Where have all the iOS games gone?
minotaurproject.co.uk
minotaurproject.co.uk
The truth is there's plenty of us in the middle still. My two person iOS dev studio has pulled in 6 figures a year for the past 4 years. The problem is not that there's no middle ground, it's that the everyone used to get guaranteed downloads, and with the removal of new releases and the never ending flood of apps, 90% of apps will get just about zero downloads after launch nowadays.
But there's still plenty of room for small studios like us who know their target audience and what works on the app store to make a sustainable business. So I'd say top 0.1% for the insane successes that can support hundreds of employees, but for a small studio, just getting in the top 5% can work.
If you're curious about numbers, check thinkgaming.com, to see that the top 200 grossing game is still pulling ~$10K a day on iPhone in the US alone. When you add all countries, tablets, and Android devices, you start to see you don't need a top 10 or even top 100 grossing app to make some serious cash.
So while it has gotten a lot tougher in the app store and it's increasingly difficult for newcomers with no experience to hit it big, there's still very much a thriving middle ground between the insane successes and the utter failures. I suspect that it's not well known is due to the fact that those in similar positions to us don't want to dish out the valuable knowledge they've acquired through years of experience that could only increase the competition.
(PS Jeff - if you're listening to. A new take on Llamatron would make me a very happy man)
http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/minotron.php
It's very good :). If it's not on the store anymore I hope you find some way to get hold of it.
It's essentially a port though. I'd love to see what Jeff would do with the Robotron format 25 years after his previous attempt.
(This makes me wonder why - given his love of Williams arcade games - Jeff has never tried a take on Defender...)
This is wonderful because this kind of revenue can sustain a lot of companies and studios -- and it does not take ad revenue models into account.
This is after apple/android 30% cut.
Even if being in the top 5% was sustainable, that's still a far cry away from the rest of the computing field.
I wonder what percentage could be classified as abusive software.
If that's the path I have to take to make money on iOS, I'll take a path on a different platform.
I think this is about much more than iOS. Anything that can be delivered online (software, music, movies etc.) is something that consumers think should be free. Strangely they are willing to get milked after download through things like in-app purchase.
I don't think that is true. I doubt many pay at all. I think there are a small number of people who are massively exploited to generate the revenue for these apps.
At the start of the year was the player aware how much a years worth of play would cost them? The key to whether or not something is exploitative in this respect is whether or not the player is spending more than they were prepared to.
Does either game disguise the cost and bring in extras incrementally to promote a sunk-cost fallacy? Do they force the decision to spend at points of particular tension in the game? Some games certainly do.
This is quite a good read.
http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g...
That's gotta be at least a couple of rounds of drinks each :D
PS: It's actually become a fairly common issue people seek addiction counseling for.
Yes. There are people that spend thousands. They also spend thousands on $60 AAA games as well.
The idea that players get "fleeced" is ridiculous. Spent $15 on Candy Crush, a game that you spent months playing? That really doesn't seem like a lot to me.
Edit: I should acknowledge that certain games, like Candy Crush, do play on psychological weaknesses. Not all free-to-play games (hell, I'd say vanishingly few in the sea of free-to-play games on the App Store) do. Free-to-play is the new shareware and try-before-you-buy. It's also the only real path to sustained revenue, and anyone that runs a game studio knows what I'm talking about with the roller-coaster that are games that take 1-2 years to develop and have an earnings bell-curve of 3 months.
I'm not willing to pay to win though, which is what most of the top grossing mobile games require.
We use rewarded video and advertising and IAP in free-to-play games our users play, but we have no desire to be exploitative.
The amount of room between basic free-to-play and psychological warfare on your players is enormous.
Rewarded video makes up about 10% (currently it's not in a very prominent placement, some games make a majority of their money that way - see Shooty Skies).
