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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?

#121

Post by cageface »

jarjoura wrote: post #107

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 c…

Apple has fantastically bungled the management of their app store. It could have been a lively and creative ecosystem of indie developers but instead it's just a trash pile of exploitative junk. They will pay the price for their negligence as apps become less and less of a differentiator between their extremely expensive phones and much cheaper but equally capable Android devices. I believe we're seeing this already.

And their iPad "pro" initiative is DOA because everybody knows you can't make money selling productivity apps on the iPad.

Getting into the app business in 2016 is a mistake.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#122

Post by personjerry »

onion2k wrote: post #102
Steko wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If Jeff Minter can't make the App Store work then no-one can. 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 ver…

So the reality is that even if you're a semi-famous developer who has a practically guaranteed revenue and media coverage from your fans, it still isn't enough. You need to make a game that competes on quality with the studios that spend $millions on their apps. Thats not a very promising proposition to anyone considering making a game.

I thought the point of the parent comment was that the quality of his games has gone down.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#123

Post by kefka_p »

zepto wrote: post #95
buserror wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm curious what OSX APIs you saw being replaced?

While not the person to whom the question was directed, I'd offer that the move from QuickTime to AVFoundation (taken directly from iOS) & friends (CoreMedia, CMIO) was one such example. Core Media I/O was released a few years ago to replace vdig and/or sequence grabber IIRC. Despite being released a few years back, the only documentation available for CMIO is a sample project. AVFoundation was limited in terms of codec support relative to QuickTime offering only support for built-in codes. Just as an example. Of course QuickTime had no 64-bit future so Apple had to do something but it was and still is a bit of a mess years down the road.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#124

Post by eridius »

Blaaguuu wrote: post #53
eridius wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But you often have to play the game for half an hour before you start running into really gross IAPs, though. If you want to find games that don't have those predatory game loops and IAPs, the only way seems to be to go outside of the app stores and find review sites - but no site can keep up with reviewing every game that gets released.

Usually the reviews on the app store itself are enough to tell if the IAP is particularly intrusive. I've skipped plenty of games after finding the reviews full of people complaining about it. Similarly, I've played some IAP games after app store reviews praised the game for making the IAP not intrusive (and the reviews were right).

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#126

Post by iofj »

CydeWeys wrote: post #115
jarjoura wrote: post #107

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 c…

I'm a lifelong gamer who's entered a bit of a rut these past few years. I would love to pay to play great apps on my phone. But I don't have the slightest clue as to how to find them. The top grossing lists are all complete F2P junk, and there's nothing close to the cottage industry that's built up around PC and console gaming. Every time I try to go look up good mobile games I get hit with lots of dodgy top-10 compi…

Actually if that's what you want I'd advise you to buy a windows 10 tablet. They run old (and gog.com) games and come with decent mouse emulation and actually last 4-5 hours on battery. Taking games like Spelunky on a 400 gram tablet with you for on the train/plane is nice.

Even something like Civ 4 is playable.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#127

Post by chii »

kbenson wrote: post #75
chc wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Different stores would allow competition on store policies and inventory. Would a store that differentiates by disallowing certain in-app purchasing strategies by useful? It would to me , because I don't want to support companies that use certain sales strategies.

By disallowing certain IAP tactics, the price of an app might rise to meet the required profit margin. Would you be willing to pay more in that case?

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#128

Post by freehunter »

themartorana wrote: post #113
k-mcgrady wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "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.

"Milked" is seriously loaded. AAA console games cost $60 and up - do you know how hard it is to get a paying freemium user to even $10? Yes. There are people that spend thousands. They also spend thousands on $60 AAA games as well. The idea that players get "fleeced" is ridiculous. Spent $15 on Candy Crush, a game that you spent months playing? That really doesn't seem like a lot to me. Edit: I should acknowledge tha…

There's a difference between Clash of Clans and GTA V, though. There is nothing on any mobile platform that can compete in any way with any AAA game made in the last 10 years (the most advanced mobile game I see is GTA:SA, which came out in 2004 or KOTOR which came out in 2003). Hypothetically, if someone spends $60 on Candy Crush and $60 on a AAA console release, the Candy Crush developers are seeing a much more massive profit from that than EA or Activision see from their games. AAA budgets are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Candy Crush could be exactly replicated by a 14 year old in a high school Python class.

Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it.

Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#129

Post by chii »

jblow wrote: post #92
diziet wrote: post #13

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…

The problem is that games designed to "stick over many months & years and monetize the player" are generally garbage, as far as the quality of the actual game goes. 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 g…

Which platform is that? I don't see console as viable for a lone indie, and PC market is similar tbh (tho much better now with greenlight).

Re: Where have all the iOS games gone?

#130

Post by freehunter »

orik wrote: post #117
makecheck wrote: post #114

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…

What type of game are you looking for? Do you believe there's a untapped market?

I do. All I want is something like boxcar2d.com that runs on iOS. It exists on Android, but the web version is Flash and even the HTML5 clone is far too slow in mobile Safari.

I like leaving it running while I work on other things, checking on it like a fish tank.

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