14 ms·

Where have all the iOS games gone?

313 points by chadaustin 10y ago

mucker 10y ago
The platform cratered with the dominance of pay to win games and the "freemium" model. This allowed the store to be cluttered with junk. I can't shop there, because I'm not sure what I am buying.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  This loss of trust amongst consumers is what caused the original video games crash in the 80's. Nintendo's seal of quality is what restored consumer trust. Apple may need to get more aggressive about the App Store.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Well, they had a category (maybe still do) called "Pay once games" or something like that. Basically highlighting games that you paid for once, up front, like normal games, and that didn't have a bunch of IAP.
    - eridius 10y ago
      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.
      - Blaaguuu 10y ago
        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.
        st3v3r 10y ago
        I dunno, if you look at the list of IAPs offered, and see that most are for "gems" or "coins" or something like that, you can be pretty sure that they've got something up their sleeve.
        eridius 10y ago
        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).
- shostack 10y ago
  Pretty much this. They could have added better filters around things like "Cosmetic-only IAP" or "Ad Supported" or "No IAP whatsoever" but they did not.
- a11957010 10y ago
  Your opinion is valid, but there's plenty of people who thoroughly enjoy many of the games you've stereotyped as junk. I'm among them; some of them I find good reasons to pay for, and others I just enjoy the free experience. One man's junk is another man's treasure I guess. Stick to what you like; it's just for fun!
eludwig 10y ago
The amazing thing to me is that at WWDC, Tim Cook (I think that's who announced it) seemed genuinely thrilled that there are over 2,000,000 apps for iOS. So sad and useless. You could hear the barely contained horror of the assembled developers. iOS has become a victim of its own success. I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?
- ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
  It does seem utterly tone deaf to celebrate this fact at a developer conference but they seem to do it every year.
  - mhurron 10y ago
    Why? From Apples standpoint it means developers are continuing to keep iOS popular. And honestly developers, individual and companies, are peer pressure driven. As long as others make it a popular platform, they'll develop for it.
    - ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
      From Apples standpoint yes it's great, I think developers would prefer to hear facts such as about how many users are active on the store, distribution of downloads, median number of downloads per app and revenue. It's like a boss holding a meeting to discuss how great his/her own bonus is this year.
      - mhurron 10y ago
        It's more like the boss showing off the stock price. It gets everyone excited because the company is doing 'well.' The only thing your metrics would do at WWDC would be to cement that unless you're the top app in your category, you're not making money, and Apple knows this. As long as they're super popular though, developers will keep trying. Also, why would Apple do anything at their event other than make themselves look great.
    - 10y ago
triptych 10y ago
Toucharcade is a great site / resource to find and learn about iOS games.
bolasanibk 10y ago
The site seems to be down. Link to the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-8QtKz9Lo2oJ:minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/%3Fp%3D376+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-8QtKz9...
ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
Same reason I stopped making games for iOS years ago. I too did truly enjoy making them though. I created original games and the effort all outside working hours overnight and weekends did at least teach me skills I still utilize today.
golergka 10y ago
Apple, goddamn. You had a potential major gaming platform on your hands – but almost 10 years later, we're stuck with $5-10 CPIs and store that doesn't even try to do anything with the long tail. Just open up Steam sometimes if you wonder how it should've been done.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  I was looking for a proper English way to say this, but exactly; the long tail in the Appstore is nearly unrecoverable in the Appstore. And even outside it; I ran a review service (one that actually make enough to live on) for apps years ago and most (all on some sites) reviews are bought so they are skewed towards deep pockets. It stinks and I'm sorry I ever even did that.
  - golergka 10y ago
    That's because Apple failed miserably at creating any kind of community - the thing that helps the most with skewed reviews, lowest-denominator titles, and other trash like that. Once again, I'm too lazy to explain this in detail; just look at Steam again.
joeblau 10y ago
I have a game that I made over a 4 day period on iOS and Android. It's not brining in much revenue, but it was a cool challenge. My game isn't really that great, but I haven't touched it in over a year as well as there is no motivation to keep working on it. Once too many bugs start showing up, I'll probably pull it from all 3 app stores.
- tluyben2 10y ago
  Which one is it? I always find it interesting to see what someone can do in a short time.
  - joeblau 10y ago
    - https://joeblau.com/orb/ https://joeblau.com/orb/ - The idea was based on bullet time so when you're moving the Orb, time is passing, but when you pick your finger off of the screen, time pauses. The goal is to dodge all of the smaller black orbs as long as possible.
mmanfrin 10y ago
There are only so many combinations of the words [Lord|War|Clan|Battle|Fight|Clash|Of|Reign|King].
diziet 10y ago
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/993499/16283312/2ca78050-3881-11e6-9fea-889dbc2e647a.png 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 revenue and earnings are captured by the top 100 publishers -- but still, even compared to 2012 or 2013, the 10000th biggest app is earning more due to the opening of all the new territories. The game earning model moved from a hits based model, where you launch with lots of hype and reviews and generate a lot of earnings in the initial months to a model where long playing loyal players stick with the game over many months & years and monetize via longer term in app purchases. It's not possible to bring back 2010. We need to be ok with that and learn to engage users over longer timelines.