So to kind of answer your questions, the longer people play, the more they're worth to us, which feels fair to us (and again, they can pay to rid themselves of ads anytime they want). We will be featuring rewarded video more prominently, which allows the user to have more choice in the matter (although I'm betting they chose ads over cash most of the time, but that's just years of experience talking).
Edit: I should add that our ARPU (average revenue per user) is less that $4.99, so we'd still much rather people buy ads away with IAP.
after years searching, i am back at an open source chess client. sadly they are trying to add their own in-house-chrome-cast instead of just improving multiplayer.
...think in the end i always pick the games that give me an excuse to code patches. sigh. I am a lost case.
Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it.
Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.
By mid-2013 Candy Crush had over 500m downloads, and in 2015 was still pulling over 340m monthly players. By comparison, GTA 5 sold about 235m units total so your apple-to-apple comparisons are not so much.
As for "playing their game," I've been in this business since before the iPhone. I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing. Mobile gaming is fun and enormous and provides opportunities for small devs that consoles never did. That said, there is a wide range of free-to-play monetization, not all of which is pure pay-to-win. But this is the industry - you can bury your head in the sand, but you'll go out of business.
You may think jumping from one industry to another is easy, but you'd be mistaken. But you know, compare us all to King if it makes you happy. There are many people beating that drum, but they simply can't grip the economic realities of software and the mobile industry as a whole.
We work to make games people love to play. We have a lot of players. They've all told us how they prefer to pay for our games so that our families might eat. That's fine with me, and with our employees who love making games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take-Two_Interactive
>I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing.
I'm sorry but it doesn't matter how long you've been making games. If you choose to produce mobile games and then choose to make them F2P with IAPs and gems and bullshit, you did make that choice. You don't have to do that. Sure it might be the best way to make money on the iPhone, but selling drugs is a pretty darn good way of making money on the streets. It's a great way to make sure your family can eat. It still makes you a horrible person.
If you were making money before the iPhone, then there's your business model. Otherwise, go back and read your comment again, this time imagining a drug pusher explaining why he sells to addicts. "Sure meth is bad, but hey I'm making money and I'm giving people what they want, you just have to come to grips with the economic realities".
Thanks for killing the industry. Glad you're making a profit though.
AAA developers aren't entitled to make more than mobile games.
Even if you're not among them, I'm sure there are plenty of players who elected to make IAPs and are more satisfied with their purchases than if they'd spent their money on AAA games. To throw one more anecdote on the fire, I'd happily pay $60 for all my time in Candy Crush ... and another $60 to NOT have to play GTA V instead (just not my cup of tea, though some friends swear by it ;).
PS. Candy Crush is owned by Activision.
It literally is, because it's literally a clone of games that have been around for decades prior. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-history-of-bejeweled-2014...
I'm not arguing that mobile developers have less right to make money than AAA developers, that's a reply to the guy above me saying that AAA developers are ripping off consumers by charging $60 when mobile users won't even pay $10. AAA games take hundreds of millions of dollars to make. There's never been a hugely successful AAA game made by one guy in his dorm room over the course of two days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird). Mobile games are inherently cheaper and easier to make than AAA titles.
>PS. Candy Crush is owned by Activision.
Yeah, I almost added a line about "that's why Activision bought King for $5.5 billion." Because they make a shit load of money scamming players and their games cost absolutely nothing to produce.
Why not just play iOS games that you buy outright without IAP then instead of downloading the "free" trash that makes money then getting upset when they try and make money off you.
For what it's worth, "rewarded video" is, IMHO a nice middle-ground. It's a trade of time for value that doesn't require an out-of-pocket spend, and is user-initiated, and still allows a studio to survive.
Worldwide wise, paid games are doing worse off overall -- so US is over-indexing on paid games compared to the rest of the world.
With it happening to more and more developers, you can't really call it a myth. You can say that maybe their stuff wasn't really that good, or that they're an outlier, but you can't call it a myth.
There is also the problem of other people engaging in the sunk cost fallacy. If your competitors keep throwing good money after bad that tends thrash your business as well. Problem because there is always a greater fool with more money than you.
