I think that becoming the most profitable company in the world has negatively impacted Apple, at least how I view them.
I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a lot. I plan on getting either a Surface 3 or Surface 3 Pro soon, and will put my old MB Air on the shelf next to my Linux laptop to be used just as needed.
Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground. The comparison is especially bad for Apple re: cloud services: Office 365 is such a good deal for $100/year compared to iCloud, with way more and better services.
As software engineers, money for hardware, software, and cloud services might not mean much, but I think it is good to look at what the general public will be using.
Recently I challenged myself to learn more about USB, HID devices and kernel development, so I partially reverse engineered and wrote a driver for the Xbox One controller. This is great and all, but it needs to be signed for people to use it without lowering a level of defense. Turns out you don't just need to be an Apple Developer, you also need to make a special request and regenerate your certificate, which needs to have a special extension, else it'll be rejected by the kernel signing system. Not the least worried I pony up 99€ (not a dev), submit a request, and an automated mail tells me I'll have a reply under 7-10 business days. So I wait 2 months, and, slightly worried since I have no reply yet, I submit again. That was 13 days ago[0].
I used to think that GateKeeper was great technology and that things will be okay. Now I have doubts: does Apple really care about its developers? How long before the kext-dev-mode boot arg disappears and kernel space becomes inaccessible to mortals?
> Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer.
Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like:
- International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or something, or change your keyboard layout and relearn how to type apostrophes. Everything else related to international text input is also much nicer in OS X.
- Trackpad quality: I've yet to find a trackpad as nice as the ones that come on Mac laptops
- emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.
Every time I update Windows, or even restart my windows laptop I hope that it'll still work afterwards.
Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it.
A while ago the fingerprint reader just stopped working after a restart. After a full hour of debugging and restarting I gave up. The next day I figured I'd try one of my debugging steps again and it started working again.
On my Mac, the worst that ever happened was a corrupted HDD. Booted into recovery, used disk utility to find and fix the problem and never had issues again.
Until an OS comes along that rivals OSX, I'll stick with Apple. I'm one of the few people I know that really doesn't put a whole lot of thought into hardware. Yes I need my machine to run properly but as long as there's a baseline achievement of performance I'm good.
Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.
One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back:
If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure.
Windows 10 is looking good. If it gets really, really good they might close the gap with Apple for professional users. Their glastnost/perestroika trend of opening up and embracing the dev community isn't hurting their reputation either. I really think Satya Nadella is turning the company around.
I'm not really a fanboy, so maybe my expectations are lower. I think Apple are doing a good job. I admire what I think of as Apple's unique quality: the product/marketing/tech strategy.
Apple insist on charging a premium. In addition they prefer to play the above median range of the market. Apart from first-to-market "freebies" they don't play for dominant market share. They insist on that premium, at the expense of market share and other trade-offs.
They don't play for check box ticking. They don't adjust to appeal to mobile service companies, IT purchasing departments or other buyers that make decisions about what other people will use. IE, it's not corporate sales departments dictating strategy according based on short term sales.
In order to get their premium they make stuff appealing enough to a subset of people that they are willing to spend their own money, pay that premium and get the thing that they decided they want for themselves. To make a stretched, contrived and over-complimentary analogy.. It's like a politician who wants to convince the voting public to join him in his position vs a politician that checks the polls to find out what his positions are.
Like I said, I don't have that much loyalty to Apple. I don't buy iphones because androids @ half the price are pretty good. I'd be interested if Apple puts out a laptop with a sub €500 price, but I'm not cranky if they don't have one. When they do happen to have a product that I buy for whatever reason, I'm usually on the fence mostly because of price but fairly well impressed once if I buy it.
But….I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking, and it's getting harder to justify buying a macbook. I still expect to get years out of the one I have, but I wouldn't be surprised if I opt for a €200 something when the time comes. Unless… Apple happens to be making something I'm willing to pay extra for at the time.
I think it's called Victory Disease. When you think you have been winning all the time and it will continue, your way of thinking becomes polluted, less clear, biased, slow etc.
>Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground.