- jblow 10y ago
  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 garbage games, that's what you get, and well, that is what we have. Fortunately if you are someone like me, who wants to make actual good games, there are still platforms where you can do that, and do quite decently money-wise. I am hoping those don't go away.
  - chii 10y ago
    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).
  - prawn 10y ago
    Depends on the user's definition of garbage. I have no interest in the games saturating the free-to-play ranks, but a lot of them looked very polished to me. Quality illustrations, very much "juiced", etc. Garbage to me is the Flappy Bird clone with poorly sized graphics, ugly buttons and default fonts.
fnayr 10y ago
I hear this myth perpetuated incessantly. (That there's no more middle ground in the app store, only the Clash of Clans and Candy Crushes and the rest with no downloads). People paint the picture that it's the top 0.1% and everyone else with an unsustainable business. The truth is there's plenty of us in the middle still. My two person iOS dev studio has pulled in 6 figures a year for the past 4 years. The problem is not that there's no middle ground, it's that the everyone used to get guaranteed downloads, and with the removal of new releases and the never ending flood of apps, 90% of apps will get just about zero downloads after launch nowadays. But there's still plenty of room for small studios like us who know their target audience and what works on the app store to make a sustainable business. So I'd say top 0.1% for the insane successes that can support hundreds of employees, but for a small studio, just getting in the top 5% can work. If you're curious about numbers, check thinkgaming.com, to see that the top 200 grossing game is still pulling ~$10K a day on iPhone in the US alone. When you add all countries, tablets, and Android devices, you start to see you don't need a top 10 or even top 100 grossing app to make some serious cash. So while it has gotten a lot tougher in the app store and it's increasingly difficult for newcomers with no experience to hit it big, there's still very much a thriving middle ground between the insane successes and the utter failures. I suspect that it's not well known is due to the fact that those in similar positions to us don't want to dish out the valuable knowledge they've acquired through years of experience that could only increase the competition.
- archagon 10y ago
  The context is that this is Jeff Minter's blog. His iOS games have received high acclaim over the years, especially early on in the App Store.
  - andybak 10y ago
    Yep. I hope a few people reading this know who the hell Jeff Minter is and why he's worth listening to. (PS Jeff - if you're listening to. A new take on Llamatron would make me a very happy man)
    - 10y ago
buserror 10y ago
Weird, I was a die hard mac developer (since 1984), and I immediately stopped when iOS came out with the app store. Like, stopped /dead/. The reason I could be a Mac Developer was the small pond; There wasn't a LOT of work, but there was enough for good people, and it paid well. On balance I /never/ developed anything for windows, because of the 'tree vs forest' problem : Even if you are REALLY fantastically good, there are so many people on the market that you can't possibly stand out. And that's why I never even wrote a single iOS app, even tho i was a wiz at ObjC and OSX (Imagine a Classic MacOS dev thrown together with a UNIX wiz, and that's me); it was guaranteed to bring in the 'forest' to OSX as well, and make any 'edge' more or less pointless. Also, from what I've seen, if anyone comes out with a nice app/game, there's a dozen or more group of people who will throw their dev team at copying it immediately, diluting any hope of revenue. It's these guys business model after all, you just can't win, and it's not like you can defend your IP anyway. So, 2016, I wonder what took people so long to realize it was all doomed but for a tiny fraction of apps.
- zepto 10y ago
  Weird - so you were uniquely position to capitalize on the growth period, but because you predicted that it would ebb a decade later, you decided not to take part?
  - buserror 10y ago
    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.
    - xenihn 10y ago
      I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I would have still gambled if I had been in your position :)
    - zepto 10y ago
highCs 10y ago
Aside some interesting comments here I find very true, my theory is that you should treat your game has a startup product: customers will not come, you have to chase them. And get them talk to their friends about your game. Just launching a game and making some marketing wont work. You need: feedback loop + word of mouth + growth.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  I just thought I would just need to make a game and pay $99 a year. Do you mean that's not enough? (sarcasm)
retromario 10y ago
Yeah it's a challenging market. Just to add another data point, we're small indie (games) developer, we spent over a year on our first title with very little marketing budget and these are our sales figures from our launch: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/Ellipsis__Sales_Numbers_for_a_Premium_Game_on_iOS_in_2016.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/E... In short, decent sales but not enough to recoup our costs. Still, we never expected that we would hit gold on the first try. I think to be as sustainable on iOS you either have a successful niche product or a collection of product, with each release building a further revenue stream.
- diziet 10y ago
  It's very very hard to make premium games on the App Store now. A typical top 25 premium game (which worldwide in Q1 were games like Five Nights at Freddy's or Scribblenauts Unlimited or Bloons TD 5 HD) earned about $300,000 in Q1 worldwide. Top 25 game free to play game (which were games similar to Summoners War or Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes) earned about $15,000,000. There's a huge gap and this is apparent in what games actually gross a lot. These are both iPhone only numbers.
- eridius 10y ago
