Top Mac indie developer Sophiestication gets yelled at by dicks
I have the utmost respect for indie developers, especially those who do really good work. For example, without the fantastic Scrivener and WriteRoom, my writing experience when working for magazines would be much less pleasant.
Something that’s pretty common among indie devs is reasonable price-tags. Instead of charging HUGE PILES OF CASH for even a tiny upgrade, you’ll find fantastic apps for bugger-all, with free upgrades for quite some time. This is something the Mac App Store should assist with further when it comes to indies, providing potential exposure, robust hosting and upgrades, and a simple payment mechanism.
Sometimes, though, people are dicks and don’t get the challenges indie devs face. Over at Sophiestication, evil indie dev Sophia has—like some other devs—announced that one of her apps will now be Mac App Store only. The thing is, she’d previously promised free upgrades until version 3, and this new version is 2.5. THE HORROR.
Clearly, Sophia should personally go round to every prior purchaser’s house, apologise profusely and perhaps offer to, say, do their shopping for a week, for free. Never mind that the new Mac App Store price for the app is $4.99 rather than $19.95 (i.e. effectively a tiny upgrade price and about the same cost as a couple of cups of coffee). Never mind that if you love the app you probably got more than $19.95 of value out of it anyway. Never mind that Sophia could have labelled the new version 3.0 and gotten away with it, despite her thinking that doing so would have been dishonest. No, bitch away at being ‘ripped off’ by an indie dev who creates polished, accessible, affordable software, who’s had to make a really tough business decision.
All you people moaning about how terribly disappointed you are, get over your fucking selves. It’s five bucks. If you like the software, support it. If not, just sod off and stop bitching about the amount of money you probably piss away daily (and literally) at Starbucks.
If this had been Microsoft though you’d be up in arms. The fact is that you were missold a product. It doesn’t in this case actually matter that it’s a small company, people bought it expecting upgrades and are now being told “Haha we’ve got your money fuck off”.
Promising free upgrades to a version number is stupid of course and that was the real mistake, a better move would have been “Free upgrades until 31/12/10” thus solving the “V2.5” issue.
They didn’t do that, they promised something then decided they couldn’t be bothered to keep that promise so I’m not surprised they’re getting flack for it. So they should.
Whatever “challenges” they face don’t exempt them from giving people what they explicitly paid for. This isn’t like say, Tweetie, where V2 was a paid upgrade. Tweetie never promised the new one for free. Sophiestication DID.
Dudley,
Microsoft’s software costs hundreds of dollars from a huge and rich corporate entity – that’s why there’d be complaints if they did it.
This is a small app from a one-person development shop. It’s a completely different situation. Was making the promise rash? Yes, probably – but, as Craig says it is beer money we are talking about here, even at full price. You can’t pay buttons and expect corporate levels of support and years of freebies – just deal.
People who can’t wear it will vote with their feet. Indignation in comment forums (and worse – there is some vile and nasty shit in the comments on her site after she posted about this) makes people look like entitled dick heads.
Perhaps they should have labelled this V3. That would have covered the bases. And stopped comments such as the one from Dudley.
Damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. I think that a number of indie devs will learn the harsh lesson that morality doesn’t come into business, not because it can’t, but because customers can be complete fuckwits.
She messed up from a PR perspective, almost certainly, but an indie developer charging such small amounts for their work cannot be expected to be a PR or customer service expert.
Promising the upgrades and not delivering was a mistake, but the actions of some of the commentators are truly despicable. Calling someone a “thieving c***” for a mistake like this is quite frankly horrific.