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Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

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Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#171

Post by [deleted] »

eridius wrote: post #141
lmm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'll make the explicit argument: iOS games are at the decline point of the hype cycle. Irrational amounts of effort have been expended on developing iOS games, both by individual developers bamboozled by a few success stories stories and hoping to s…

> remember the great videogame crash? No. What are you referring to? I've been playing games all my life and I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash". > Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. And so have the number of users. And nearly all developers are focused on cheap / F2P games. I would wager that the proportion of high-quality/more-than-a-cup-of-coffee apps has actually gone d…

[deleted]

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#172

Post by ThomPete »

briandear wrote: post #168
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…

Trials? How much does a paid game cost; a few bucks? People really want a trial before they make a $1.99 investment? When you go to a restaurant, do you ask for a piece of steak before you actually order it? Do you get a trial of a movie before you buy a ticket? A trailer doesn't count because apps can have trailers too. Why is this trial obsession such a big deal for such cheap products? I personally would love to s…

Thats part of the problem though. Because there are no trials it's forcing down the prices the developers can charge for the games which again make them unsustainable and thus back to creating a very skewed distribution of income from the market 1-9-90 distribution and that's probably being nice to how the distribution goes given the 5000 apps being submitted each and every day.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#173

Post by Steko »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #104

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…

> I think it is good to look at what the general public will be using.

The general public really isn't using Office 365 or Surface 3 though.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#175

Post by PythonicAlpha »

That is one of the reasons, I avoid Apple as much I can. The hardware is really good and also the software often is. But the company politics just kills it off for me.

They just don't care about the small developer (and sometimes not even about the customers). When they have an idea, how the world should be, they change everything needed and don't care about the effects on small software vendors or even some customers.

Apple once made this genius tv spot about 1984. Apple for me has become, what they accused IBM to be at 1984. The crazy thing is, that the normal Apple customer does not care.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#176

Post by eridius »

krapp wrote: post #158
eridius wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember the great videogame crash? No. What are you referring to? I've been playing games all my life and I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash". > Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. And so have the number of users. And nearly all developers are focused on cheap / F2P games. I would wager that the proportion of high-quality/more-than-a-cup-of-coffee apps has actually gone d…

> I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash" Probably when the market was flooded with garbage quality games and the bottom fell out of it[0]. Fun fact - the reason the NES looked like a nondescript square box in the US with the weird spring loading cartridge (meant to resemble the mechanism of a VCR) as opposed to looking like the Famicom, was fear that after the crash, Americans wouldn't spend mone…

> 1983

Ah, that's why I'm not familiar with it. That was a long time ago. I'm really only familiar with everything from the NES onwards.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#177

Post by seanalltogether »

Steko wrote: post #142
seanalltogether wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I genuinely hate how apple has pushed microtransactions as the only viable route for app/game demos on their platform. I want to try out an app or game for free, and then decide if I want to purchase the full thing or not. This is how games always worked, and this is how Steam / PS3 / Xbox work. The infrastructure apple provides however forces demos to live in the same category as microtransaction games, and as a res…

Apple hasn't pushed this. If anything they are pushing quality paid titles and trying to given them lots of visibility. The market however has spoken.

> Apple hasn't pushed this.

Of course they have, otherwise they would have long ago provided ways for paid apps to offer demos. There are lots of quality apps that would be rescued from the freemium category if Apple provided this as a distribution feature.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#178

Post by cwyers »

eridius wrote: post #141
lmm wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'll make the explicit argument: iOS games are at the decline point of the hype cycle. Irrational amounts of effort have been expended on developing iOS games, both by individual developers bamboozled by a few success stories stories and hoping to s…

> remember the great videogame crash? No. What are you referring to? I've been playing games all my life and I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash". > Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. And so have the number of users. And nearly all developers are focused on cheap / F2P games. I would wager that the proportion of high-quality/more-than-a-cup-of-coffee apps has actually gone d…

You're probably too young (so am I). He's talking about the crash that wiped out Atari and others in the home market. Nintendo had to market themselves as an accessory for a toy robot just to get U.S. retailers to stock them. The single biggest example is the E.T. game, which had thousands of unsold copies shipped straight to landfills.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#179

Post by walterbell »

api wrote: post #167

Sort of "meta," but I am getting the feeling that the whole "mobile is the future everything else is dead make everything for phones!" era is going the way of "web/cloud is the future everything else is dead write everything for the browser!" Obviously mobile ain't going anywhere any more than the web is... I am referring to the mobile-only and everything else is dead mania. I feel like it has maybe a year or two lef…

Visible battlefield casualties tend to scare inbound bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed recruits, until recruiters invest in cleanup crews.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#180

Post by Steko »

Mithaldu wrote: post #159
Steko wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are we pretending PC isnt a platform?

As far as i know free-to-pay stuff never worked even remotely as well as on cellphones, because on average pc gamers are more experienced and recognize more easily when a skill-based difficulty curve morphs into a payment-based difficulty curve. So i didn't think it worth mentioning.

League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, Dota 2, Hearthstone, World of Tanks (etc) are all wildly successful F2P PC titles.
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