I hear this myth perpetuated incessantly. (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). People paint the picture that it's the top 0.1% and everyone else with an unsustainable business.
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.
I really don't think the top 200 is as impressive a metric as you think for so called middle ground. I mean really, extend it to other industries.
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.
> 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.
> My two person iOS dev studio has pulled in 6 figures a year for the past 4 years.
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.
The sentiment is totally right -- especially if you take other countries into account. The numbers you mentioned are pretty far off for US -- a typical rank 200 game in iPhone earns around $4000-6000 or so per day, but worldwide we can expect the top 100 app to earn around 100k / day on both platforms, and the top 200 app earns roughly half of that.
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.
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.
So would you say there is no middle-ground for new developers? It seems what you're saying is that people with an already locked-in user base continue to thrive while newcomer apps are crowded out, regardless of quality.
Are you sure it's 5%? Apparently 250,000 games shipped for iOS last year. If true you're suggesting of those quarter of a million games 12500 of them are making enough for a small studio? I have a feeling that's a pretty high number but I have no evidence to back it up. 1% would be still be 2500 games and even that seems high.
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.
Not game-related, but in the "app utility" space, there's still a lot of room to grow if you're creative and can actually build tools that enhance people's lives. We've done 6 figures the last couple years on that alone.
Weird, I was a die hard mac developer (since 1984), and I immediately stopped when iOS came out with the app store. Like, stopped /dead/.
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.
I'm not sure I understand your position. The iOS platform has probably made more indie dev millionaires than any other platform in history. And countless others making a living, or make a few bucks off side projects. Or are employed by app companies.
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.
The entire reason indie devs were making so much money in 2008-2009 was due to the mismatch between a wealthy customer base demanding apps for their new iPhones and the tiny ObjC-competent developer community at the time.
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.
Weird - so you were uniquely position to capitalize on the growth period, but because you predicted that it would ebb a decade later, you decided not to take part?
I think it's possible that the "Technology adoption life cycle" can be applied to app development. With iOS you were in a unique position to be an "early adopter" getting tons of early exposure on the app store. If you were to try today you would not get much at all.
i don't know what to make of this. so you correctly predicted that 5-10 years of lurcrative sales in a closed system didnt feel right to you because you were a big fish in a pond that woud become larger, so you stopped /dead/ and did what? again, I am not trying to be rude, just trying to figure out what provided a better opportunity cost and was more interesting for you to work on that you gave up 20-30 years in the mac ecosystem?
I feel it's worth pointing out this isn't just some blog by any old indie development studio. This is a blog by Jeff Minter. The man practically invented home computer gaming. I was buying his games with my allowance 35 years ago, because they were great. And I still buy them today, because they are still great. If Jeff Minter can't make the App Store work then no-one can. (Although he probably could have done if he had been willing to make crappy games with in app purchase rather than make good games. )
The amazing thing to me is that at WWDC, Tim Cook (I think that's who announced it) seemed genuinely thrilled that there are over 2,000,000 apps for iOS. So sad and useless. You could hear the barely contained horror of the assembled developers. iOS has become a victim of its own success.
I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?
As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard.
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.
How is it that Sony PS4/Vita stores can sell these same indie games for $20 a pop? Sony pushes these games hard and gives every one of them a fair amount of free marketing. They also celebrate their game developers by writing about them on their blogs and press-releases.
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.
I recently tried for about 10 minutes to find a game that met my criteria, using the iOS version of the App Store. I wasn’t asking for much (at least, so I thought): I wanted a game that could be purchased once (no In-App Purchases), and I wanted a particular category. The search was practically futile; every single match was In-App Purchases. I even decided to stop caring about the category and it was the same.
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.
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.
That game looks pretty neat. You just sold a copy :) But it's a game I've never heard of before, and I'm pretty good about checking the new games lists on the App Store each week. So I think the takeaway from this shouldn't be that premium games (is $2.99 really "premium"?) don't work, but rather that you can't rely on free marketing to sell your game. Once a game falls off the lists, it's pretty hard for people to stumble across it unless they're looking for it specifically.
It's very very hard to make premium games on the App Store now. A typical top 25 premium game (which worldwide in Q1 were games like Five Nights at Freddy's or Scribblenauts Unlimited or Bloons TD 5 HD) earned about $300,000 in Q1 worldwide.
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.
This is when you need to build on your experience and go back for another shot. Maybe try a free variant with IAP.
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.
It's often hard for indie developers without marketing budgets, but in the same vein the whole gaming market on iOS is doing tremendously well. Here's a high level snapshot of iPhone earning by country, month by month:
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.
Aside some interesting comments here I find very true, my theory is that you should treat your game has a startup product: customers will not come, you have to chase them. And get them talk to their friends about your game. Just launching a game and making some marketing wont work. You need: feedback loop + word of mouth + growth.
The platform cratered with the dominance of pay to win games and the "freemium" model. This allowed the store to be cluttered with junk. I can't shop there, because I'm not sure what I am buying.
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.
Apple, goddamn. You had a potential major gaming platform on your hands – but almost 10 years later, we're stuck with $5-10 CPIs and store that doesn't even try to do anything with the long tail. Just open up Steam sometimes if you wonder how it should've been done.
I have a game that I made over a 4 day period on iOS and Android. It's not brining in much revenue, but it was a cool challenge. My game isn't really that great, but I haven't touched it in over a year as well as there is no motivation to keep working on it. Once too many bugs start showing up, I'll probably pull it from all 3 app stores.
It's sad. You don't need to see income metrics to support this, just look at the quality of the games. I'm an avid consumer of iphone games and the quality of them has been getting worse and worse.
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.
Other replies have mentioned it's the Vita, but I have to mention the game is called TxK. It's the third version of Tempest 2000 I've played over the years and it's an amazing piece of work. I can hardly believe I've been playing this guy's games for almost 30 years now.
I've seen other indie game developers say that they made decent money on the Vita: Vita owners are a small market, but they're very active and prepared to spend money.
These lists in no way take account of ad revenue. For the average indie game ad revenue now makes up at least 50% of the gross daily revenue or if well integrated can make up 70 or even 90% if the game is an advergame like the Ketchapps one finger frustration games.
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.
[+] [-] fnayr|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sago|9 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] Lerc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] archagon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] diziet|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] st3v3r|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ikeboy|9 years ago|reply
>look at the Top 200
There are more than 200,000 apps out there.
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] joelrunyon|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: Nevermind, think I found it down below: http://www.bmcm.co/
[+] [-] emsy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gcb0|9 years ago|reply
> middle ground
pick one.
[+] [-] buserror|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coralreef|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ingsoc79|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zepto|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partiallypro|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vonklaus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billyjobob|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eludwig|9 years ago|reply
I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?
[+] [-] eirikref|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jarjoura|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] retromario|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] eridius|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diziet|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] prawn|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] diziet|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mmanfrin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] highCs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mucker|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NEDM64|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] melling|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] golergka|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joeblau|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ascotan|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] projectramo|9 years ago|reply
" 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.
[+] [-] phjesusthatguy3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] the_hoser|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zelos|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Blaaguuu|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmiroslav|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kinnth|9 years ago|reply
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.