[jonhendry]

"Those guys are the typical case of the "free" brainwashing. They see taking money as something filthy and immoral to do."

I don't think that's quite the case.

They went free because they saw a lot of profitable apps using the free + In-App-Purchase model.

The problem is they didn't think through what their own IAP model should be. They just focused on not being exploitative (the part that makes many of those free apps so profitable), when they should have been thinking about how much they needed to charge to be profitable, given the single IAP they had to work with.

They also might have gimped the free version a bit more to encourage people to buy the IAP.

[dirtyaura]

And the thing that they also missed is that most of the Top Grossing free IAP games don't have a ceiling for IAP spending. This is very important, as spending follows power law curve, which is very well known fact among free-to-play game developers ("rich oil sheiks subsidizing the game for poor kids")

It's requires a bit of a game design ingenuity to make it work so that you can't just buy your way to victory, especially in multiplayer setting, but is doable.

[larrys]

"They went free because they saw a lot of profitable apps using the free + In-App-Purchase model."

I think it would be more accurate to say that they saw several well publicized stories about where that model worked. They certainly didn't read any analysis highlighting that strategy and how it worked for all that tried it that way.