[trevelyan]

tptacek,

This comment is not meant to be dismissive, but your advice is imho a recipe for dismal placement in the App store. It makes it much less likely that anyone will find this guy's application and will produce a bunch of 1-star rankings from those who do because "app didn't work" or "requires Internet" or "why do i have to register on server after buying app". Your proposal for server authentication also risks violating Apple's new TOS regarding subscription apps unless he moves to in-app payments and goes freemium anyway (which is part of the more realistic solution).

There is a non-obvious case to be made that this guy's Asteroids clone should be a paid webapp, but the suggestion is so counterintuitive to actual iOS marketers that summarizing all advice to the contrary as "blah blah blah" is not helpful. And I suspect that if you or Patrick had experience developing for iOS you wouldn't be so quick to believe that any strategy that doesn't involve tethering applications is "pointless and exasperating".

Piracy does not help with pagerank, but total downloads do wonders for visibility in the App Store as do the "others also downloaded" buttons. If Patrick is advising killing that marketing channel, he will need to come up with something else and if it isn't SEO I don't know what it is. This guy needs to leverage his freeloaders to promote the visibility of his stuff and be smarter about providing people with opportunities to pay him. For an example of a better approach look at the strategy of this company. Not only does free promote paid, but the price of the paid app is higher because it doesn't need to compete with other paid games for visibility in general channels:

http://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/sillysoft-games/id29253857...