To keep this on the rails, I have to wonder exactly how much Apple has paid out to developers on the iOS platform vs Microsoft on their mobile platform. The very first reason the author of the linked article cited for his decision to pull out was competition, which combined with having the largest payouts by a large margin speaks to the health of the platform imho.
Native vs. web apps has been debated endlessly, but the doomsday scenario for Apple's approach has which has been trumpeted for many years now has conclusively not come to pass.
I suppose if you extend the time horizon out to some Nth degree that may change, but what has Apple been doing in the meantime? Making a ton of money and paying a ton of money to developers.
Interestingly, the increasing role of the web and other platform-neutral software has pushed me toward Apple products. I now care much less about the massive amount of software written only for Windows, so I'd rather just buy the Apple product that I know is going to be a reasonably solid experience from purchasing, to updating, to customer support if necessary, to even selling when I upgrade.
My Surface 3 Pro is my go to, take with me device. I always know I have everything I need, whereas I obviously don't with my iPad. Hopefully the next Surface Pro will have a longer battery life, it is still a few hours short.
I recently started using the Windows Chocolately package manager, strange name, but works great and makes setting up a new machine and maintaining utilities much more simple.
> Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so.
Just have a look at the enormous amount of open research available at http://research.microsoft.com and try to find the equivalent of Apple. That tells me enough.
For general consumers, Microsoft is catching up. But Apple never really gained marketshare there because of its high prices.
For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.
Microsoft is heading in a good direction. I do like Surface 3 and 3 Pro. But the battery life of Windows laptops (including Surface) is still not good enough. We have to admit Apple does well in Macbook's battery life.
Just out of curiosity: is using IntelliJ on the HP Stream a good experience? Considering a similar purchase (chromebook C720p) but afraid of performance issues...
My gripe with Apple is all these Operating system upgrades in iOS and OS X. I understand the need to change, and security is of utmost importance, but don't alienate your customer base with OS's that need hours of tweaking, and then you still have programs that don't work, and missing files. I can't imagine Steve Jobs would be running the ship this way. Are their products still the best-- yes, but the margin is closing in my little world.
It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else.
Spiderweb throwing in the towel I would guess has a lot more to do with their #1 point "Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level." than the others.
The top two grossing games - Clash of Clans and Game of War - receive metacritic scores of 74 and 67 respectively.
Whereas the most recent SpiderWeb release I can find - Avernum 2: Crystal Souls - sits at 81
The organic discovery issue is only a small component of the problem when you look at the sheer amount of money that the micro guys can afford to dump into the mobile-advertising economy.
And as anybody who's spent 5 mins on app-store "optimization" knows - the better your paid, the better your organic - by a right mile.
I hate ending comments like this without a solution but the best context we have is watching Zynga get eroded / replaced on FB at some point.
But their death blow was the rise of FB's platform selling ads to the mobile OS guys mentioned above who essentially just out-zynga'd Zynga.
When you create an app economy that provides outsized rewards to the vultures, of course they'll control the board, wonder where this winds up.
> It is fascinating how much the "micro-transaction" model on the iOS platform continues to bury everything else.
It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS.
So basically the only platforms where this happens are the two primary cellphone platforms.
Spiderweb can't compete with the likes of Supercell because their games are niche.
It's an old-school 2D party-based rpg, it looks dated and they recycle the engine year after year to release more games, as their loyal fanbase is more interested in the new storylines and quests than they are in gameplay updates.
I love spiderweb games, but you could spend millions marketing them and they would still be niche, I don't think the discovery issue is the only challenge here; casual management games are the Call of Duty of mobile gaming.
IAPs have destroyed the gaming market on iOS. Funnily enough there's a lot of money being thrown around and a few companies have become rich, but if you're looking for quality it's really really difficult to find something worthwile.
I was hoping that iOS could become a premium platform for games, with titles like Broken sword, The orient express and others. There are a few gems here and there, but most of it is IAP-infested, pay to win. Even if I could in theory play those few good games, I've decided to give up on the iPad, as ultimately those companies won't be able to support themselves and I expect fewer and fewer quality games.
I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work.
