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Last week Mac site MacHeist offered users a bundle of 10 Mac shareware apps for the bargain price of $49. The total price of all the apps bought separately would have been over $350, obviously for consumers the bundle was an excellent deal.
The reaction from consumers was massive. MacHeist sold 16,821 bundles, which though hard statistics are unavailable, given small size of the audience to begin with, might be the largest, most successful sale of Mac shareware ever.
MacHeist is the brainchild of Phill Ryu an eighteen year old mac user who previously created and hosted My Dream App, and John Casasanta, developer of iClip. "John came to me with the idea of a bundle sale, something similar to MacZot," Ryu says. "We started brainstorming about how to make it more fun than just another mac bundle sale and MacHeist was the result."
Ryu says they had no idea that MacHeist would be as successful as it was. "We weren't expecting the kind of sales we ended up with. We told the developers we were expecting somewhere around 5000 sales." The final numbers put MacHeist at over triple the initial forecast.
But the Ryu concedes that at least some of the additional sales may have come about because of controversy surrounding the event.
You might wonder where the controversy lies in a sales event that triples its expectations and donates $200,000 to charity.
According to some commentators, the most important people, the developers themselves, were left out of the equation. The controversy centers around how much money the developers were paid versus how much MacHeist itself made.
Though no figures have officially been released, some developers who declined to participate have reported that they were offered a flat rate around $5000.
Longtime Mac blogger, John Gruber, writes on Daring Fireball, "respectable agents or managers take no more than a 15 percent cut of their clients' revenue, and usually not more than 10 percent. That's true in sports, it's true for authors, and it's true for entertainers."
While that may be true, Mac shareware developers are hardly comparable to celebrities. Most sports celebrities for instance, make more than in an hour than all the developers of MacHeist bundle apps combined will likely make in the lifetime of their products. In other words %10 of a celebrity's profits is a lot of money, but 10% of the Mac developer's profits isn't.
What makes the supposed controversy even sillier is that none of the developers themselves are complaining. In fact most are quite happy with the sale. Oliver Breidenbach writes on his blog, "I don't care how much money the MacHeist guys make, I care about how much my company makes and how the Heist brings us forward towards our goals."
Additionally, because sales so exceeded their expectations, Ryu says MacHeist passed a bonus on to all the developers. "We've given pretty substantial bonuses, which work out to about double the money of the original agreements."
Ryu says that developer feedback has been positive. "Nine of the ten developers are very happy with the sale," he says. The tenth developer asked not to be named and delined to comment for the story.
"I feel like it brought a lot of focus to mac shareware." Ryu counters. "We had a lot of feedback from customers who said they had never even heard of shareware let alone bought."
If you missed out on the bundle, Ryu wouldn't give a date, but he did say that MacHeist will be offering another shareware app bundle sometime next year.
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