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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

#201
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP. It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

And the reason we got Transformers 3 is because the 50 million people will buy whats being made available for them and pushed. Keep in mind that via Spotify's subscription model it's only something like 20% of the what users listen to thats chart music. The rest is outside the normal popular genres. So it's a chicken and an egg discussion.

No the 50 million people chose to consume Transformers 2 instead of John Carter, they don't just buy anything the studios shove in their face.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#202
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thought I had about MS as a development machine a while back: If you want your Unix toolchains for development, you could still have them. The Surface Pro is powerful enough to run Linux in Vagrant or another virtualization engine. So you could just run a virtual dev environment. Virtual environments are sometimes better anyway, since you can replicate your operational infrastructure. Windows 10 is looking good.…

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

What's wrong with VirtualBox shared folders? Also, Windows-native sshfs-alike is SMB.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#203
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have the demo experience you're describing by unlocking the substantial content as a single IAP. It's not Hollywoods fault we got Transformers 3, it's the 50 million people who bought tickets to Transformers 2.

And now to complete the conversational loop and point out the problems of categorizing demos via IAP, I point you right back to my original comment.

How can you possibly reconcile the idea that demos would somehow beat out micro transactions if only they had their own category despite the fact that they fail living side by side with microtransactions?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#204
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Compare and contrast the experience of buying an iPhone with the experience of buying an iPhone app. When you buy an app, you are basically looking at sales sheets from people you don't know making claims you can't verify. The only way out is to go find reviews about the apps from blogs you can't trust. Now think about buying an iPhone. I've owned an iPhone for 8 years. I know intimately the support experience. I kno…

If you sold your app for $600 I bet you could create that kind of experience. And if Apple sold phones for $2 you can bet the buying experience would be a lot different.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether there was a gold rush or not is irrelevant for my argument. This isn't about being the random popular app, it's about the marketplace, supply and demand. How many flashlight apps were available 6 years ago? How many are available now? How has the average price changed? Given roughly equivalent ratings, how much research does the user have to do to figure out if one is better for their needs than another? How…

I don't understand your argument. Flashlight apps? There was a brief flurry of flashlight apps, and fart machine apps, and Apple then declared that they would stop accepting trivial clones of existing trivial functionality like flashlights / fart machines. But that's not really relevant, especially as the average price for those apps was generally $0. Those apps existed because they were easy to make, people who made…

I thought it was fairly self evident that I used flashlight apps as a stand in for any specific segment you want to isolate in the app store.

That said, here's something to think about: I myself have paid real money for a flashlight application for my smartphone. Why? Because I wanted a flashlight app that didn't take three screens and button presses to get to light, and I also was a little leery of what the ad supported apps were really using the network for, so I wanted one that didn't require network access. This was a few years back and on Android, but I think the point is applicable, what you think you know about a market on a cursory review may not turn out the be correct upon deeper inspection. Some people made money on these apps, either through advertising or through the initial app price.

Flashlight apps may have been a poor choice on my part, but I think the original point stands. How does the market for tower defense games look? What about platform games? Do you think the average developer in these markets markets makes as much as they did 5-6 years ago? Do you think the advertising cost is the same?

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#206
post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the reason we got Transformers 3 is because the 50 million people will buy whats being made available for them and pushed. Keep in mind that via Spotify's subscription model it's only something like 20% of the what users listen to thats chart music. The rest is outside the normal popular genres. So it's a chicken and an egg discussion.

No the 50 million people chose to consume Transformers 2 instead of John Carter, they don't just buy anything the studios shove in their face.

They buy what they are presented with and whats considered popular. How can they know up front whats good and bad?

Thats how the movie industry still works that how the music industry used to work.

I bet you Netflix show the same tendency of having more people see non-chart movies than if they had to pay for it.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#207
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really hate using WinSCP for file transfer between Windows and the guest OS. If Windows shipped with a native sshfs-alike, I'd probably be ok, but I really prefer native Ubuntu development.

There are lots of alternative solutions to share file systems between a VM and host ... is that all you're trying to solve? VirtualBox has it built in.

No, I'm also trying to share between my laptop and a remote server. (actually, I very rarely use VMs hosted locally)

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#208
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…

> "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true

But isn't that the crux of it? If you are charging $5 per game and you spend $100k developing then you simplistically need 30k installs just to break even. When the app store was small and you had a good chance of being the only app in your category that was not hard to achieve. When you are just 1 of 100 other apps in your same category it is 100 times harder to achieve. If you could charge $20 or $50 which was historically how software was priced then you could tolerate 4x - 10x less installs, but the app store culture has been permanently set now such that it will not tolerate that. 99c apps got Apple off to a great start, but it has locked in a situation where only the largest (or most sophisticated) developers that can reliably get to the top of the charts can stay afloat.

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What software are you using that is only on Mac? I'm surprised by this, as it seems most development software is available for all platforms these days.

This is from a dev standpoint but at my job we're using MySQL and I develop from Linux. When I want to browse or modify data with a GUI nothing quite matches OS X's Sequel Pro. The best I've found is DBeaver (or SQuirrel). IntelliJ is working on a thing called 0xDBE, but it feels even worse. I could easily rattle off a handful of other applications that just feel better, even if slightly, on OS X. DaisyDisk and Trans…

Try MySQL Workbench - this is what I miss the most after switching to Postgres

Re: Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad

#210
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is minecraft free2play or free2pay? Also, afaik LOL, TF2 and Dota2 sell content as micro transactions, not consumable cheats. I don't know if the same is true for Hearthstone, and i know this is true for WoT, but its lunch is being eaten by War Thunder, which also only sells content.

I'd love to hear the substantial difference between Clash of Clans selling you gems that make your building finish faster and LOL selling you XP boosts?

Gladly.

First off, i need to clarify how the two work, since they work substantially different to one another:

LOL boosts come in two variants, but the net effect is the same: XP income per time unit played is doubled. You can spend more money to have them apply to more time units played, but you can't increase the effects of the boosts. They do nothing else. (I assume rising in level also pushes one into higher level matches against stronger players.)

Meanwhile CoC gems do a multitude of things: They permit access to items that are otherwise inaccessible and increase competitiveness. They are very powerful multiplicators in allowing constructions times (that i assume to span days in the extreme) to be entirely removed. Lastly, they allow the player to ... play more by restoring heroes.

So, the practical effects are:

LOL XP boosts do not increase competetiveness of the player. In fact, they can detrimentally affect it by pushing a player into high level matches before they themselves earned the necessary experience to function well in them. Further, players are discouraged actively from spending too much on them, since they may be stockpiled, but not increased in power and past a certain amount of stockpiling it's senseless to buy more.

CoC gems increase competitiveness fo players massively, in some cases (build times) applying literally infinitely large multipliers compared to the x2 multiplied of LoL xp. Further they also serve lock the player out of playing the game unless the player spends real money to buy and spend them on healing their hero.

TL;DR:

LoL xp boosts are fixed subscription fees with a maximum cap.

CoC gems are literally consumable cheat codes designed to encourage unlimited spending.

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