The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a result, the best games either get lost in the sea of free stuff, or completely forgo a demo and just list in the paid section. Quality content doesn't stand a chance.
Meta critic reviews don't hold much weight for me here, there's a knee jerk mentality in much of the professional press against all freemium games that's justified in many cases but certainly not across the board.
I don't play Clash of Clans or Game of War but I do play Boom Beach from Supercell and I can tell you with zero spent in over a year its far and away better than any other mobile game I've seen and I've bought almost every 4.5 star or better Toucharcade game for iOS.
I own a couple of Spiderweb Software games on Windows, and play them on my Windows 8.1 tablet. They almost play like they were made for a touch screen (and they run great on the ancient dual-core Atom and stupidly non-existent video card in my Thinkpad Tablet 2).
Actually the only thing I need a keyboard for is if I have selected a magic spell and want to cancel casting it. Then I need to pair my Bluetooth keyboard just to hit the escape key.
So, Jeff, let the world know that your games run un-altered on x86-based Windows tablets, even quite old ones. You don't even need to change any of your development processes to target the platform. It's already Windows.
I enjoyed the heck out of developing drivers for that thing—it was a constant uphill battle to even get correctness, nonetheless, the pretty decent performance we got. In the end, my tablet's battery died, and it now sits in a drawer, forgotten.
The app stores need what Steam has added a touch of lately, other lists curated by anyone that highlight good games. The Appstore top lists are full of bad games and ones I am tired of seeing. You can't hide them and they still show even if you bought them.
Places like Touch Arcade and other curations also highlight lots of great games. There needs to be the ability to make curated lists like a mall within the app stores just like Steam or the actual internet.
The markets and stores should always be open to developer submissions, they should always have top lists of different types and categories, but they also need curated lists of games that you can browse and find within the store. This alone would put more quality games in the top lists that actually have gameplay and are worth it.
> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level.
This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels?
The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened. There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.
I follow Ipad gaming quite closely because it is perfect for my commutes. I would consider myself as close to a hardcore ipad gamer as it is possible to get - I read specialist sites like pockettactics and spend well over a hundred dollars a year on ipad games. I had never heard of this company or its games before.
The ipad is a marketing platform in the best and worst way I can mean that. Looking at this company they seem aggressively anti-marketing. Their entire presentation style and format is opposed to the kind of experience the ipad offers. They are the anti-flipboard. The fact that someone as interested in ipad gaming as me was not even aware their games existed until now suggests it is probably not the best platform for them at all.
That is one of the reasons, I avoid Apple as much I can. The hardware is really good and also the software often is. But the company politics just kills it off for me.
They just don't care about the small developer (and sometimes not even about the customers). When they have an idea, how the world should be, they change everything needed and don't care about the effects on small software vendors or even some customers.
Apple once made this genius tv spot about 1984. Apple for me has become, what they accused IBM to be at 1984. The crazy thing is, that the normal Apple customer does not care.
I teach both iOS/UIKit and OS X/AppKit in some of my courses and I have to rewrite my solutions every year. So much is deprecated and so much changes. If you write mildly sophisticated apps for iOS, just prepare to rewrite them every year.
Just look at the evolution of memory management from retain/release, to gc, to ARC, throw in properties, etc...
Not to mention the API's that are constantly deprecated.
Even my model (non-IU) classes get overhauled.
> 2. Changes in iOS 8.3 completely broke the engine we have been using for the last several years.
This. Apple has been a specialist at breaking compatibility. Microsoft has been much better at that. Backward compatibility is so important, not having it is pretty risky if you want to keep mac developers.
XCode is a good example of that. At every new XCode versions, things have to be reconfigured.
That's too bad, but I do understand the sentiment. Ive been playing Spiderweb software games since I was a kid, and did in fact buy one of the Avernum games for my iPad, which I quite enjoyed (though the graphics were a bit to small, and hard to click on in some places).
Honest question: how/why is it legal for Apple to ban any other "app store" from existing? I understand the motivation to require the presence of an intermediary to combat malicious software, but it seems blatantly anti-competitive to forbid competition within the domain of providing this intermediation service.