For example it took us 5 failures before we figured out what worked. Unless you're rich or have very understanding investors, you just won't get 5 opportunities to fail today.
Despite that, I still think anyone can make it to a sustainable small studio if they understand the app store market and their demo and have the resources to execute their plan.
> That there's no more middle ground in the app store, only the Clash of Clans and Candy Crushes and the rest with no downloads
Did he say anything like that?
In the version I read he said that his games weren't making enough money to be viable, though he expected the market to be big enough to support their work. No mention of middles, Clash of Clans or anything.
FWIW: I also let my Apple dev license lapse, for similar reasons. Perhaps I could have gained that 'valuable knowledge' through years of experience, to get to a point of making a modest return. Perhaps. But, like Jeff, I found other platforms to be much more financially viable.
Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. If you found more viable platforms of course that makes sense to pursue. I think that's what more developers who complain about the meager app store sales ought to do (explore alternatives), rather than just whine about the apocalypse and hope their downloads magically change.
This genuinely sounds like a problem for Apple. Without a healthy App Store ecosystem there is little reason to purchase an iPad!
>look at the Top 200
There are more than 200,000 apps out there.
And my point with the top 200 was that that's way beyond profitability for a small studio. None of our apps are currently in the Top 1000 grossing (I don't think).
The top 200 highest grossing album, concert, football player, movie star, corporate executive etc, are all making big money too, and not because these industries have a great middle ground, but because the top 200 on the planet in just about anything is the top 0.1%.
For example, I took a look at the very bottom of the list, the first company that had a report on its website I opened, which was Iggs, second to last game on the top 200 list, and it had 860 employees, mostly in low-cost areas like China. (more power to them, but for many HN readers, the prospect of competing with a team of 5 people who total your salary in the iOS game industry probably isn't very appealing). I'll grant, it's not their only game on the list, but if it was it'd still be a very sizeable studio.
This is by no means a middle-ground company. The notion you don't need to be top 10 or top 100 and that top 200 is good, too, is meaningless when such companies can have almost 900 employees. Check the list and you'll find lots of big ones, from EA, Disney, Zynga to Bethesda, hanging around at the bottom of this ostensibly middle ground list.
Anyway I do agree, there is a lot more middle ground than people make it out to be, but it definitely feels like an industry where mediocre talent doesn't really fly. Small studios have to do something special, unique, in a niche. That's a bit different from some other industries where you can make a living without really standing out. In that sense, the app store does feel like a place where the middle-ground is scarce and relatively competitive. And that's a new reality from 6 years ago, when you could still make money on flashlight apps, which is a lifetime ago in the appstore, but a short time for an entire industry in general to undergo such a paradigm shift. I think a lot of the myth you talk about is a narrative that contrasts the story we had not very long ago, when every app idea was relatively new and got the guaranteed downloads you mentioned already.
He's saying he himself is in the middle ground, which is a 2 man operation pulling in 6 figures.
EDIT: Nevermind, think I found it down below: http://www.bmcm.co/
> middle ground
pick one.
I certainly haven't looked at 2500 games in the last year, probably not more than 100 if that (then again I'm not a the target consumer so I have no idea how many games people look at). Still 2500 games (1%) is over 6 games per day.
This statement does not say much, because in the worst case, that's $100.000 divided by two equals $50.000, which is less than average wage for programmers.
In the best case, you make a pretty good salary :)
Anyway, I just wish Apple would disclose some numbers about app sales. There's one thing worse than government regulating a market, and that is a company regulating it.
Depends on where you live. Not everybody lives in the US, or even the valley.
Plus, even if $50000 is easy to pull in a lot of places as a programmer, with the mobile games they get to do it being their own bosses and creating the programs they want -- which beats working for a pointy haired boss or pulling all nighters for some "Facebook for turtles" startup.
