There's been a lot of talk about the race to the bottom in terms of iPhone game pricing - and specifically the 99-cent price point that's supposedly swamping the App Store.
So, we thought we'd have a look to see who's doing the best job of selling games at that price.
Below is a snapshot of today's Top Paid Apps chart on the US App Store, stripping out the 20 top games that cost $0.99 - the numbers relate to their position in the overall paid games chart:
1. Hero of Sparta (Gameloft)
2. Sally's Spa (Games Cafe)
3. StoneLoops! of Jurassica (PlayCreek)
4. Flight Control (Firemint)
5. Real Soccer 2009 (Gameloft)
9. Asphalt 4: Elite Racing (Gameloft)
11. StickWars (John E. Hartzog)
12. Bloons (Digital Goldfish)
13. Sally's Salon (RealArcade)
16. Flick Fishing (Freeverse)
18. World Cup Ping Pong (Skyworks)
21. Solitaire (MobilityWare)
24. iFighter (EpicForce)
29. iHunt 3D (John Moffett)
32. Warpack Grunts (Freeverse)
33. Arcade Bowling (Skyworks)
34. Topple 2 (ngmoco)
36. Supermarket Mania (G5 Entertainment)
39: Shift (Armor Games)
47. Tap Tap Revenge Classic (Tapulous)
A few quick thoughts on what's shown by this. First, nearly half of the top 40 paid games on the App Store are selling for $0.99, which won't surprise anyone.
Second, it's not just small independent developers rocking this price point any more. Gameloft is using 99-cents to give its older titles a bump, but RealArcade, Freeverse and ngmoco are also in there.
Third, we didn't realise the original Tap Tap Revenge now has a paid version, but that's a side-note.
The phrase "clogging up" in the headline is a bit misleading, in that we're not criticising any of these companies for their strategies. It's just interesting to see the trend for 99-cent pricing continuing to spread beyond smaller developers.
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Contributing Editor
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)
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