Excellent points all around! As an indie developer myself I've had to learn these lessons the hard way.
I'd also like to throw in one additional point: Selling apps up front for $0.99 is a bad idea. It makes it look and feel cheap. The average user doesn't see any difference between $0.99 and $1.99 or even $2.99 anyways, it's all under the "impulse buy" threshold. Scale up the price to something respectable, you won't lose any sales[1], which means more money in the end.
Oh and here's one additional data point, if anyone is curious: we made a mobile game called Big Action Mega Fight![2] It came out earlier last year, initially as a free-to-play game. We worked hard at it, iterating on gameplay and pushing several content updates. In the end we got plenty of downloads but no revenue. The F2P model had never really sat well with us anyways so we ended up pushing one last big update and switching the business model back to premium and making more money in the process :) [3]. In my humble if biased opinion, the only reason we got any money at all is because the game stood out visually. Anyways I could go on... I'm happy to share more if anyone is interested.
I'd also like to throw in one additional point: Selling apps up front for $0.99 is a bad idea. It makes it look and feel cheap. The average user doesn't see any difference between $0.99 and $1.99 or even $2.99 anyways, it's all under the "impulse buy" threshold. Scale up the price to something respectable, you won't lose any sales[1], which means more money in the end.
Oh and here's one additional data point, if anyone is curious: we made a mobile game called Big Action Mega Fight![2] It came out earlier last year, initially as a free-to-play game. We worked hard at it, iterating on gameplay and pushing several content updates. In the end we got plenty of downloads but no revenue. The F2P model had never really sat well with us anyways so we ended up pushing one last big update and switching the business model back to premium and making more money in the process :) [3]. In my humble if biased opinion, the only reason we got any money at all is because the game stood out visually. Anyways I could go on... I'm happy to share more if anyone is interested.
[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/12/stats-99-cent-apps-arent-sell...
[2] http://bigactionmegafight.com/
[3] http://toucharcade.com/2014/07/25/big-action-mega-fight-succ...