The reason I could be a Mac Developer was the small pond; There wasn't a LOT of work, but there was enough for good people, and it paid well. On balance I /never/ developed anything for windows, because of the 'tree vs forest' problem : Even if you are REALLY fantastically good, there are so many people on the market that you can't possibly stand out.
And that's why I never even wrote a single iOS app, even tho i was a wiz at ObjC and OSX (Imagine a Classic MacOS dev thrown together with a UNIX wiz, and that's me); it was guaranteed to bring in the 'forest' to OSX as well, and make any 'edge' more or less pointless.
Also, from what I've seen, if anyone comes out with a nice app/game, there's a dozen or more group of people who will throw their dev team at copying it immediately, diluting any hope of revenue. It's these guys business model after all, you just can't win, and it's not like you can defend your IP anyway.
So, 2016, I wonder what took people so long to realize it was all doomed but for a tiny fraction of apps.
Quite frankly I still compile my old stuff now and then, but I have no regrets leaving it all for the hipsters to fight over.
AVFoundation is in nearly every way superior to QuickTime, minus the fact that you couldn't make ref movies with it until El Capitan.
QuickTime's API sucks in comparison.
Source: I write a video editor for macOS.
I have seen that quite often with my ex-colleague. Some people have been working on the company for ages, solving issues in the same business realm and just at the beginning of the next big thing in the company, they decide it is time to go someplace else.
I used to think they were just afraid they could not compete, or were technically rusty. With many more years in the industry, I understand that the most likely reason is that they didn't want to commit to another round of the same bullshit with new shiny tech on top of it and they simply needed some fresh air.
We are lucky to be employed in an industry where you can still say fuck it and find something else to do instead.
So yeah, the amount of money attracts a lot of competition, and no, its not easy figuring out marketing and distribution. Most of us fail, but that's really just the nature of entrepreneurship.
If you choose not to participate on a platform that generates billions of dollars annually, I suppose thats on your choice, and you could be correct that it is a waste of time for most people. But what is the cost of being a software developer who ignores this giant wave of mobile device adoption? You can't succeed if you don't give yourself a chance to succeed.
I think the assertion is something along the lines of that being possible because more indie devs are on that platform than ever existed before. Sure, there's a lot that made it big, but so many are in the pool that it's still a relatively minuscule chance.
The unlucky developer will LOSE money by releasing their apps. The average developer might break even or make a ridiculously small amount. Only at the very top/lucky end will you get projects (that due to social media, word of mouth or just random luck) that nets between decent to good money.
Now that everyone and their dog knows ObjC or Swift, plus the fact that most mobile problems are solved, the easy money is long gone.
As a counterpoint I grew up on no small amount of Jeff Minter games, lost more hours to Tempest 2000 on the godawful Jaguar than one should admit to in polite company, and have downloaded almost all of Llamasoft's iOS games due mostly to the fawning reviews in Toucharcade and played them for not all that long because -- frankly -- they are simply not very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS.
The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.
Thats not a very promising proposition to anyone considering making a game.
Yes
> with the studios that spend $millions on their apps.
No, there are plenty of studios that compete on quality without spending millions.
No, for example Crossy Road or Flappy Bird made some good money with a minimal team and minimal investment.
Not $millions like those studios, but also the creators didn't spend $millions in marketing and assets.
> Thats not a very promising proposition to anyone considering making a game.
Risks.
That's why most people find a job and not make games for the AppStore/Play Store in their room.
Could describe a lottery ticket win the same way.
I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?
And honestly developers, individual and companies, are peer pressure driven. As long as others make it a popular platform, they'll develop for it.
The only thing your metrics would do at WWDC would be to cement that unless you're the top app in your category, you're not making money, and Apple knows this. As long as they're super popular though, developers will keep trying.
Also, why would Apple do anything at their event other than make themselves look great.
So unless they start allowing third party stores, nothing will change.
What would a 3rd party store do to make profitability? Best case thy take zero revenue and you get 30% more money - from TFA it doesn't sound like 30% or even 300% would have made a difference....