  That game looks pretty neat. You just sold a copy :) But it's a game I've never heard of before, and I'm pretty good about checking the new games lists on the App Store each week. So I think the takeaway from this shouldn't be that premium games (is $2.99 really "premium"?) don't work, but rather that you can't rely on free marketing to sell your game. Once a game falls off the lists, it's pretty hard for people to stumble across it unless they're looking for it specifically.
  - retromario 10y ago
    Thank you! That's another problem, there are so many good games coming out on a weekly basis, it's hard enough to stand out among those, let alone the 800 other games coming out every week. We've experimented with various marketing ideas. Advertising is very challenging, especially when it costs more to acquire a user than we charge for the game. The F2P user acquisition market insanity has made this a complete non-starter. Press seems to have very little impact unless it's a big publication. So we're focusing on word of mouth and quality and a longer term outlook.
melling 10y ago
I saw this article yesterday about how more and more apps have become abandoned: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/the-apple-app-store-graveyard/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/the-apple-app-store-gravey... The App Store will keep growing but it won't be good if half the apps are abandoned.
projectramo 10y ago
Wait a second: " the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally thousands of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users." What was the platform? I wonder if there is a strategy to be carved out making games for Windows 10, Linux mobile, etc.
- the_hoser 10y ago
  The Vita. A "dying" console. It's actually the best handheld gaming device I've ever owned.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- zelos 10y ago
  I've seen other indie game developers say that they made decent money on the Vita: Vita owners are a small market, but they're very active and prepared to spend money.
- Blaaguuu 10y ago
  I'm guessing he is referring to the Xperia Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
  - sleepybrett 10y ago
    He's not. He's shipping on the Vita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter TxK (PlayStation Vita, 2014)[43]
    - zelos 10y ago
      Sony gave it away 'free' as a PS+ title for subscribers as well, I don't know what affect that had on his income.
ccvannorman 10y ago
One iOS game I enjoyed and recently rediscovered is GeoDefense. I highly recommend it (at $3.99 I think) and it is definitely a middle-ground app. I estimate they made between 500K - 5M lifetime sales over 4 years with both games.
- SystemOut 10y ago
  The geoDefense games (regular and swarm) were huge favorites of mine at the time. I wish they were still making games but haven't seen anything new from those developers since that game came out.
  - KingMob 10y ago
    Man, those games were fantastic. Best tower defense games ever made by a long shot.
eirikref 10y ago
As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard. I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.
- NEDM64 10y ago
  The AppStore has a category listing. Of course category search is not going to work for everybody with 2 million entries. If you want to search the games for genre, price, etc. go to toucharcade.com
profeta 10y ago
history will look back on this iphone era we are living as the second dark age.
- xufi 10y ago
  Agreed, I do feel there could've been much better games made on the phone. For example, I remember Nintendo was about to make a push to bring its old classic Gameboy Era games /Gameboy Color games to the phone to no avail
  - intoverflow2 10y ago
    Would you have been happy to pay $5-$8 per gameboy/gbc title? Yeah didn't think so, but Nintendo DS owners are.
jpeg_hero 10y ago
Apple needs to move the "standard price" from 0.99 one time download -> 0.99 per year Delete app to unsubscribe Remove 0.99 one time pricing $5.00 minimum one time download price
- spikengineer 10y ago
  That is unaffordable to most consumers in the world. You will end up limiting urself to a market of few rich communities in rich countries.
  - vonklaus 10y ago
    that is not true. again, we aren't talking about a coursera course and paywalling information and vital self-learning here. We are talking about a dollar for a luxury game on a device that costs nearly $1000 and $100 a month for service. This is leaving aside that the economics of $4-5 a game would be better than a free game that is unwinnable unless you spend > $10. I believe the parent, and if not then certainly I, am talking about games that are subsciption based and promote full releases that get upgrades and create community. not a 0.99 clone. this market is largely rich communities anyway if you use the world income scale, but we aren't using that scale, we are talking about iphone owners with discretionary income already willing to spend 1-30 a year on games...
    - madgar 10y ago
      > a device that costs nearly $1000 and $100 a month for service If you're going to make a fiscal argument then don't exaggerate your numbers by 60-120%. They start at $400 and top out at $750. If you pay $100/month for service that's your own fault, I don't know anybody paying over $60/month.
- spikengineer 10y ago
  Apple and Android should instead take a Valve/Steam like approach and create a good community around the store that includes curators, flash sales etc.
- 10y ago
billyjobob 10y ago
I feel it's worth pointing out this isn't just some blog by any old indie development studio. This is a blog by Jeff Minter. The man practically invented home computer gaming. I was buying his games with my allowance 35 years ago, because they were great. And I still buy them today, because they are still great. If Jeff Minter can't make the App Store work then no-one can. (Although he probably could have done if he had been willing to make crappy games with in app purchase rather than make good games. )
- Steko 10y ago
  > 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 very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS. The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.
  - onion2k 10y ago
    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.
    - personjerry 10y ago
      I thought the point of the parent comment was that the quality of his games has gone down.
      - 10y ago
kmiroslav 10y ago
You know the situation is bleak when even the legendary Jeff "llama" Minter says he can't make money on the app store.