Similarly, why haven't any major app companies challenged Apple on the 30% app store charge, and how it is inconsistently enforced? For example, rdio charges a premium if you purchase a subscription through the app store, but MLB radio does not.
I don't know much about these things, but as a user I think it's fair to conclude that Apple has not done a very good job of app store stewardship, and I personally would welcome potential new overlords.
> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level. As a result, sales for our games has dropped massively and the cost of advertising them has shot through the roof.
Indeed. It seems nowadays, with Apple and Google, that the company with the deepest pockets for advertisement takes it all.
Money is screwing up the evolutionary game that capitalism is trying to be.
You know something is wrong when I find myself not only agreeing with everything the author writes, but when I'm also fearful to publicly state that I agree for the concern that it might hurt my own app store submissions if big brother notices.
Every iOS update breaks our app, in stupidly unexplainable ways. It takes months of work just to maintain a steady state between app store versions, and I feel that the magnitude of work required to keep up with iOS 7 and now iOS 8 was much worse than going from 5 to 6.
Android is not much better, but I feel that iOS is slowly getting worse and it makes me sad.
Sort of "meta," but I am getting the feeling that the whole "mobile is the future everything else is dead make everything for phones!" era is going the way of "web/cloud is the future everything else is dead write everything for the browser!"
Obviously mobile ain't going anywhere any more than the web is... I am referring to the mobile-only and everything else is dead mania. I feel like it has maybe a year or two left in it.
Question is: what is the next thing that is "the future" and will make everything else "dead"? Internet of things?
Apple isn't changing, they've always wrested control of their platform from developers. This approach is obviously working for them, this time next year we'll all be talking about "watch first web development."
I read the article and while Jeff made valid points, I wonder if he would've benefited from having a PR/marketing person vet his messaging. His article can easily be dismissed as hyperventilating about change and as a reader it's unclear what action I should take after absorbing his point of view.
This is a single twist of fate. It has no meaning except for the individual. He just doesn't want to keep up any more. His decision. But it has nothing to do with Apple.
> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level.
I'm portuguese. I've an Ipad but I never bought any app. The market is so full of good free apps that I never needed to buy any. Most of my friends don't spend much in apps also. This makes me think that App store gets money only from very specific countries. Will App Store become like Google Store as soon as these countries get used to get apps for free?
There was a story on here a month or two ago interviewing the founder of the company. This is basically a one-man shop, and from the few games I have played in their offerings, they look like a little more work to put together than Flappy Bird.
If it's too much of a hassle for the return he's getting on it, then it makes perfect sense to refocus efforts.
[+] [-] mark_l_watson|11 years ago|reply
I wrote the chess program given away free with the early Apple IIs, made some good money on a Mac app in 1984, and until recently favored Mac laptops: a fan boy. That is changing. I bought an incredibly cheap and underpowered Windows 8.1 laptop in January (HP Stream 11) for $199 and like it quite a lot. I plan on getting either a Surface 3 or Surface 3 Pro soon, and will put my old MB Air on the shelf next to my Linux laptop to be used just as needed.
Microsoft seems to be heading in a good direction, Apple less so. Things like living in a web browser and a platform neutral IDE (I use IntelliJ for Clojure, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby) make OS platform less impactful on using a computer. I am looking at Surface 3 Pros and Surface 3s, price and feature wise, vs. Apple products and I find Apple losing ground. The comparison is especially bad for Apple re: cloud services: Office 365 is such a good deal for $100/year compared to iCloud, with way more and better services.
As software engineers, money for hardware, software, and cloud services might not mean much, but I think it is good to look at what the general public will be using.
[+] [-] lloeki|11 years ago|reply
Recently I challenged myself to learn more about USB, HID devices and kernel development, so I partially reverse engineered and wrote a driver for the Xbox One controller. This is great and all, but it needs to be signed for people to use it without lowering a level of defense. Turns out you don't just need to be an Apple Developer, you also need to make a special request and regenerate your certificate, which needs to have a special extension, else it'll be rejected by the kernel signing system. Not the least worried I pony up 99€ (not a dev), submit a request, and an automated mail tells me I'll have a reply under 7-10 business days. So I wait 2 months, and, slightly worried since I have no reply yet, I submit again. That was 13 days ago[0].