Heck, you could literally just copy Steam in every respect and you'd end up with something significantly different from the current App Store.
To the degree the market will bear that price, sure. I suspect we would see both a raise in prices (of course), but also a realignment at the studios as to what the expected profit margin is.
> Would you be willing to pay more in that case?
If I could demo it to confirm it was worth the cost, or there was a fairly thorough review, then yes. Even if the "demo" version was ad-supported (and/or limited in some other fashion), that would be fine with me, I could update to the ad-free paid version with less permissions required if it was good. The problem is that they've discovered that ad-supported doesn't hold a candle to in-app purchases powered by game resource scarcity. That gameplay doesn't generally translate well to a paid version (unlimited gameplay resources makes it no fun), and it's too much work to expect them to essentially make two different games.
At this point I've basically given up on most app store apps. I do occasionally put the odd game on there from Humble Bundle though, and those are ones I pay for. You could say I'm getting a really good deal because I'm paying $5-15 for 5-10 games each time, but since I generally only play one of them...
Personally, I'd just be satisfied if they made a new category FREE+IAP and then we could search for and browse genuinely free stuff.
We went through this with the web between 2000-2004. All the money-oriented folks gave it up for dead with the dot-com crash, a number of tinkerers started to move in and play with it, and eventually we ended up with the GMail/GoogleMaps/Flickr/Facebook/YouTube/Reddit/AJAX/Rails explosion around 2004-2005. So usually 3-4 years.
This is an interesting time in computing history, though, because there are multiple overlapping tech cycles and multiple big companies driving them. During the web interregnum, the dominant tech company was Microsoft, and Microsoft basically completely controlled the channel to the customer. So we just weren't getting fundamental innovations in the browser - there was XmlHttpRequest and hidden iframes that sparked a lot of Web 2.0, and there was Flash from Adobe, but that was largely it. Today, we have innovation in cloud computing from Amazon and Google; we have innovation in programming languages from Mozilla, Jetbrains, and Apple; we have innovation in big-data tools from the Apache foundation and others; we have innovation in machine-learning from Google and a number of startups; and we have innovation in computing devices from Apple, Google, Pebble, Oculus, and a large number of other companies. So while the Apple ecosystem itself may face a dot-com bust, there could easily be a killer app brewing in technologies outside of the pure iOS ecosystem that uses an iOS app to deliver its service to the customer.
I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.
Of course category search is not going to work for everybody with 2 million entries.
If you want to search the games for genre, price, etc. go to toucharcade.com
The Apple App store in its current iteration is just mentally exhausting. Everytime I open it up I'm presented with a new grid of app icons and no context to why I should care.
To further detriment, Apple has trained the market to stay away from 3rd party curation of iOS apps in any kind of useful way. So we're left only with a gateway of lists. That's nice, but not worth my time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but ultimately an indie game has limited replay value because they're just so small in scope, but they're usually a lot of fun. So a one time upfront payment to enjoy for a few weeks is a great business strategy I think.
Edit: Not to sound like I'm bashing Apple here, as I don't think the Google Play store does it any better.
Contrast with my recent gaming experiences on the PC -- Civ V, The Witcher 3, Kerbal Space Program, and Faster than Light. All excellent games well worth their price that I was able to find out about easily. I don't know if anything comparable exists on mobile gaming, or if it's all just shit, nor do I even know how to find out. Back in the day Sony and Nintendo owned and published official magazines that were excellent sources of finding out about games, and many other non-official rags filled any potential void left over (I'll forever look back fondly on my afternoons after school spent reading issues of PC Gamer, PSM, and EGM cover-to-cover). Nothing comparable exists for mobile gaming, and Apple and Google could be doing a much better job of curating their gaming content.
Even something like Civ 4 is playable.
TxK, Persona 4, Binding of Isaac, etc were the icing on a great cake.
And their iPad "pro" initiative is DOA because everybody knows you can't make money selling productivity apps on the iPad.
