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 [1], 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.