I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games, so my mental model was seeing $0.99 as the pricing floor. If you want to arbitrarily choose an ARPU, we could get that percentage to any number we wanted to make a point.
> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available
I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.
It blows my mind that you open with "The amount of outrage from people with no P&L or game development experience in this thread is unreal" and close with "I wasn't considering F2P or ad-supported games".
Your "mental model" didn't consider 80% of the market by revenue?
From https://www.statista.com/statistics/263797/number-of-applica...:
> As of July 2023, nearly 97 percent of apps in the Google Play app store were freely available
I don't think "arbitrarily" is the right word to use here. Your mental model might have been $0.99 as the pricing floor, but that mental model does not represent the reality of mobile app stores. Paid apps are a minority on both iOS and Android, the dominant revenue model for mobile games is to offer free downloads/installs with advertising and in-app purchases.