I'm not sure if it is that great that the race to the bottom already started. Sure low prices are great for customers but in case of Cheetah3D I can hardly imagine how support could be offered for such low prices.
Obviously it's a tradeoff. If you charge less you'll get more customers but your support costs will increase. If you dropped prices to $29 I doubt you'd make $1,000,000 in 20 days the way Pixelmator did simply because (a) 3d is a much smaller target market (Pixelmator is essentially making money as an iPhoto companion and benefiting from the digital photography boom), and (b) Cheetah 3d is a much harder program to grok than Pixelmator (not an attack on C3D, just a fact of life for a general-purpose 3d program vs. a very limited paint program).
Edit: I'm not sure Pixelmator really had a choice w.r.t. pricing. Look at the strength of competition in the 2d graphics market. Autodesk Sketch is $15 for goodness sakes.
I think you
might get a major increase in revenues if you cut prices below $100 because that's a big psychological barrier (in the US market). Obviously that's a big risk and there are no guarantees. I think it's a testament to the quality of C3D that you can sell it in any significant quantities as an indie developer with a price point over $100.
I don't know. I think of you as a friend (even though we've obviously never met
). If it were me I think I might roll the dice. You can always tier your products if you need to back out (or convert all outstanding C3D licenses to C3D "Pro" or something).
Difficult decision.
Another option: work on a C3D release that allows naive users to do awesome stuff "out of the box" and
then drop your price — e.g. provide stationery files that let a graphic designer import a few textures and then render product "hero" shots with ten minutes' work. This might even be a severely "cut down" version of C3D (e.g. no modeling capability, just populating materials, setting camera angles, and rendering).
