Re: How do developers decide the prices of products?
That is just one of many tricks and the process can be far more insidious than you might imagine, especially on mobile. Its actually been a real sticking point for some ethical debates in dev communities. You'll often hear phrases like "Monetization", "Whales", "Retention", etc. It generally revolves around psychologically manipulative tricks like cooldown timers, rewards points, and micro payments where they give you just enough to keep you coming back to extract maximum value. In this case, getting as many players as possible and farming a known percentage of them to find "whales", big spenders who either through naivete or a gam bling like compulsion and weakness to those tricks supply most of their profits.
PC tends to be a bit less exploitive, although there are still plenty of tricks at play. On steam for example people typically wait for sales to buy anything, because why pay full price when a sale is around the corner? So some developers up-price their games knowing that the true value they want will come during the "sale", essentially manipulating peoples expectations of value to get their desired profit.
It depends on a number of factors and not all dev's use those tricks. There's a bunch of articles that delve more into it you can read below, there are probably a few more you can find on Gamasutra if you dig for them.
[Chasing the Whale: Examining the ethics of free-to-play games]
[Report Anonymous dev decries the state of F2P game design]
[Why we dont believe in sales discounts and bundles]
[hearthstones new formats and the rise of digital scarcity]
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