[drewcrawford]

> I don't see any reason that the marginal value to the consumer of software would be near-zero.

If you look at the top 10 paid apps in the iOS app store, 9/10 are games. In a sufficiently large market, games are interchangeable; I might equally prefer hundreds of games. As long as at least one of those games is free, the marginal value of some particular game to me is zero.

Now this may not be true for example when considering applications used for business, that provide perhaps a lot of value. But these represent just a tiny fraction of the overall market, which is mostly games and other mass-market, interchangeable software. It is large in absolute terms of course; that is how a great many developers make their living. But it is very small relative to the overall ecosystem, so it is fair to characterize most purchases as having essentially no marginal value.

[coolsunglasses]

The games on iOS are interchangeable because they're awful and barely register as 'games'.

[Samuel_Michon]

Let’s see: Infinity Blade II, RAGE HD, Real Racing 3, Grand Theft Auto, Modern Combat 4, Riven, realMyst, Year Walk, Bastion, Eufloria... I would call those real games.

[lmickh]

Out of the literally hundreds of thousands of other games, those are just outliers. Even if you named another 200 of them, they would not be statistically significant to the whole list.

[Samuel_Michon]

If we’re talking about the majority, then the same can be said for PC games, yet no one says all PC games are awful. There’s a reason why the games I mentioned sell better than 99% of the games in the App Store: they are GOOD. There are hundreds of good games in the App Store, and even though that number may seem minuscule compared to the total catalog, it’s more than many other platforms have to offer.