jarjoura 10y ago
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 context to why I should care. To further detriment, Apple has trained the market to stay away from 3rd party curation of iOS apps in any kind of useful way. So we're left only with a gateway of lists. That's nice, but not worth my time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but ultimately an indie game has limited replay value because they're just so small in scope, but they're usually a lot of fun. So a one time upfront payment to enjoy for a few weeks is a great business strategy I think. Edit: Not to sound like I'm bashing Apple here, as I don't think the Google Play store does it any better.
- CydeWeys 10y ago
  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 compilation linkfarm spam sites. I don't even know where to go to find the best mobile games, and every so often after investing another ten fruitless minutes of research (into what should be fun!) I'll give up all over again. Contrast with my recent gaming experiences on the PC -- Civ V, The Witcher 3, Kerbal Space Program, and Faster than Light. All excellent games well worth their price that I was able to find out about easily. I don't know if anything comparable exists on mobile gaming, or if it's all just shit, nor do I even know how to find out. Back in the day Sony and Nintendo owned and published official magazines that were excellent sources of finding out about games, and many other non-official rags filled any potential void left over (I'll forever look back fondly on my afternoons after school spent reading issues of PC Gamer, PSM, and EGM cover-to-cover). Nothing comparable exists for mobile gaming, and Apple and Google could be doing a much better job of curating their gaming content.
  - 10y ago
makecheck 10y ago
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 browsing experience was almost unbelievably inefficient; I found myself scrolling through handfuls of games when I should have been able to rule out dozens. Apple likes to show you “only the icon” most of the time, which is really quite a terrible way to browse; you keep having to go in, out, in out, to learn anything about what’s in the list. I ended up buying nothing at all because I couldn’t even tell if there were games that supported buy-once without any of the usual bullshit gem-buying tactics. Despite having simple goals, the App Store just failed me.
- orik 10y ago
  What type of game are you looking for? Do you believe there's a untapped market?
  - freehunter 10y ago
    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.
    - NEDM64 10y ago
      So your problem has nothing to do with search, but it's simply a game that isn't available on the AppStore. What did you expect? The search to port the game for you?
      - freehunter 10y ago
        You do realize that my comment was in a reply to someone asking what games a person would like to see developed, and in particular, what games are actually missing from the app store, right? Nothing to do with being able to find them. The idea is that they don't exist at all. So yes. You're completely right.
reiichiroh 10y ago
As someone who enjoyed Tempest, isn't Minter a bit of an industry grump now? Albeit someone who's shipped games unlike Chris Crawford.
NEDM64 10y ago
Well, try your luck at Android or Consoles or PC. Never noticied the AppStore was some kind of heaven where money rained. Seriously, so much entitlement. If you want to make money selling games, you have to spend a lot in advertising, how much does Clash of Clans and etc spend? It's the rules, it always has been, what's the surprise? Maybe it worked for a couple of months out of novelity, but it doesn't work any more. Get real, people. And yes, it's free games with IAP the rules. Because they are designed for kids without credit cards that at most buy iTunes gift cards. And yes, it's jewel and candy games, because that's what there is for girls, which are 50% of the population that the "mainstream gaming" has abandoned.
- Roboprog 10y ago
  The first part was a bit harsh, but you make a good point about games for girls. (my now 20 daughter plays a lot of console games, but hates "ugly" scenery)
alttab 10y ago
So much conversation and not a single reference to App Annie? Look at the data yourselves.
ascotan 10y ago
It's sad. You don't need to see income metrics to support this, just look at the quality of the games. I'm an avid consumer of iphone games and the quality of them has been getting worse and worse. Really neat and creative games seems are gone and we're left with 'Qbert' and 'Bejeweled' clones being recommended as 'featured games'. Most of the great iOS shops seems to have left the market or have been drowned out in a sea of 'crapware'. It seems that to be successful in this market you need to go back to advertising. Apple makes it very very hard to sort crap from quality, so you have to get your brand/name out there.
douche 10y ago
Someday, we'll realize that games on a tiny, fiddly touchscreen with no tactile response, is kind of a stupid idea. I would much rather play games on my dusty old Gameboy Color than struggle with a phone.
coldtea 10y ago
>To give some idea of just how awful iOS was for us, the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally thousands* of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users.* Yeah, but the Sony handled has like N titles, whereas the iOS has 1000xN.
nathan_f77 10y ago
Oh well. I'm about to finish up a tiny game that I've been working on, and it will be fun to see what happens. At the very least, I've enjoyed learning SceneKit and practicing Swift.
roryokane 10y ago
If you’re looking for “the free .apks that we have put up for our Android ports of five of the iOS games on this site”, they’re at http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/donate.php http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/donate.php. The five games are Super Ox Wars, Five a Day, Caverns of Minos, Goat Up, and Gridrunner.
kinnth 10y ago
These lists in no way take account of ad revenue. For the average indie game ad revenue now makes up at least 50% of the gross daily revenue or if well integrated can make up 70 or even 90% if the game is an advergame like the Ketchapps one finger frustration games. There is still quite a lot of revenue in the market place, just like there is on web. You need to be shrewd and think more about business than just creating and releasing a fun game.

