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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?
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: 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 reve…
Of course these things are relative or subjective and what have you, but it's pretty rare for people who have a lot of experience playing games to seek out stuff on iOS because of the great quality of games there.
If you build a system that incentivizes garbage games, that's what you get, and well, that is what we have.
Fortunately if you are someone like me, who wants to make actual good games, there are still platforms where you can do that, and do quite decently money-wise. I am hoping those don't go away.
One iOS game I enjoyed and recently rediscovered is GeoDefense. I highly recommend it (at $3.99 I think) and it is definitely a middle-ground app. I estimate they made between 500K - 5M lifetime sales over 4 years with both games.
The geoDefense games (regular and swarm) were huge favorites of mine at the time. I wish they were still making games but haven't seen anything new from those developers since that game came out.
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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes, because I'm an engineer, not a gambler or a marketer. In that time, I also saw OSX become more and more iOS like, with fisher-price grade APIs replacing old, working ones, etc. Quite frankly I still compile my old stuff now and then, but I have no regrets leaving it all for the hipsters to fight over.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does seem utterly tone deaf to celebrate this fact at a developer conference but they seem to do it every year.
Why? From Apples standpoint it means developers are continuing to keep iOS popular. And honestly developers, individual and companies, are peer pressure driven. As long as others make it a popular platform, they'll develop for it.
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…
As a counterpoint I grew up on no small amount of Jeff Minter games, lost more hours to Tempest 2000 on the godawful Jaguar than one should admit to in polite company, and have downloaded almost all of Llamasoft's iOS games due mostly to the fawning reviews in Toucharcade and played them for not all that long because -- frankly -- they are simply not very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS.
The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.
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'm guessing he is referring to the Xperia Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter
TxK (PlayStation Vita, 2014)[43]
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>> "If that's the path I have to take to make money on iOS, I'll take a path on a different platform." I think this is about much more than iOS. Anything that can be delivered online (software, music, movies etc.) is something that consumers think should be free. Strangely they are willing to get milked after download through things like in-app purchase.
>Strangely they are willing to get milked after download through things like in-app purchase. I don't think that is true. I doubt many pay at all. I think there are a small number of people who are massively exploited to generate the revenue for these apps.