Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

spiderwebforums.ipbhost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 509 posts

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#101

Post by LoSboccacc »

quietplatypus wrote: post #43
takasc2 wrote: post #10

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 the…

Do you think there is still the chance for a well-made, expensive up front iPad game (we are talking like $10 to even $30) to make it based on word of mouth from hardcore gamers and Gamespot/IGN/etc. ? I know that the ecosystem itself optimizes f2p, but still.

Well I just bought space program manager, got many more before and will pay ten bucks for prison architect, even more for tiny trek or if ever rimword would get a porting

Fact is all iOS categories and ratings are useless to me, mostly rubbish game built for freemium and with loads of marketing wind behind get visibility on the store, while real games get buried and I've had to follow third party website just to even know their existence

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#102

Post by kbenson »

eridius wrote: post #42
kbenson wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the marketplace is profitable to a developer at their level is not always directly correlated to how popular that marketplace is. If the the App store is so competitive as to require a lot of up-front money to see a worthwhile return on investment, but other markets do not have that same problem, it may may sense to focus on those other markets.

How do you define "competitive" if you're not defining it in a way that correlates with "popular"?

In the beginning, the App store was popular (people used it), but was not competitive (there weren't a lot of apps, comparatively). Thus, many apps earned quite a bit of money than now because they got a larger percentage of the available consumers.

Even if we assume the App store today had the exact same number of consumers, there's many more apps competing for those users. The marketplace is very competitive, and the percentage of available users is less per app (on average).

My guess is that the reality is that the App store has many more consumers (or consumer dollars which is what we care about), but the number of apps has increased much more rapidly than consumer spending (e.g. supply increased much faster than demand).

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#103

Post by s73v3r »

rodgerd wrote: post #24
eridius wrote: post #12

> 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 advertisin…

> Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development? In Windows game development you've have a long history of many ways to distribute your wares, with different pros and cons. Not so much for Androids or iOS. Note that similar complaints have been levelled at Steam, which is the closest thing to the iOS model.

So? That's not really relevant. You still have insane amounts of competition on Windows, much like you do on iOS. On either platform, marketing is a requirement.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#104

Post by mark_l_watson »

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.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#105

Post by drawkbox »

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.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#106

Post by s73v3r »

jblow wrote: post #52
eridius wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there really that much of a difference between "Click [here](link-to-app-store) to buy this game!" and "Click [here](link-to-self-hosted-page) to buy this game!"? The only real difference I can think of is when software was primarily distributed via physical media, but that hasn't been the primary distribution mechanism for a while (and I would expect that nearly all software these days doesn't even have an option…

There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.

You mean iOS developers aren't allowed to do things like have Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, or host forums?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#107

Post by eridius »

[deleted] wrote: post #91
eridius wrote: post #12

> 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 advertisin…

[deleted]

> to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots

That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the same thing as being featured on the store, and it's widely regarded as a scummy move.

In any case, if you had to self-host your own game download instead of having Apple provide the download, that certainly wouldn't fix any of this. People still need to discover your game, which means you need to market it, and you can provide a link to the app store just as easily as you could provide a link to a self-hosted download.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#109

Post by ThomPete »

olefoo wrote: post #79
ThomPete wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem isn't that it's popular. The problem is that it's not designed to it's current popularity. 5000apps added every day yet no way for developers to build meaningful relationships with their customers or creating trials make it a very irrational platform to be on. Its nothing like how Google deals with popularity and quality. It's a huge problem Apple will have to solve. On the mac app store they completely g…

Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem. Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you a…

Yeah I hear you.

I had a reality check when I launched my mac app. Good thing it doesn't have much competition at least for now.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#110

Post by s73v3r »

eridius wrote: post #62
jblow wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.

Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an a…

jblow: So follow them on Twitter? Go to their website? Seriously, you're acting like a developer can never see the outside world after they sign the developer agreement.
Post reply on HN