313 points by chadaustin 10y ago

The platform cratered with the dominance of pay to win games and the "freemium" model. This allowed the store to be cluttered with junk. I can't shop there, because I'm not sure what I am buying.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
This loss of trust amongst consumers is what caused the original video games crash in the 80's. Nintendo's seal of quality is what restored consumer trust. Apple may need to get more aggressive about the App Store.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Well, they had a category (maybe still do) called "Pay once games" or something like that. Basically highlighting games that you paid for once, up front, like normal games, and that didn't have a bunch of IAP.
  - eridius 10y ago
    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.
    - Blaaguuu 10y ago
      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.
      - st3v3r 10y ago
        I dunno, if you look at the list of IAPs offered, and see that most are for "gems" or "coins" or something like that, you can be pretty sure that they've got something up their sleeve.
      - eridius 10y ago
        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).
shostack 10y ago
Pretty much this. They could have added better filters around things like "Cosmetic-only IAP" or "Ad Supported" or "No IAP whatsoever" but they did not.
a11957010 10y ago
Your opinion is valid, but there's plenty of people who thoroughly enjoy many of the games you've stereotyped as junk. I'm among them; some of them I find good reasons to pay for, and others I just enjoy the free experience. One man's junk is another man's treasure I guess. Stick to what you like; it's just for fun!

eludwig 10y ago

The amazing thing to me is that at WWDC, Tim Cook (I think that's who announced it) seemed genuinely thrilled that there are over 2,000,000 apps for iOS. So sad and useless. You could hear the barely contained horror of the assembled developers. iOS has become a victim of its own success. I guess the market will eventually sort it out, but when? 2030?

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
It does seem utterly tone deaf to celebrate this fact at a developer conference but they seem to do it every year.
- mhurron 10y ago
  Why? From Apples standpoint it means developers are continuing to keep iOS popular. And honestly developers, individual and companies, are peer pressure driven. As long as others make it a popular platform, they'll develop for it.
  - ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago
    From Apples standpoint yes it's great, I think developers would prefer to hear facts such as about how many users are active on the store, distribution of downloads, median number of downloads per app and revenue. It's like a boss holding a meeting to discuss how great his/her own bonus is this year.
    - mhurron 10y ago
      It's more like the boss showing off the stock price. It gets everyone excited because the company is doing 'well.' The only thing your metrics would do at WWDC would be to cement that unless you're the top app in your category, you're not making money, and Apple knows this. As long as they're super popular though, developers will keep trying. Also, why would Apple do anything at their event other than make themselves look great.
  - 10y ago

triptych 10y ago

Toucharcade is a great site / resource to find and learn about iOS games.

bolasanibk 10y ago

The site seems to be down. Link to the Google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-8QtKz9Lo2oJ:minotaurproject.co.uk/blog/%3Fp%3D376+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:-8QtKz9...

ajeet_dhaliwal 10y ago

Same reason I stopped making games for iOS years ago. I too did truly enjoy making them though. I created original games and the effort all outside working hours overnight and weekends did at least teach me skills I still utilize today.

golergka 10y ago

Apple, goddamn. You had a potential major gaming platform on your hands – but almost 10 years later, we're stuck with $5-10 CPIs and store that doesn't even try to do anything with the long tail. Just open up Steam sometimes if you wonder how it should've been done.

tluyben2 10y ago
I was looking for a proper English way to say this, but exactly; the long tail in the Appstore is nearly unrecoverable in the Appstore. And even outside it; I ran a review service (one that actually make enough to live on) for apps years ago and most (all on some sites) reviews are bought so they are skewed towards deep pockets. It stinks and I'm sorry I ever even did that.
- golergka 10y ago
  That's because Apple failed miserably at creating any kind of community - the thing that helps the most with skewed reviews, lowest-denominator titles, and other trash like that. Once again, I'm too lazy to explain this in detail; just look at Steam again.

joeblau 10y ago

I have a game that I made over a 4 day period on iOS and Android. It's not brining in much revenue, but it was a cool challenge. My game isn't really that great, but I haven't touched it in over a year as well as there is no motivation to keep working on it. Once too many bugs start showing up, I'll probably pull it from all 3 app stores.

tluyben2 10y ago
Which one is it? I always find it interesting to see what someone can do in a short time.
- joeblau 10y ago
  - https://joeblau.com/orb/ https://joeblau.com/orb/ - The idea was based on bullet time so when you're moving the Orb, time is passing, but when you pick your finger off of the screen, time pauses. The goal is to dodge all of the smaller black orbs as long as possible.

mmanfrin 10y ago

diziet 10y ago

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/993499/16283312/2ca78050-3881-11e6-9fea-889dbc2e647a.png 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 revenue and earnings are captured by the top 100 publishers -- but still, even compared to 2012 or 2013, the 10000th biggest app is earning more due to the opening of all the new territories. The game earning model moved from a hits based model, where you launch with lots of hype and reviews and generate a lot of earnings in the initial months to a model where long playing loyal players stick with the game over many months & years and monetize via longer term in app purchases. It's not possible to bring back 2010. We need to be ok with that and learn to engage users over longer timelines.

jblow 10y ago
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 garbage games, that's what you get, and well, that is what we have. Fortunately if you are someone like me, who wants to make actual good games, there are still platforms where you can do that, and do quite decently money-wise. I am hoping those don't go away.
- chii 10y ago
  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).
- prawn 10y ago
  Depends on the user's definition of garbage. I have no interest in the games saturating the free-to-play ranks, but a lot of them looked very polished to me. Quality illustrations, very much "juiced", etc. Garbage to me is the Flappy Bird clone with poorly sized graphics, ugly buttons and default fonts.

