Mobile market research firm Distimo looked at the 300 most popular apps on Apple's App Store and found that downloads of free apps had grown 34 per cent since last year. Downloads of paid apps, however, have grown by just 7 per cent.
Despite just 4 per cent of apps on the download service using the system, 72 per cent of all App Store revenue comes through in-app purchasing, up from just 28 per cent in 2010. Of that figure, 24 per cent was through paid apps, and double that through free apps.
Source: Pocket Gamer
Comments
1This is an unfortunate trend. A lot of games coming out lately have in app purchases with the regular game hiding a lot of features behind pay walls. Usually it's something involving coins or some kind of ingame currency to purchase upgrades. The amount of coins you need to buy cool stuff is extremely prohibitive and takes hours and hours of playing to afford 1 upgrade. Or you can spend real money on the fake coins and by a kajillion of them for 99 cents.
This kind of fleecing is only going to get worse and worse. I know most games only cost a dollar, but I don't want to spend a dollar to find out I need to spend another 5 dollars in order to have any fun.