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Comment by spaghetti | Hacker News Reader

Physical Tchotchkes have done well for 1000s of years. Do you think people will get tired of virtual Tchotchkes and go back to physical?

I know it seems odd that people pay money for essentially tiny bits of entertainment. But the fact is that's what lots of people want. If you want to do something positive try combining the virtual Tchotchkes with something partially educational.

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Frankly it's too early too tell if this market has legs. My guess is that it's a lot more limited than most of the current players think but who knows for sure?

What market, the app market?

The number of apps and gross revenue from apps has been growing big. The future of software development is mobile apps.

You might be too young to remember this but people were saying the same thing about the video game business back in the heyday of the arcade. Consumers are fickle.

I do think mobile is important but I think most of the money in apps will be integrating them into some larger business. For example, I'm starting a new app for a big U.S. retailer. The app will be free but presumably it will drive more business for them.

I probably am too young to know anything about the arcade business, but arcades died because better, more convenient technologies replaced them. Their form factors shifted to consoles, handhelds, and computers.

Consider now the adoption rate of smartphones, where we'll have a billion devices in the hands of users within the next few years. Mobile devices are now replacing computers and gaming consoles. Do I see anything replacing smartphones/tablets anytime soon? No. That's why the bet is obvious to me, your audience is shifting to a new platform. Apps ARE the future because that's where the audience is and will be.

True enough, but there's no "law of conservation of gaming". As interfaces, form factors and fashions change, so does the population of gamers and the time and money they spend on gaming. Some of the most brutal periods for the gaming industry have been when the current fashion turned against gaming. That there was a solid growth trend underneath the contrary fashion didn't make a difference to the many studios that went bust in the meantime.

Mobile is here to stay, I agree. But I think the future of this kind of mobile app business model is a lot less certain.

Its not the business model that will change. The business model works, thats why there is so much competition in the gaming industry and lots of money being made. What will change are the types of games themselves. Because as competition increases, acquiring a user becomes more expensive, so the games will have to have different mechanics and be of higher quality to differentiate themselves. Your smartphone is increasingly becoming your new console.

Maybe so, but what proportion of these apps generate revenue for those who buy and use them? How many such apps help people design things, build things, monitor things, simulate things, and discover things? How many mobile apps exist to run accounting, payroll, and HR? Server software that supports mobile clients isn't itself a "mobile app", unless your claim is simply that mobile devices can replace PCs being used as "dumb terminals", which, while true, means the more interesting software components will often be the non-"mobile" bits.

Even "mobile apps are the future of video games" is only true if the market for games that are neither "casual" nor inherently "social" suddenly dries up.

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