> 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 strike it rich, and venture investors bamboozled by a few success stories and hoping to strike it rich. This has happened on other platforms - remember the great videogame crash? - perhaps not on windows due to some peculiarities (games there are often ports of successful console games that wouldn't cover their costs on windows alone).
> The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened.
Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. Imagine 5 people are willing to spend $500 developing a game that would have made $1000 a year ago. Sounds smart, right? But because there's 5 of them their games make $200 each and they each lose $300.
> There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques.
I think maybe the changes have crept up on you. I'm playing an F2P game at the moment for the first time in a couple of years and the depth of the content and polish is staggering, unbelievably high production values.