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Where have all the iOS games gone?

minotaurproject.co.uk

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Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#61

Post by uptown »

diziet wrote: post #26
fnayr wrote: post #14

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…

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…

Are the rough figures you cited the app purchase price, advertising revenue, in-app purchases or some combination of the three?

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#62

Post by emsy »

fnayr wrote: post #14

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…

Care to share a link to your games?

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#63

Post by fnayr »

sago wrote: post #50
fnayr wrote: post #14

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…

Which myth? Did we read the same article? > 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 als…

Sure, and to be fair to author, my point wasn't made to combat his article. I was more responding to the headline which reminded me of the "indieapocalypse" articles that make news all the time.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. If you found more viable platforms of course that makes sense to pursue. I think that's what more developers who complain about the meager app store sales ought to do (explore alternatives), rather than just whine about the apocalypse and hope their downloads magically change.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#64

Post by vitd »

ikeboy wrote: post #52
fnayr wrote: post #14

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 only the top .1% >look at the Top 200 There are more than 200,000 apps out there.

True, though they're not all games.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#66

Post by chc »

djrogers wrote: post #57
wmil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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....

A third-party store could do a lot of things differently other than just lower the revenue split — you could have a recommendation engine like Amazon, or you could add curation, or you could change the way search works, or any number of other (possibly crazier) things.

Heck, you could literally just copy Steam in every respect and you'd end up with something significantly different from the current App Store.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#67

Post by ikeboy »

vitd wrote: post #64
ikeboy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>not only the top .1% >look at the Top 200 There are more than 200,000 apps out there.

True, though they're not all games.

Games is the biggest category. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/ says there are over 500,000 games active now.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#68

Post by ingsoc79 »

buserror wrote: post #17

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, th…

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.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#69

Post by retromario »

eridius wrote: post #41
retromario wrote: post #24

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…

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 s…

Thank you!

That's another problem, there are so many good games coming out on a weekly basis, it's hard enough to stand out among those, let alone the 800 other games coming out every week.

We've experimented with various marketing ideas. Advertising is very challenging, especially when it costs more to acquire a user than we charge for the game. The F2P user acquisition market insanity has made this a complete non-starter. Press seems to have very little impact unless it's a big publication. So we're focusing on word of mouth and quality and a longer term outlook.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#70

Post by retromario »

biot wrote: post #58
retromario wrote: post #24

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…

Please edit your comment and add http:// in front of the link so that HN will abbreviate it. Without that, your comment messes up the page width on mobile.

Fixed, thanks for the head's up.
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