Crap I'm going to spend so much money now to play games with my casual gamer friends! I've wanted this feature for a while now for good multiplayer games and I'll be more than happy to buy quality wifi games for me and my friends EDIT: is it possible to gift apps that aren't on sale in other countries to friends living there?
I guess all eyes should be on Catacombs at this point. The devs don't seem to have wasted any time experimenting with this one.
I doubt that Apple introduced such a major feature without considering the possibilities for abuse. From their point of view with this feature, abuse == profit, so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for them to change their minds.
I'm not so sure they would necessarily have spotted it. Afterall, it's been there for music all this time and, as far as my research tells me, there's no complaint of it having been abused. The music industry still seems to be throwing money at billboard/radio/tv advertising rather than trying to manipulate iTunes download numbers by buying their own products. Also, it took Apple a long while to put an end to the constant updates issue (ie appearing as new titles). I'm pretty intrigued though and am certainly going to be watching what happens next.
If a pr company was going to do this, I'd think they'd gift to thier own email Addyson made just for this purpose. You give away 10k in free games, that's 10k of customers who won't buy. Plus then they could use say 10% of those emails to leave 5 star reviews. Either way, I'm intrigued by this whole concept. I do think the ability to gift an app us cool though.
I must say, I wondered when anyone would dare to propose such a questionable scheme! It would take a lot of organisation, a lot of different email & iTunes accounts but some chancer is bound to give it a try. Would it be worth the risk of getting permanently banned though (& it'd be almost impossible to legally hide behind a PR company)? Probably not. I think I'll just use the new feature to send gifts to friends for now at least. PS - I see Mr Mitchell of Geared fame has now decided to roll the dice!
I saw that and thought to myself, "And so it starts." It also makes me wonder if maybe this isn't the end of promo codes. Gifting (presumably) works worldwide, there's no 50 code limit, and while it does cost devs money, they get 70% of it back anyway. At the very least it would be a huge adjunct for developers to use in addition to promo codes.
OMG, I go to sleep for 8 hrs and it's already started... Music industry doesn't have this issue because of "discovery". For the App Store, there is no other good way of advertising your app. Music has many traditional outlets and iTunes is simply a distribution channel. iTunes rankings can't compete with Billboards rankings. Even spending $500 to bump your app to the top of a sub-category is well worth the money. And there's also the side benefit of getting your promotion seen and heard by others that didn't win the "free-give-away" possibly attracting more sales. For less competitive categories, spending 200 is enough to move yourself up a few places. Top 20-25 sports games were only doing 400-450 sales per day last week. [edit] Now that I'm awake and sober, this has some serious implications on the entire App Store and ecosystem. If it affects rankings, then websites that derive revenue from ads are going to be effected. Why spend money on them when you can gift the apps and move up the paid lists guaranteed? Why spend money on Admob when the ROI is less than 5%? Will the top paid lists become simply a list of apps with the most marketing muscle with an occasional one-hit-wonder? It's not unlike pop music charts today, IMO. In the long run, it's also going to significantly increase the cost of doing business. If everyone does it, then there's no way for a random indie app to rise to the top without some bankroll or publisher.
No, you can only send a gift to someone in the same country in which the sender is located: Thought this would be a nice alternative to promo codes for those not in the US, but unfortunately not.
Is there a possibility of this being used for spam? Seems like someone with a "free" ad supported app could collect e-mails and then spam everyone with the gifting - it would also serve to launch the app into the top list, and have lots of innocent bystanders then get the app merely because it is in the top bunch and they think it is there because of popularity...
Makes sense, not a lot of point in gifting something that the receiver is perfectly capable of getting themselves!
Judging from Geared's ranking ( http://www.appannie.com/geared/ranking/history/ ) for the last couple days, it seems the 200 free apps did not do any good in terms of appstore ranking. So Apple did thought this through and not take gifting sales into appstore ranking.
Actually over 7 hours, Geared has gained 7 ranks to 28 in Puzzle and gained 7 ranks to 24 in Strategy. Catacombs has dropped 5 ranks to 48 in Role Playing in the same time period.
No, maybe you got me a little bit wrong: I meant, that app trading is easier now. As an example: I want to have Doom RPG, not available in Germany. Someone from the US wants EDGE, not available in the US. We both have a German and an US account. So we can both gift the other person and trade the apps.
So gifts can't be sent across borders. On one hand that stinks for the consumer, and to some degree for the developer, too. On the other I understand why it's done that way. (Tax laws and all that legal crap.) It would be conceivable though that any developer could "hire" someone in multiple countries who also have to gift apps to people in their country when needed (and their payment would be free apps from that developer). I'm sure there are those who would be willing to do it.
I'm sure Apple would be monitoring for abuse. But if they aren't, the chart position:money ratio seems quite favorable. You could buy 10,000 copies of your app, reaching into the top 10 app store charts, and, assuming you can get the 10% back from linkshare when gifting, you'd get $8,000 back from Apple, meaning you'd only spent $2,000 to get into the charts! I could easily set up a script to do this.
Hehe, you're thinking too easy. You would need 10.000 valid iTunes accounts including holders name and e-mail-adress for that. And quite some time for keying. And Apple wants 30%, not twenty. You'd pay 3.000$ and get 7.000$ back. Oh, and you have to pay the taxes for the giftings. Would be another 1000$ maybe? Then we are at 4000$.
