I, as the “computer guy”, had friends and family asking how to pirate it. This is coming from SMS costing €0.25 per message (text only!) and also coming from people who would gladly pay €3 for a Coke at a bar that they’d piss down the toilet an hour later. It didn’t matter if it only took 3 or 4 messages to make Whatsapp pay off for itself, as they were sending dozens if not hundreds of messages per day, either images, videos and whatnot (MMSs were much more expensive).
At that moment I realised many (most?) people would never pay for software. Either because it’s not something physical or because they’re stuck in the pre-Internet (or maybe music) mentality where copying something is not “stealing” as it’s digital data (but they don’t realise running Whatsapp servers, bandwidth etc cost very real money). And I guess this is why some of the biggest digital services are ad-funded.
In contrast, literally never someone has voiced privacy concerns, they simply find ads annoying and they’ve asked for a way to get rid of them (without paying, of course).
I should say, I’m from one of the European countries with the highest levels of piracy.
Apps and the internet in general, for most people, is considered almost weightless and zero cost. In the race for market dominance meant dropping the price as low as possible to drive out competition.
Personal take on it: that's all just preparing children for the inevitable fact that everything from education over employment and housing to dating is mostly depending on luck...
Unfortunately that would still exclude plenty of good apps. There are a ton which are “free” with limited options and then have a one-time in-app purchase to unlock the full thing.
I see this and not see this.
See this = friend wants to check out app but it costs $1-$3. I'm like, that's less than a coffee or a candy bar that you consume disposably. Why not just try it and if it's sucks throw it away, the same way you might with a new food item? That argument doesn't work on them for some reason.
not see = Steam
Even mediocre food is still functional, and usually still enjoyable.
Quite a lot of paid software does not meet that bar. It's far more likely to both cost you money and waste a few hours (much longer than that food demanded, unless you got food poisoning).
I generally agree it's far out of balance, but I do think it's broadly understandable.
That's not even remotely close to being true. Plenty of people would order a $25 dish at a place and not like it. Not finishing the dish, or throwing a way a half eaten candy bar or bad-tasting-$6-cup of coffee is very normal. Plenty of (if most) food is meh or not enjoyable. It just serves a purpose and fills you and you move on.
Steam experience is closer to the feel of ownership because: - Most games don't just randomly upgrade. They are stable. - Steam is cross platform enough that you can use the software on different devices as if you were copying it. - Your steam account isn't the center of your digital life, it's access isn't subject to many associated risks.
Apps (“software”) and games are fundamentally different in the public’s perception. Look at the App Store, it has two different tabs for games and Apple is even making a separate app for them.
I genuinely do not know how to get a refund from the google play store or the apple equivalent.
(The downside of the Steam policy is it makes Steam unviable for games that can be played in full very quickly. Develops can also game the system by dragging out early game so the player is over the refundable time by the time they reach the rough parts. But this is for another discussion.)
I think it’s actually worldwide?
The explicit rule is you can get a refund on any game for any reason if both of these are true:
* You have played for less than two hours.
* You bought it in the past two weeks.
Source? I always thought this was a general Steam policy, as it's available pretty much anywhere.
* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)
* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)
> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.
> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.
> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.
Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...
I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.
https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...
Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.
https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...
But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.
The idea of trading something valuable for an abstract piece of software or paper is still not really natural to us, and is a learned behavior.
I still see a lot of people who are afraid of purchasing on the internet and give out their card number. My mother in law ask her daughters to call her a uber when she needs one because she is afraid of installing the app and giving her credit card number[1]. Yet she has all the social medias installed on her smartphone.
[1] The irony is she apparently don't care the her own daughters would have to take that risk for her.
That's not a fair assessment. Maybe she simply thinks heir daughter will be better at not getting scammed and she could very well be right about that.
If everything goes the way of ads and (for lack of a better term) enshittification, could consumer attitudes change?
Now, this market probably isn’t going to put you in the Fortune 500, but is enough to run a profitable business.
I mostly share your conclusion, but I think there is a specific twist: most people will pay for on the spot transactions.
We see it in spades for games: in-app purchases and season passes have a lower barrier of acceptance. I assume buying stones to unlock a character must be thought at the same level as buying coffee, as just a one-time purchase that doesn't require further calculations.
If somebody has never purchased an app, setting up payments in the app might be seen as “too much work, especially just for this one app”. But once you get the payments in there, each subsequent 0.99 payment is painless
the urge to buy goes down if the subscription is cheap enough ($.99 songs versus $12 a spotify subsscription) but having been through my fair share of attempting contract cancellations this isn't surprising.
My understanding is games with microtransactions optimise for "whales", people who spend inordinate amounts of money. While the majority of users don't pay anything, or at most very little.
My mental image of it is looking at Apple when the iPhone was 2 or 3 years old, and today's Apple: its current size dwarfs the Apple of back in the days, but it wasn't some small also-ran company, it's impact on the whole industry was still pretty big.
AppsFlyer's data on this was interesting, while not straightforward to interpret from our angle.
https://www.appsflyer.com/resources/reports/app-marketing-mo...
I think it's just if you're empire building - and Zuck is insanely good at this, one of the best - then it'll never be optimal to charge vs. grow massively and then monetize the larger attention base.