I used to think that GateKeeper was great technology and that things will be okay. Now I have doubts: does Apple really care about its developers? How long before the kext-dev-mode boot arg disappears and kernel space becomes inaccessible to mortals?
[0]: https://github.com/lloeki/xbox_one_controller/issues/2
[+] [-] Zarel|11 years ago|reply
Really? I'd think this would make the remaining things matter more. Things like:
- International text input: in OS X, out of the box, é is opt+e, e (or the now even easier: hold down e and choose é from the menu). In Windows, é is alt+0233 or something, or change your keyboard layout and relearn how to type apostrophes. Everything else related to international text input is also much nicer in OS X.
- Trackpad quality: I've yet to find a trackpad as nice as the ones that come on Mac laptops
- emacs keybindings in every text box! Anyone? ...Anyone? Maybe it's just me.
[+] [-] donkeyd|11 years ago|reply
Updating has previously killed my dedicated graphics card, which turned out to be a driver issue. With Intel providing 2 nearly identical drivers one of which kills it.
A while ago the fingerprint reader just stopped working after a restart. After a full hour of debugging and restarting I gave up. The next day I figured I'd try one of my debugging steps again and it started working again.
On my Mac, the worst that ever happened was a corrupted HDD. Booted into recovery, used disk utility to find and fix the problem and never had issues again.
Also, dat touchpad, nothing competes...
[+] [-] ryanSrich|11 years ago|reply
Obviously I'd never be able to give up OSX for work purposes. Pretty much every piece of software I use is tied to OSX only.
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure.
Windows 10 is looking good. If it gets really, really good they might close the gap with Apple for professional users. Their glastnost/perestroika trend of opening up and embracing the dev community isn't hurting their reputation either. I really think Satya Nadella is turning the company around.
[+] [-] netcan|11 years ago|reply
Apple insist on charging a premium. In addition they prefer to play the above median range of the market. Apart from first-to-market "freebies" they don't play for dominant market share. They insist on that premium, at the expense of market share and other trade-offs.
They don't play for check box ticking. They don't adjust to appeal to mobile service companies, IT purchasing departments or other buyers that make decisions about what other people will use. IE, it's not corporate sales departments dictating strategy according based on short term sales.
In order to get their premium they make stuff appealing enough to a subset of people that they are willing to spend their own money, pay that premium and get the thing that they decided they want for themselves. To make a stretched, contrived and over-complimentary analogy.. It's like a politician who wants to convince the voting public to join him in his position vs a politician that checks the polls to find out what his positions are.
Like I said, I don't have that much loyalty to Apple. I don't buy iphones because androids @ half the price are pretty good. I'd be interested if Apple puts out a laptop with a sub €500 price, but I'm not cranky if they don't have one. When they do happen to have a product that I buy for whatever reason, I'm usually on the fence mostly because of price but fairly well impressed once if I buy it.
But….I suspect the €1000+ laptop market is going to keep shrinking, and it's getting harder to justify buying a macbook. I still expect to get years out of the one I have, but I wouldn't be surprised if I opt for a €200 something when the time comes. Unless… Apple happens to be making something I'm willing to pay extra for at the time.
[+] [-] ap22213|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dba7dba|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deveac|11 years ago|reply
To keep this on the rails, I have to wonder exactly how much Apple has paid out to developers on the iOS platform vs Microsoft on their mobile platform. The very first reason the author of the linked article cited for his decision to pull out was competition, which combined with having the largest payouts by a large margin speaks to the health of the platform imho. Native vs. web apps has been debated endlessly, but the doomsday scenario for Apple's approach has which has been trumpeted for many years now has conclusively not come to pass. I suppose if you extend the time horizon out to some Nth degree that may change, but what has Apple been doing in the meantime? Making a ton of money and paying a ton of money to developers.
[+] [-] baddox|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dade_|11 years ago|reply
I recently started using the Windows Chocolately package manager, strange name, but works great and makes setting up a new machine and maintaining utilities much more simple.