fnayr 10y ago

I hear this myth perpetuated incessantly. (That there's no more middle ground in the app store, only the Clash of Clans and Candy Crushes and the rest with no downloads). People paint the picture that it's the top 0.1% and everyone else with an unsustainable business. The truth is there's plenty of us in the middle still. My two person iOS dev studio has pulled in 6 figures a year for the past 4 years. The problem is not that there's no middle ground, it's that the everyone used to get guaranteed downloads, and with the removal of new releases and the never ending flood of apps, 90% of apps will get just about zero downloads after launch nowadays. But there's still plenty of room for small studios like us who know their target audience and what works on the app store to make a sustainable business. So I'd say top 0.1% for the insane successes that can support hundreds of employees, but for a small studio, just getting in the top 5% can work. If you're curious about numbers, check thinkgaming.com, to see that the top 200 grossing game is still pulling ~$10K a day on iPhone in the US alone. When you add all countries, tablets, and Android devices, you start to see you don't need a top 10 or even top 100 grossing app to make some serious cash. So while it has gotten a lot tougher in the app store and it's increasingly difficult for newcomers with no experience to hit it big, there's still very much a thriving middle ground between the insane successes and the utter failures. I suspect that it's not well known is due to the fact that those in similar positions to us don't want to dish out the valuable knowledge they've acquired through years of experience that could only increase the competition.

archagon 10y ago
The context is that this is Jeff Minter's blog. His iOS games have received high acclaim over the years, especially early on in the App Store.
- andybak 10y ago
  Yep. I hope a few people reading this know who the hell Jeff Minter is and why he's worth listening to. (PS Jeff - if you're listening to. A new take on Llamatron would make me a very happy man)
  - 10y ago

buserror 10y ago

Weird, I was a die hard mac developer (since 1984), and I immediately stopped when iOS came out with the app store. Like, stopped /dead/. The reason I could be a Mac Developer was the small pond; There wasn't a LOT of work, but there was enough for good people, and it paid well. On balance I /never/ developed anything for windows, because of the 'tree vs forest' problem : Even if you are REALLY fantastically good, there are so many people on the market that you can't possibly stand out. And that's why I never even wrote a single iOS app, even tho i was a wiz at ObjC and OSX (Imagine a Classic MacOS dev thrown together with a UNIX wiz, and that's me); it was guaranteed to bring in the 'forest' to OSX as well, and make any 'edge' more or less pointless. Also, from what I've seen, if anyone comes out with a nice app/game, there's a dozen or more group of people who will throw their dev team at copying it immediately, diluting any hope of revenue. It's these guys business model after all, you just can't win, and it's not like you can defend your IP anyway. So, 2016, I wonder what took people so long to realize it was all doomed but for a tiny fraction of apps.

zepto 10y ago
Weird - so you were uniquely position to capitalize on the growth period, but because you predicted that it would ebb a decade later, you decided not to take part?
- buserror 10y ago
  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.
  - xenihn 10y ago
    I can definitely see where you're coming from, but I would have still gambled if I had been in your position :)
  - zepto 10y ago

highCs 10y ago

Aside some interesting comments here I find very true, my theory is that you should treat your game has a startup product: customers will not come, you have to chase them. And get them talk to their friends about your game. Just launching a game and making some marketing wont work. You need: feedback loop + word of mouth + growth.

NEDM64 10y ago
I just thought I would just need to make a game and pay $99 a year. Do you mean that's not enough? (sarcasm)

retromario 10y ago

Yeah it's a challenging market. Just to add another data point, we're small indie (games) developer, we spent over a year on our first title with very little marketing budget and these are our sales figures from our launch: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/Ellipsis__Sales_Numbers_for_a_Premium_Game_on_iOS_in_2016.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/E... In short, decent sales but not enough to recoup our costs. Still, we never expected that we would hit gold on the first try. I think to be as sustainable on iOS you either have a successful niche product or a collection of product, with each release building a further revenue stream.

diziet 10y ago
It's very very hard to make premium games on the App Store now. A typical top 25 premium game (which worldwide in Q1 were games like Five Nights at Freddy's or Scribblenauts Unlimited or Bloons TD 5 HD) earned about $300,000 in Q1 worldwide. Top 25 game free to play game (which were games similar to Summoners War or Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes) earned about $15,000,000. There's a huge gap and this is apparent in what games actually gross a lot. These are both iPhone only numbers.
eridius 10y ago
That game looks pretty neat. You just sold a copy :) But it's a game I've never heard of before, and I'm pretty good about checking the new games lists on the App Store each week. So I think the takeaway from this shouldn't be that premium games (is $2.99 really "premium"?) don't work, but rather that you can't rely on free marketing to sell your game. Once a game falls off the lists, it's pretty hard for people to stumble across it unless they're looking for it specifically.
- retromario 10y ago
  Thank you! That's another problem, there are so many good games coming out on a weekly basis, it's hard enough to stand out among those, let alone the 800 other games coming out every week. We've experimented with various marketing ideas. Advertising is very challenging, especially when it costs more to acquire a user than we charge for the game. The F2P user acquisition market insanity has made this a complete non-starter. Press seems to have very little impact unless it's a big publication. So we're focusing on word of mouth and quality and a longer term outlook.

