I would, of course, be happy to have a fully itemized accounting database, but the way it is, undefined "making money" or "breaking even" etc. doesn't give me a

I would, of course, be happy to have a fully itemized accounting database, but the way it is, undefined "making money" or "breaking even" etc. doesn't give me anything at all that I can use. Having an undefined mishmash of revenues over an unspecified time (per year? since release? discounted cash flow anticipated forever?) minus who even knows what, and announcing just the result of comparing undefined values to undefined values, is not more informative than a simple top line gross revenue number. You're clearly correct that annual revenues per app without the costs it took to achieve those revenues is not all you would like to know. It's only one piece of relatively well-defined data, which you would have to supplement with your own estimates, based on looking at lists of popular apps and estimating what it would take to create them, of what it would take you to produce something similar. But having just the results of how often an undefined value exceeds another undefined value is not more information than one well-defined value; it is less. Now, of course, if they were to provide much clearer definitions of their terms ("breaking even", etc.), and give us some assurance that the developers who answered the questionnaires were quite clear on those definitions (not as certain as simply, "how many dollars per year does the store send to you for that app?), then we would both probably be happier with the data.