[+] [-] amelius|11 years ago|reply
Just have a look at the enormous amount of open research available at http://research.microsoft.com and try to find the equivalent of Apple. That tells me enough.
[+] [-] csomar|11 years ago|reply
For Professionals, (especially software developers), I don't think so. OS X is still very superior to Windows. And the apps on OS X makes it worthwhile.
[+] [-] pjmlp|11 years ago|reply
Same would apply to most modern programming stacks that come with batteries.
Given that I used to like Windows, before getting into the UNIX world. As it was huge improvement over plain *-DOS for someone with Amiga envy.
Going back wasn't a big deal specially given the Windows office requirements.
I enjoy playing with Macs since the LC days at the university, but always was put off by the hardware combination that was given at their price range.
For me the GPU/CPU combo is quite important.
[+] [-] Steko|11 years ago|reply
The general public really isn't using Office 365 or Surface 3 though.
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinceyuan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roma1n|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marincounty|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pXMzR2A|11 years ago|reply
o_O
Was the whole post in a sarcastic tone, or just this part? Serious question.
[+] [-] aresant|11 years ago|reply
Spiderweb throwing in the towel I would guess has a lot more to do with their #1 point "Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level." than the others.
The top two grossing games - Clash of Clans and Game of War - receive metacritic scores of 74 and 67 respectively.
Whereas the most recent SpiderWeb release I can find - Avernum 2: Crystal Souls - sits at 81
The organic discovery issue is only a small component of the problem when you look at the sheer amount of money that the micro guys can afford to dump into the mobile-advertising economy.
And as anybody who's spent 5 mins on app-store "optimization" knows - the better your paid, the better your organic - by a right mile.
I hate ending comments like this without a solution but the best context we have is watching Zynga get eroded / replaced on FB at some point.
But their death blow was the rise of FB's platform selling ads to the mobile OS guys mentioned above who essentially just out-zynga'd Zynga.
When you create an app economy that provides outsized rewards to the vultures, of course they'll control the board, wonder where this winds up.
(1) http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/clash-of-clans, http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios/game-of-war---fire-age, http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/avernum-2-crystal-souls
[+] [-] pivo|11 years ago|reply
Sorry, I guess my English is bad. I do not understand this sentence. Could you explain?
[+] [-] Mithaldu|11 years ago|reply
It's not only iOS, it's exactly the same thing on Android. Some companies also tried it on Vita and PS3 with games like Rainbow Moon and Destiny of Spirits, but ultimately failed. Interestingly i've also been able to get people to completely drop free-to-pay games by getting them other hardware like PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS.
So basically the only platforms where this happens are the two primary cellphone platforms.
[+] [-] mpeg|11 years ago|reply
It's an old-school 2D party-based rpg, it looks dated and they recycle the engine year after year to release more games, as their loyal fanbase is more interested in the new storylines and quests than they are in gameplay updates.
I love spiderweb games, but you could spend millions marketing them and they would still be niche, I don't think the discovery issue is the only challenge here; casual management games are the Call of Duty of mobile gaming.
[+] [-] blub|11 years ago|reply
I was hoping that iOS could become a premium platform for games, with titles like Broken sword, The orient express and others. There are a few gems here and there, but most of it is IAP-infested, pay to win. Even if I could in theory play those few good games, I've decided to give up on the iPad, as ultimately those companies won't be able to support themselves and I expect fewer and fewer quality games.
[+] [-] seanalltogether|11 years ago|reply
The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a result, the best games either get lost in the sea of free stuff, or completely forgo a demo and just list in the paid section. Quality content doesn't stand a chance.
[+] [-] Steko|11 years ago|reply
I don't play Clash of Clans or Game of War but I do play Boom Beach from Supercell and I can tell you with zero spent in over a year its far and away better than any other mobile game I've seen and I've bought almost every 4.5 star or better Toucharcade game for iOS.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
Actually the only thing I need a keyboard for is if I have selected a magic spell and want to cancel casting it. Then I need to pair my Bluetooth keyboard just to hit the escape key.
