Ok ok folks, while it seems one person in here "gets it" most of everybody else doesn't quite get it.
Universal Apps are meant to be Universal Apps. The developer makes one App and it works on all devices.... Phone, Tablet, Xbox, PC, etc.
This is a benefit to developers to make apps for the Windows 10 environment because at present, Windows Phones and the Windows 8.1 PC Store are not doing too well and they don't have a lot of prospective buyers for their app in each separate store.
But when you put PC's, Tablets, Convertibles, Laptops, Mobiles and Xbox's together under one roof, that's a **** tonne of potential buyers for your app/game.
If a developer has to break their app down to use graphics and specification suited for an Xbox, PC, Tablet and Mobile, etc.... And then charge different prices for each one because of this, then it's no longer a universal app.... Is it?
This then means that a developer needs to coordinate their app to suit the lowest common denominator.... In most cases that would be low end tablets and phones.
Example:
Angry Birds. The developer makes the game work perfectly fine for Windows 10 for Phones.... It is then available to be functional on tablets and everything above.
But, you ask, How do you prevent the game from looking all low quality and crappy on a 60" Smart TV while being played through an Xbox?
Well now I head into the speculation part of things, but I would assume that when a developer is making their app, they have a section where they adjust graphical settings based on the device being used.... Similar to how PC games have a graphics section you adjust based on what your system can handle.
The only difference is that these settings are automatic based on the device sending the request to download the app.
It's not really that much more work for the developer to do as they'd only have to setup 4-5 graphical settings while the code and everything else remains the same.
Pure PC games today require developers to have many different settings, like resolution, blur, bloom, brightness, contrast, texture quality, anti aliasing, aspect ratio and so on..... And they all have to work together properly based on users setting these things up themselves and on countless types of PCs using countless types of hardware and OS combinations.... All the while trying not to bug the game up or crash.
In the end, developers could set one price for this one universal app.... And because the available market for their app is huge compared to one isolated market (Windows Phone Store or Windows 8 PC Store, etc.) the consumer's costs for the app would either remain around the same price as todays apps or end up even less.
Would there be some $20 apps out there in the future?
Perhaps, but that would depend on how much is in the app, what you can do with it / features and who's releasing the app.
Currently there are already a few apps in the Windows Phone store that are pretty close to $20 and they're certainly not Universal..... Like Final Fantasy.
But will the majority or at least half of the apps get this expensive?
I highly doubt it and believe it would be only a small handful of apps in the overall collection... And they would have to be some top rate, highly popular apps that do some magical crap that people would pay for.
Finally, one also has to keep in mind the developer's competition in the store. If more developers jump into the store and more apps are piled into the collection.... And you try and sell your app for $20 while everybody else is selling theirs at $1.99 - $3.99, then not a lot of people are going to be buying your $20 app.
You will be forced to drop your price or pack up and leave..... Or market the crap out of your app and try to convince people it's worth the money..... But if you have the collective population of users from PC's, Xbox, Tablets, Laptops, Convertibles and Phones (which is a hell of a lot of people) you selling your universal app for $2 will pay off ten fold than selling at $20.
Let's say you sell your app for $20 and only 10 people worldwide buy it in the first week. That's $200 in your pocket.
Now let's say you sold it for $2 and because it's cheap enough for everybody to try, you get 1000 people worldwide buying it in the first week. That's $1800 more than what you would have had otherwise.... And you get more word of mouth and user reviews on top of that vs. The 10 people who bought it at $20 and half the reviews are from people complaining it's too expensive.
The word of mouth and user reviews from those 1000 people would spread much father and faster than those 10 people who paid $20.... Which means more people trying out your app, which means more money in your pocket.
You can see which pricing I would choose.
The Universal App thing will not be ideal for every kind of app/game out there and I see this type of app function worming with such games like Angry Birds, Airport City, Monopoly, Tetris and the like..... It will not work with such games as Halo, Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.
At best, those games will allow streaming and they will be able to be played between Xbox and PC's.... But not tablets or phones (thus not universal)
So to sum up, Universal Apps will no doubt be geared towards low intensity type apps like Facebook/Twitter/XBox Live/Sonic Dash/Angry Birds.
You will not see Far Cry 4 or similar like games being played on a mobile or anything other than a PC or Console.
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