51–60 of 211 posts
Wait a second: " 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.
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…
>look at the Top 200
There are more than 200,000 apps out there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, they had a category (maybe still do) called "Pay once games" or something like that. Basically highlighting games that you paid for once, up front, like normal games, and that didn't have a bunch of IAP.
They also show on every single app whether or not it has IAP (and you can see what the IAP is with a tap), so you can do your own filtering when looking at the new games list if that's an important criteria.
Wait a second: " 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.
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?
Usually it takes one turn or so of the technology cycle. Basically the market is poisoned as long as it's too competitive for customers to really differentiate between alternatives. Developers realize this, and stop paying attention to the market. Adjacent technologies (eg. iOS platform libraries, hardware capabilities, backend systems, market penetration) continue to improve, but nobody notices their improvement bec…
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?
The market may never sort it out. Apple doesn't need to fix the app market to make money, and they're really the only one who can. 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....
Yeah it's a challenging market. 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"I hear this myth" 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.
As the number of developers grows, so does the number of failure stories. That tells you nothing about the proportion of developers that are failing.
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.