So, Jeff, let the world know that your games run un-altered on x86-based Windows tablets, even quite old ones. You don't even need to change any of your development processes to target the platform. It's already Windows.
[+] [-] thechao|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|11 years ago|reply
Places like Touch Arcade and other curations also highlight lots of great games. There needs to be the ability to make curated lists like a mall within the app stores just like Steam or the actual internet.
The markets and stores should always be open to developer submissions, they should always have top lists of different types and categories, but they also need curated lists of games that you can browse and find within the store. This alone would put more quality games in the top lists that actually have gameplay and are worth it.
[+] [-] eridius|11 years ago|reply
This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels?
The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened. There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.
[+] [-] takasc2|11 years ago|reply
The ipad is a marketing platform in the best and worst way I can mean that. Looking at this company they seem aggressively anti-marketing. Their entire presentation style and format is opposed to the kind of experience the ipad offers. They are the anti-flipboard. The fact that someone as interested in ipad gaming as me was not even aware their games existed until now suggests it is probably not the best platform for them at all.
[+] [-] untog|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PythonicAlpha|11 years ago|reply
They just don't care about the small developer (and sometimes not even about the customers). When they have an idea, how the world should be, they change everything needed and don't care about the effects on small software vendors or even some customers.
Apple once made this genius tv spot about 1984. Apple for me has become, what they accused IBM to be at 1984. The crazy thing is, that the normal Apple customer does not care.
[+] [-] waynecochran|11 years ago|reply
Just look at the evolution of memory management from retain/release, to gc, to ARC, throw in properties, etc... Not to mention the API's that are constantly deprecated. Even my model (non-IU) classes get overhauled.
In the end the apps are doing anything better...
[+] [-] jokoon|11 years ago|reply
This. Apple has been a specialist at breaking compatibility. Microsoft has been much better at that. Backward compatibility is so important, not having it is pretty risky if you want to keep mac developers.
XCode is a good example of that. At every new XCode versions, things have to be reconfigured.
[+] [-] jnem|11 years ago|reply
Still a great source of classic RPG gameplay.
[+] [-] gmisra|11 years ago|reply
Similarly, why haven't any major app companies challenged Apple on the 30% app store charge, and how it is inconsistently enforced? For example, rdio charges a premium if you purchase a subscription through the app store, but MLB radio does not.
I don't know much about these things, but as a user I think it's fair to conclude that Apple has not done a very good job of app store stewardship, and I personally would welcome potential new overlords.
[+] [-] amelius|11 years ago|reply
Indeed. It seems nowadays, with Apple and Google, that the company with the deepest pockets for advertisement takes it all.
Money is screwing up the evolutionary game that capitalism is trying to be.
[+] [-] verelo|11 years ago|reply
Every iOS update breaks our app, in stupidly unexplainable ways. It takes months of work just to maintain a steady state between app store versions, and I feel that the magnitude of work required to keep up with iOS 7 and now iOS 8 was much worse than going from 5 to 6.
Android is not much better, but I feel that iOS is slowly getting worse and it makes me sad.
Edit: Spelling
[+] [-] api|11 years ago|reply
Obviously mobile ain't going anywhere any more than the web is... I am referring to the mobile-only and everything else is dead mania. I feel like it has maybe a year or two left in it.
Question is: what is the next thing that is "the future" and will make everything else "dead"? Internet of things?
[+] [-] clutterjoe|11 years ago|reply
I read the article and while Jeff made valid points, I wonder if he would've benefited from having a PR/marketing person vet his messaging. His article can easily be dismissed as hyperventilating about change and as a reader it's unclear what action I should take after absorbing his point of view.
[+] [-] kuebelreiter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] galfarragem|11 years ago|reply
I'm portuguese. I've an Ipad but I never bought any app. The market is so full of good free apps that I never needed to buy any. Most of my friends don't spend much in apps also. This makes me think that App store gets money only from very specific countries. Will App Store become like Google Store as soon as these countries get used to get apps for free?
[+] [-] meritt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] douche|11 years ago|reply
If it's too much of a hassle for the return he's getting on it, then it makes perfect sense to refocus efforts.