MacHeist Bundle – Is that really good for indie developers?
These days there have been long discussions about the MacHeist bundle and its effects on the involved developers. For the few that still don’t know what the MacHeist bundle is, it is a collection of applications sold at an extremely discounted price.
Here is my take on it. I’m not going to talk wether MacHeist offered or not a good deal to developers. Lets pretend MacHeist offered a good deal. The real damage is to the perceived value of the involved software after the promotion ends. If it can be sold for few dollars, its worth a few dollars! Will the developers still be able to sell said software at regular price at the same rate they did before the promotion? Or will user start complaining it is too expensive? I hope the answers are (in order) yes and no, but i have my reasonable doubts.
Unfortunately this doesn’t affect only the involved software, but the whole independent mac software scene, especially because the software involved (this surprised me a lot) was already pretty famous and some even won awards! I think we should avoid depreciating our software with these kind of offers or we’ll soon be forced to do it constantly. This is also diseducative, if you remember my post about software piracy, my point was that we must teach user that software HAS a value, not the opposite.
This said, i don’t want to say these kind of promotion is inherently bad. Offering your 1.0 (or otherwise not popular) application on sites like MacZOT for 1 day at discounted price should cause no harm, the promotion of a new product is something we are used to. What is to avoid is the continuos depreciation of software, especially if it is already well known.
December 14th, 2006 at 22:34
Marketing is a very unpredictable beast. You might think that doing something particular will hurt the sales and then see a huge spike immediately after that “bad” thing happens. As an independent developer, would I participate in something like MacHeist? No fucking way! Do I think MacHeist is hurting those developers that participate? Perhaps. Does it affect the whole independent mac software scene? Not likely, I don’t think so. But then, again, I am not a marketing guru. We shall wait and see.
December 15th, 2006 at 18:11
In response to George Sudarkoff, i want to make clear that i do not think this initiative alone WILL hurt the whole industry, but MAY be the begin of a dangerous tendency of depreciating software and lower its perceived value.
December 15th, 2006 at 20:33
My answer.
December 16th, 2006 at 15:01
I agree that it completely devalued the perceived value of the software titles available. I did not know of MacHeist until a few days ago and when I looked at it and the price I really did think “well most of these apps must not be of much value and I would never purchase them individually in the future since they were selling for a few dollars”. Whether that is true or not that is the thought that I had. I did have more respect for TextMate though.. since you will not get v2.0 of TextMate for free with this offer.
January 10th, 2008 at 1:12
I don’t think promotions like the MacHeist bundle devalue the developers involved or their applications because it is a limited time once a year promotion. If MacHeist offered more bundle promotions like this more often then I think it would be a problem. Besides the developers involved can still make money of the customers of this promotion in upgrade pricing for new versions of their software.
July 19th, 2009 at 14:23
[…] zum Schluss noch: In der ganzen MacHeist-Debatte schliesse ich mich voll und ganz der Meinung von Michele Balistreri auf Briksoftware an. Vernünftiger Ton, klare Aussage. Ah ja 2: Im ersten Entwurf dieses Posts stand bei fast jedem […]