melling 10y ago

I saw this article yesterday about how more and more apps have become abandoned: https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/the-apple-app-store-graveyard/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/21/the-apple-app-store-gravey... The App Store will keep growing but it won't be good if half the apps are abandoned.

projectramo 10y ago

Wait a second: " the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally thousands of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users." What was the platform? I wonder if there is a strategy to be carved out making games for Windows 10, Linux mobile, etc.

the_hoser 10y ago
The Vita. A "dying" console. It's actually the best handheld gaming device I've ever owned.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
zelos 10y ago
I've seen other indie game developers say that they made decent money on the Vita: Vita owners are a small market, but they're very active and prepared to spend money.
Blaaguuu 10y ago
I'm guessing he is referring to the Xperia Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xperia_Play
- sleepybrett 10y ago
  He's not. He's shipping on the Vita. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Minter TxK (PlayStation Vita, 2014)[43]
  - zelos 10y ago
    Sony gave it away 'free' as a PS+ title for subscribers as well, I don't know what affect that had on his income.

ccvannorman 10y ago

One iOS game I enjoyed and recently rediscovered is GeoDefense. I highly recommend it (at $3.99 I think) and it is definitely a middle-ground app. I estimate they made between 500K - 5M lifetime sales over 4 years with both games.

SystemOut 10y ago
The geoDefense games (regular and swarm) were huge favorites of mine at the time. I wish they were still making games but haven't seen anything new from those developers since that game came out.
- KingMob 10y ago
  Man, those games were fantastic. Best tower defense games ever made by a long shot.

eirikref 10y ago

As a user who frequently opened the AppStore just to browse, discover new apps, and who used to buy a lot, I've just stopped opening the AppStore over the last three-four years. Browsing and discovery has become too hard for me, and I feel like they're pushing games too hard. I used to buy a lot of games as well, but often I was just in the mood to look for some neat applications. If I could somehow filter out all games and just browse apps across all categories, I might still browse the AppStore regularly and still buy apps (including games, when I'm in the mood for that). The end result now is that they've lost a customer who used to buy new apps every week.

NEDM64 10y ago
The AppStore has a category listing. Of course category search is not going to work for everybody with 2 million entries. If you want to search the games for genre, price, etc. go to toucharcade.com

profeta 10y ago

history will look back on this iphone era we are living as the second dark age.

xufi 10y ago
Agreed, I do feel there could've been much better games made on the phone. For example, I remember Nintendo was about to make a push to bring its old classic Gameboy Era games /Gameboy Color games to the phone to no avail
- intoverflow2 10y ago
  Would you have been happy to pay $5-$8 per gameboy/gbc title? Yeah didn't think so, but Nintendo DS owners are.

jpeg_hero 10y ago

Apple needs to move the "standard price" from 0.99 one time download -> 0.99 per year Delete app to unsubscribe Remove 0.99 one time pricing $5.00 minimum one time download price

spikengineer 10y ago
That is unaffordable to most consumers in the world. You will end up limiting urself to a market of few rich communities in rich countries.
- vonklaus 10y ago
  that is not true. again, we aren't talking about a coursera course and paywalling information and vital self-learning here. We are talking about a dollar for a luxury game on a device that costs nearly $1000 and $100 a month for service. This is leaving aside that the economics of $4-5 a game would be better than a free game that is unwinnable unless you spend > $10. I believe the parent, and if not then certainly I, am talking about games that are subsciption based and promote full releases that get upgrades and create community. not a 0.99 clone. this market is largely rich communities anyway if you use the world income scale, but we aren't using that scale, we are talking about iphone owners with discretionary income already willing to spend 1-30 a year on games...
  - madgar 10y ago
    > a device that costs nearly $1000 and $100 a month for service If you're going to make a fiscal argument then don't exaggerate your numbers by 60-120%. They start at $400 and top out at $750. If you pay $100/month for service that's your own fault, I don't know anybody paying over $60/month.
spikengineer 10y ago
Apple and Android should instead take a Valve/Steam like approach and create a good community around the store that includes curators, flash sales etc.
10y ago

billyjobob 10y ago

I feel it's worth pointing out this isn't just some blog by any old indie development studio. This is a blog by Jeff Minter. The man practically invented home computer gaming. I was buying his games with my allowance 35 years ago, because they were great. And I still buy them today, because they are still great. If Jeff Minter can't make the App Store work then no-one can. (Although he probably could have done if he had been willing to make crappy games with in app purchase rather than make good games. )

Steko 10y ago
> 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 very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS. The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.
- onion2k 10y ago
  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.
  - personjerry 10y ago
    I thought the point of the parent comment was that the quality of his games has gone down.
    - 10y ago

kmiroslav 10y ago

You know the situation is bleak when even the legendary Jeff "llama" Minter says he can't make money on the app store.

jarjoura 10y ago

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 context to why I should care. To further detriment, Apple has trained the market to stay away from 3rd party curation of iOS apps in any kind of useful way. So we're left only with a gateway of lists. That's nice, but not worth my time. Correct me if I'm wrong, but ultimately an indie game has limited replay value because they're just so small in scope, but they're usually a lot of fun. So a one time upfront payment to enjoy for a few weeks is a great business strategy I think. Edit: Not to sound like I'm bashing Apple here, as I don't think the Google Play store does it any better.