Getting into the app business in 2016 is a mistake.
This may, or may not, make a big difference for serious apps on the iPad.
I deeply regret the day I got an iPad for my son instead of an Android device. At least ratings aren't censored or hidden there.
The browsing experience was almost unbelievably inefficient; I found myself scrolling through handfuls of games when I should have been able to rule out dozens. Apple likes to show you “only the icon” most of the time, which is really quite a terrible way to browse; you keep having to go in, out, in out, to learn anything about what’s in the list.
I ended up buying nothing at all because I couldn’t even tell if there were games that supported buy-once without any of the usual bullshit gem-buying tactics. Despite having simple goals, the App Store just failed me.
I like leaving it running while I work on other things, checking on it like a fish tank.
What did you expect?
The search to port the game for you?
Games with ads and that are incomplete, where you purchase the "complete game with no ads" with a single purchase.
So it's like a demo that you upgrade to full version.
The problem is that because there's no "demo" functionality in the app store, they get labeled as games with IAP which turns many people, me including, away.
Before IAP, there were Free and Full versions of the same game (with and without ads and other perks), like Angry Birds and others.
If they made a "demo" category where the game has ads and fewer levels, or limited play time that you could upgrade to full game without ads, I'd be much happier as a dev and as a consumer.
This would make no difference, people would just play the demo then move on to the next game. There are 2,000,000 apps in the store.... if your title is any good someone will clone it and put a free version up anyway.
Just to add another data point, we're small indie (games) developer, we spent over a year on our first title with very little marketing budget and these are our sales figures from our launch: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/E...
In short, decent sales but not enough to recoup our costs. Still, we never expected that we would hit gold on the first try. I think to be as sustainable on iOS you either have a successful niche product or a collection of product, with each release building a further revenue stream.
Top 25 game free to play game (which were games similar to Summoners War or Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes) earned about $15,000,000. There's a huge gap and this is apparent in what games actually gross a lot.
These are both iPhone only numbers.
That's another problem, there are so many good games coming out on a weekly basis, it's hard enough to stand out among those, let alone the 800 other games coming out every week.
We've experimented with various marketing ideas. Advertising is very challenging, especially when it costs more to acquire a user than we charge for the game. The F2P user acquisition market insanity has made this a complete non-starter. Press seems to have very little impact unless it's a big publication. So we're focusing on word of mouth and quality and a longer term outlook.
Leaving higher ARPU (free to pay) or viral customer acquisition. But yeh it's a tough market.
We had a similar run to you. Built http://www.hexiledgame.com/ and had great reviews and some flurries of downloads, but outside of features and basic press, it's hard to really get rolling. Our game was free with one optional IAP to unlock extra modes more quickly, remove ads, etc - I thought that was a reasonable middle ground.
If I was doing it over and wanted to make money, I'd spend more time on virality, incentives to keep people playing, and not cap the most a hardcore fan can spend on that single IAP we had.
The reality is that a paid game needs to get especially lucky to maintain features or word of mouth and see a serious return.
https://cloud.githubusercontent.com/assets/993499/16283312/2...
The industry grew a lot - surely driven by the most successful titles, but also for the longer tail of developers. More of the total revenue and earnings are captured by the top 100 publishers -- but still, even compared to 2012 or 2013, the 10000th biggest app is earning more due to the opening of all the new territories.
The game earning model moved from a hits based model, where you launch with lots of hype and reviews and generate a lot of earnings in the initial months to a model where long playing loyal players stick with the game over many months & years and monetize via longer term in app purchases. It's not possible to bring back 2010. We need to be ok with that and learn to engage users over longer timelines.
Of course these things are relative or subjective and what have you, but it's pretty rare for people who have a lot of experience playing games to seek out stuff on iOS because of the great quality of games there.
If you build a system that incentivizes garbage games, that's what you get, and well, that is what we have.
