I think if you read TFA, the author would agree with you: the game was not quality because he made a game that he thought other people would want, and it didn't sell. He also spent way too much time going multi-platform and wasted a lot of resources. Much of his article wasn't about how the mobile platform is awful, but about the mistakes he made in his approach to it.

> quality games -- real quality, not monkey quality -- are getting written up in indiegamemag.com or the like. they're thirsty for real, quality games to write about because people keep submitting monkey-catching games or yet another boring, pixelated, hero's journey rpg to them. you can't expect spending 3 months of nights and weekends on a game and it'll beat out all of the awesome stuff indies are producing right now.

So you mean the entire job of a publisher? It's not so easy to just write a good game and release it: you need a marketing plan, and that's where publishers come in. The reviewer from indiegamemag.com should probably have heard of your game through word of mouth before he even plays it -- but word of mouth advertising is almost never accidental. Even then though, a good writeup on one site might have taken his total revenue from $7k to $70k. He still would have lost money. Marketing is the end-all, be-all of the app store, and he didn't have it. Though in all fairness, most of his strategy was a "me too" attempt to cash-in on mobile gaming, which doesn't work when your competition is paying developers $5-10k/yr in India or China.