App Store: Dismantling the double dip

The double dip. It's a seedy practice that buyers of DVDs are all-too familiar with, but one which also pervades the App Store. Making your customer buy the game separately for iPhone and iPad is bad form. Let's stop doing it, m'kay?

Simply creating a universal version of your game is all well and good, but then as a developer and a business you are faced with a difficult choice. Do you price your game at the $0.99 tier for the iPhone market, or a higher price, say $2.99 for the iPad market? Or do you split the difference at $1.99?

Undoubtedly, the customer would love to get the universal version of your game for $0.99, but only games at the top of the charts can break even at this price point. Is there a solution would be fair for both developer and customer alike?

The price structure I've put in place for the game my studio is just releasing, Food Run, hopes to solve this problem. With the launch of the iPhone-only version today, there are now two skus: $0.99 for the iPhone-only version, and $2.99 for the universal version.

In this way, those who want both the iPhone and iPad version only have to pay once, whilst there is still a $0.99 sku for those who are only interested in playing the game on iPhone. Good value for both sets of customers, and no double dip.

It's not a new solution, but it is still surprisingly rare. "Galaxy on Fire 2", for example, does something similar.

But of the top 50 games for iPad on the App Store which have a HD and iPhone-only version, all of them require the customer to double dip to play the game on iPhone and iPad*.

It's time we stopped this practice and started treating our App Store customers fairly. And hopefully without devaluing the immense amount of work we put into our games in the process.

* At time of writing. UK App Store, iPad games, paid.

Food Run HD was released 22nd January 2013, whilst the iPhone only Food Run was released on the 13th February 2013. Believe it or not, it's not an endless runner. You can find out more about it here.