Fortunately if you are someone like me, who wants to make actual good games, there are still platforms where you can do that, and do quite decently money-wise. I am hoping those don't go away.
Garbage to me is the Flappy Bird clone with poorly sized graphics, ugly buttons and default fonts.
It's what the kids want to play.
I don't think the author's games are much better.
The parallel on the PC side of things of games that have recurring revenue sources lies in the spectrum of WoW / Dota 2 / TF2 / League of Legends to little known asian market MMOs where you buy xp boosts.
The top grossing games are played by a lot of users who play a lot. Similarly, the top titles on mobile have very repeatable revenue sources with high retention rates. I can't blame companies and businesses for investing in predictable revenue streams.
Now without a doubt there is a point of conflict between long user retention and addiction, and the drive to maximize LTV can be taken too far, but I don't think this is happening to most games. As an example, Farmville (2) is a well crafted experience in terms of mechanics, art style, pacing and progression for what it is trying to achieve. I can appreciate the work and thought that went into the game.
I can also similarly appreciate The Witness and I was happy to pay $40 for it. I appreciate the game for different reasons and different set of skills in game design and story telling and pacing of challenges. I love games all about gameplay -- heck, I spend time playing a pure maze puzzle game ( http://www.pathery.com/ ) that about 300 other people play. But this does not stop me from appreciating and respecting the game design work and decisions that went into making the mass market IAP driven games.
I might disagree with the long term reward-loop design of some of the titles, but I would not call them garbage.
Do you mean that's not enough?
(sarcasm)
Never noticied the AppStore was some kind of heaven where money rained.
Seriously, so much entitlement. If you want to make money selling games, you have to spend a lot in advertising, how much does Clash of Clans and etc spend? It's the rules, it always has been, what's the surprise? Maybe it worked for a couple of months out of novelity, but it doesn't work any more.
Get real, people.
And yes, it's free games with IAP the rules. Because they are designed for kids without credit cards that at most buy iTunes gift cards. And yes, it's jewel and candy games, because that's what there is for girls, which are 50% of the population that the "mainstream gaming" has abandoned.
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/the-apple-app-store-gravey...
The App Store will keep growing but it won't be good if half the apps are abandoned.
Once again, I'm too lazy to explain this in detail; just look at Steam again.
Really neat and creative games seems are gone and we're left with 'Qbert' and 'Bejeweled' clones being recommended as 'featured games'. Most of the great iOS shops seems to have left the market or have been drowned out in a sea of 'crapware'.
It seems that to be successful in this market you need to go back to advertising. Apple makes it very very hard to sort crap from quality, so you have to get your brand/name out there.
" the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally thousands of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users."
What was the platform? I wonder if there is a strategy to be carved out making games for Windows 10, Linux mobile, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter
TxK (PlayStation Vita, 2014)[43]
There is still quite a lot of revenue in the market place, just like there is on web. You need to be shrewd and think more about business than just creating and releasing a fun game.
Yeah, but the Sony handled has like N titles, whereas the iOS has 1000xN.
Yeah didn't think so, but Nintendo DS owners are.
Delete app to unsubscribe
Remove 0.99 one time pricing
$5.00 minimum one time download price
I believe the parent, and if not then certainly I, am talking about games that are subsciption based and promote full releases that get upgrades and create community. not a 0.99 clone. this market is largely rich communities anyway if you use the world income scale, but we aren't using that scale, we are talking about iphone owners with discretionary income already willing to spend 1-30 a year on games...
If you're going to make a fiscal argument then don't exaggerate your numbers by 60-120%.
They start at $400 and top out at $750.
If you pay $100/month for service that's your own fault, I don't know anybody paying over $60/month.
People that download games from the AppStore are kids that don't have a credit card, so subscriptions are not even an option.
Uninstalling things you use on extremely rare occasions is ridiculous. If I play something I want to keep the high score, etc. even if I never really use it. I'm not paying for that privilege.
Link to the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-8QtKz9...