CydeWeys 10y ago
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 compilation linkfarm spam sites. I don't even know where to go to find the best mobile games, and every so often after investing another ten fruitless minutes of research (into what should be fun!) I'll give up all over again. Contrast with my recent gaming experiences on the PC -- Civ V, The Witcher 3, Kerbal Space Program, and Faster than Light. All excellent games well worth their price that I was able to find out about easily. I don't know if anything comparable exists on mobile gaming, or if it's all just shit, nor do I even know how to find out. Back in the day Sony and Nintendo owned and published official magazines that were excellent sources of finding out about games, and many other non-official rags filled any potential void left over (I'll forever look back fondly on my afternoons after school spent reading issues of PC Gamer, PSM, and EGM cover-to-cover). Nothing comparable exists for mobile gaming, and Apple and Google could be doing a much better job of curating their gaming content.
- 10y ago

makecheck 10y ago

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 browsing experience was almost unbelievably inefficient; I found myself scrolling through handfuls of games when I should have been able to rule out dozens. Apple likes to show you “only the icon” most of the time, which is really quite a terrible way to browse; you keep having to go in, out, in out, to learn anything about what’s in the list. I ended up buying nothing at all because I couldn’t even tell if there were games that supported buy-once without any of the usual bullshit gem-buying tactics. Despite having simple goals, the App Store just failed me.

orik 10y ago
What type of game are you looking for? Do you believe there's a untapped market?
- freehunter 10y ago
  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.
  - NEDM64 10y ago
    So your problem has nothing to do with search, but it's simply a game that isn't available on the AppStore. What did you expect? The search to port the game for you?
    - freehunter 10y ago
      You do realize that my comment was in a reply to someone asking what games a person would like to see developed, and in particular, what games are actually missing from the app store, right? Nothing to do with being able to find them. The idea is that they don't exist at all. So yes. You're completely right.

reiichiroh 10y ago

As someone who enjoyed Tempest, isn't Minter a bit of an industry grump now? Albeit someone who's shipped games unlike Chris Crawford.

NEDM64 10y ago

Well, try your luck at Android or Consoles or PC. Never noticied the AppStore was some kind of heaven where money rained. Seriously, so much entitlement. If you want to make money selling games, you have to spend a lot in advertising, how much does Clash of Clans and etc spend? It's the rules, it always has been, what's the surprise? Maybe it worked for a couple of months out of novelity, but it doesn't work any more. Get real, people. And yes, it's free games with IAP the rules. Because they are designed for kids without credit cards that at most buy iTunes gift cards. And yes, it's jewel and candy games, because that's what there is for girls, which are 50% of the population that the "mainstream gaming" has abandoned.

Roboprog 10y ago
The first part was a bit harsh, but you make a good point about games for girls. (my now 20 daughter plays a lot of console games, but hates "ugly" scenery)

alttab 10y ago

So much conversation and not a single reference to App Annie? Look at the data yourselves.

ascotan 10y ago

It's sad. You don't need to see income metrics to support this, just look at the quality of the games. I'm an avid consumer of iphone games and the quality of them has been getting worse and worse. Really neat and creative games seems are gone and we're left with 'Qbert' and 'Bejeweled' clones being recommended as 'featured games'. Most of the great iOS shops seems to have left the market or have been drowned out in a sea of 'crapware'. It seems that to be successful in this market you need to go back to advertising. Apple makes it very very hard to sort crap from quality, so you have to get your brand/name out there.

douche 10y ago

Someday, we'll realize that games on a tiny, fiddly touchscreen with no tactile response, is kind of a stupid idea. I would much rather play games on my dusty old Gameboy Color than struggle with a phone.

coldtea 10y ago

>To give some idea of just how awful iOS was for us, the first non-iOS game I did after spending two years on iOS, released on a Sony handheld that many describe as being “obscure”, generated literally thousands* of times more income for us than two years and ten games on iOS with its potential billions of users.* Yeah, but the Sony handled has like N titles, whereas the iOS has 1000xN.

nathan_f77 10y ago

Oh well. I'm about to finish up a tiny game that I've been working on, and it will be fun to see what happens. At the very least, I've enjoyed learning SceneKit and practicing Swift.

roryokane 10y ago

If you’re looking for “the free .apks that we have put up for our Android ports of five of the iOS games on this site”, they’re at http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/donate.php http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/donate.php. The five games are Super Ox Wars, Five a Day, Caverns of Minos, Goat Up, and Gridrunner.

kinnth 10y ago

These lists in no way take account of ad revenue. For the average indie game ad revenue now makes up at least 50% of the gross daily revenue or if well integrated can make up 70 or even 90% if the game is an advergame like the Ketchapps one finger frustration games. There is still quite a lot of revenue in the market place, just like there is on web. You need to be shrewd and think more about business than just creating and releasing a fun game.