Zuck is also in a trench warfare competition with other social media players, it's far from a monopoly. He's historically been more inclined to do things that were worse for growth, but better for users when they had more of a dominant position - but he can't do that anymore.
Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat. Instead they're going to be stuck with the modern equivalent of BBM while Zuck and Meta erase their only remaining stronghold in the US as iPhone users continue to move to WhatsApp.
> Somewhat relatedly Apple really missed an opportunity with iMessage. Had they timed it right they could have had a dominant cross platform chat.
Google also had the opportunity to do this. Around the same time iMessage launched, Google made Hangouts the default SMS app on Android with a similar capability to upgrade to Internet-based messaging when all parties to a conversation had it. Hangouts was cross-platform. Rumor has it carriers whined and Google caved.
I'm kind of glad Google doesn't have a dominant messaging service, but it's only true due to their own lack of commitment.
There's no way they actually earned $500M/year. Even if Whatsapp had 100 employees making $200k/year on average, that's $20M on salaries. Add an another very generous $80M on infra/admin etc costs and they'd have been making $400M profit. With that much profit achieved within such a short period, in the QE funny money era they could have IPO'd at $50-100 billion easily.
Now the credit card company knows what service I am buying; I would get endless marketing emails from the service for buying additional things; my info as a person willing to pay for such a service would get sold to other companies; my credit card info would get leaked/stolen, ...
If the whole experience was literally as simple as handing someone a $1 bill, I promise I would pay for many many internet services.
Incidentally, this is also the reason, as much as I would like to, for not donating to public/non-profit organizations. Anybody who has donated to a political party or an organization like ACLU would know what I am talking about...
But then to book directly and get the "guaranteed cheapest!" price, I have to sort through even more options than on an aggregator, I have to create an account, and now I'm getting spammed from ANOTHER entity I never plan to do business with again. At least with the aggregators I have one company whose privacy settings I've already dealt with.
I don't know. Paying for streaming services seems very natural nowadays.
It's the friction of paying for something at all. There is no free sandwich, so people don't generally expect it, on the other hand there's plenty of free software.
I think the other factor is a bit of anchoring. I know this impacts me anyways. If there is a "free" alternative, then that's where I'm anchored at. I can watch youtube for free so paying for it seems like a bad deal. Where as there is no free alternative to Coke that still gets your Coke (as opposed to say water).
Flight comparators don't show "avaliable legroom" in their metrics.
As far as I know some companies charge more for seats near entrances where there's more space, so people are willing to pay more.
In my anecdotal experience, the people complaining about leg room are precisely those who are not paying for additional leg room. (Similar to how people who compare modern air travel with service in the 1960s aren't purchasing the inflation-adjusted equivalent ticket, which would almost always be a lay-flat seat today if not Wheels Up.)
Unfortunately those prices are usually not even close to proportional to the additional space (and even that would ignore that seating space is only part of the service).
This is true. One thing I note is that with the same dollar amount, you get even less legroom, luggage, etc. today than you used to back 10-15 years ago on traditional airlines. Granted the airline costs rose over time, but it's hard to imagine they went up to the scale traditional airfare has increased at equivalent service levels... Also the fact that things that used to be included are now considered "extra" looks like a good excuse for folks to complain about.
Even then the second most profitable line of business for airlines are credit cards and the banks who buy miles in bulk for their customers. Of course this is a US perspective.
How to you qualify the comfort of a seat with 20cm of legroom vs 30cm? Until we have a quality metric for flights that's also a single number we can't.
Strangely, some of my colleagues have 'paid' (work's money, their time) extra to avoid Ryanair, when Ryanair has the only direct connection. This I find strange.
Given the choice, I've long paid a little more if it means an Airbus plane, as I think the cabin is quieter. However, that's rarely shown on flight booking sites.
To be fair, that was in era when pirating was such a normal thing. Everybody at least knew about it. Cheap pirated DVD's were super common (I received them as gifts even) and everyone knew someone selling them. With people accustomed to paying for Netflix, music streaming, Office 365, etc. maybe a subscription version of WhatsApp would be more palatable. The problem is nobody will pay as long as the tech behemoths are offering the same thing for free.
I cannot overstate how unexpected this was and is to me, we talk about people in their mid-twenties with jobs - maybe (video) streaming / subscriptions services actually overplayed their hand in the current economic climate.
Doesn't make me super optimistic in this regard.
[1] even if most of it is void in my jurisdiction anyway
Interestingly, WhatsApp put up paid plans to slow down user acquisition [0].
On Androids, in some countries, WhatsApp continued to work even if you didn't pay the $1/year fee.
I don't know any Android users who paid back then, only iPhone owners did.
In this case the service started as free (and thereby training people that it costs nothing) and and only later tried to pull the rug out under people after locking them in via network effects. It's perfectly reasonable to refuse to financially reward such tactics.
It's also that people already pay ridiculous amounts of money for their own internet connection. There is no reason why with A paying for internet and B paying for internet that A and B should pay again just to be able to talk to each other. Of course the technical reality is different but that's at least partially due to how WhatsApp designed their system.
