A nice piece by Stu Dredge over at The Guardian, on Amazon’s Appstore terms. The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) is warning devs about Amazon’s pricing fluctuation, which will enable it to pay developers either 70% of the purchase price for their game, or 20% of the developer’s List Price, whichever is greater. The IGDA’s concerned, because:

Some developers will probably win in this scenario, but some developers – most likely, those near the bottom of the list – will lose, not gaining enough sales to offset the loss in revenue per sale.

And Amazon also reserves the right to make a game free that’s selling well, to which the IGDA responds:

This sort of promotional activity may attract consumers away from competing markets and into Amazon’s arms. But it might actually represent a net loss for the developer, which was already doing quite well and didn’t need to firesale its game at that moment in time.

Yeah, well, tough. This is how things are in Amazon-land. I know of a couple of book publishers who ended up going under because Amazon kept discounting products to the point that they effectively lost money, but Amazon’s not fussed, because it knows there are a lot of other publishers—and customers also flock to where things are cheapest. It won’t be any different for Android games and apps.

From a personal standpoint, I’m not terribly keen on Amazon’s terms, though. The rush-to-the-bottom on Apple’s App Store is bad enough, with games discounted within days of going on sale. While Apple’s managed to ‘train’ iOS users to buy stuff, they’ve also set an expectation that games should be dirt-cheap (something not entirely helped by giant publishers like EA and Gameloft doing regular fire-sales); and while I like games being more affordable (rather than being 30-quid cartridges), they don’t really need to be just 59p. But at least on the App Store the dev has a choice—Amazon’s terms are a little off in that regard.

Still, Amazon’s the one company that could really give Apple strong competition in the app/tablet/smartthing space, and so despite its iffy terms, I’m excited to see where it takes things.