a treasury or corporate bond then I don't do this project.
So here is the thing, if the project costs are (example illustration only)
100 USD to develop
20 USD per year to maintain
10 USD per year to run the business
and the life of th
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Don't blame him, blame his aging Intel CPU..
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as always, anything that isn't praising Apple gets modded down
And the mods prove it - brilliant!
I'm still waiting for a Motorola V980 Gaming Continues To Grow article, btw.
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That game sucks ass, I liked it better back in the day when it was called "You do not have RealPlayer installed on your computer".