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> 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

by eridius 12y ago

> 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 advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels? 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. 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. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.

rodgerd 12y ago
> Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development? In Windows game development you've have a long history of many ways to distribute your wares, with different pros and cons. Not so much for Androids or iOS. Note that similar complaints have been levelled at Steam, which is the closest thing to the iOS model.
- eridius 12y ago
  Is there really that much of a difference between "Click [here](link-to-app-store) to buy this game!" and "Click [here](link-to-self-hosted-page) to buy this game!"? The only real difference I can think of is when software was primarily distributed via physical media, but that hasn't been the primary distribution mechanism for a while (and I would expect that nearly all software these days doesn't even have an option for physical media).
  - jblow 12y ago
    There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.
    - s73v3r 12y ago
      You mean iOS developers aren't allowed to do things like have Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, or host forums?
    - eridius 12y ago
      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 app from. The only other interpretation I can think of is "Apple doesn't let you respond to reviews on the app store", but the ability to respond to reviews is not an industry-wide expectation. I can't think of anywhere before the rise of mobile gaming that anyone considered the idea that a game developer should be able to respond to reviews.
      - jblow 12y ago
        It's not about giving your email address to everyone (I wouldn't want that either), but it's about having the friction-free option of doing so. There are a number of game-makers for whom I absolutely want to be emailed when they make something new, because I love their stuff. That doesn't happen on iOS very easily.
        eridius 12y ago
        Why not? Every app page has a link to the developer's site, and the developer's site can offer a way to subscribe to some sort of newsletter. And games often provide links in the game itself to view information about the game developer. Edit: I recognize that it's not particularly common for developers to try and encourage users to sign up for some sort of marketing. But I think that's just because developers haven't really considered it to be an acceptable thing to ask users of their games for, rather than any actual difficulty in doing so.
- s73v3r 12y ago
  So? That's not really relevant. You still have insane amounts of competition on Windows, much like you do on iOS. On either platform, marketing is a requirement.
kbenson 12y ago
Whether the marketplace is profitable to a developer at their level is not always directly correlated to how popular that marketplace is. If the the App store is so competitive as to require a lot of up-front money to see a worthwhile return on investment, but other markets do not have that same problem, it may may sense to focus on those other markets.
- eridius 12y ago
  How do you define "competitive" if you're not defining it in a way that correlates with "popular"?
  - frandroid 12y ago
    Competitive is a question of demand versus supply; you can have super competitive small markets. You have 1 yellow marble, 5 blue marbles, and 10 people. 5 people want a yellow marble, and five want a blue marble. Blue and yellow marbles are just as popular, but the competition for yellow marbles is much more intense.
    - eridius 12y ago
      Given that we're discussing the supply side of things, I think your example is backwards. But even if you changed it to competition for supplying the desire of yellow marbles, I still don't think it's relevant. It's certainly true that there's an incredible supply of cheap/free games on iOS (typically of very low quality, or chock-full of F2P mechanics or ads). But there's a very low supply of high-quality serious games being sold for more-than-a-cup-of-coffee prices. I think there's certainly a market for those games, the problem is just that you can't rely on the App Store for discovery (but you never really could do that anyway). So it seems the real problem is just that Jeff Vogel doesn't know how to market his stuff, and rather than actually figuring it out, or, heck, hiring someone else to do it for him, he's just giving up on the market entirely. Which is a real shame.
      - kbenson 12y ago
jnem 12y ago
I don't think Vogel was saying the platform was too popular for users, but rather too popular for developers, resulting in too much competition. Besides, if you've ever read his blog, you know hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade, and has a charming way of not caring.
- eridius 12y ago
  I didn't say "popular for users", I just said "popular". And I strongly expect that "popular for users" and "popular for developers" are extremely closely correlated anyway, at least when it comes to consumer-targeted platforms (i.e. not Linux, where every user is also a developer). > hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade There's a difference between "haha I'm not good at marketing, I'm glad people are still buying my stuff" and "haha I'm not good at marketing, therefore I'll stop developing for probably the fastest-growing gaming platform ever and say it's due to competition".
  - yellowapple 12y ago
    Is the App Store really the fastest-growing, though? It's a ridiculously-dubious claim (in addition to being pretty meaningless without context). It reminds me of a particular XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/
ThomPete 12y ago
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 given up.
- olefoo 12y ago
  Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem. Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you are putting money into it. Look at Twitter as an example. They give away their app to drive usage of the service, and in the early days they were totally OK with other developers making and selling twitter clients. This was because twitter clients are a complement to Twitter the service and their money comes from selling the analytics and advertising that the service enables. 0. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    Yeah I hear you. I had a reality check when I launched my mac app. Good thing it doesn't have much competition at least for now.
  - serve_yay 12y ago
    Yeah yeah. But none of that has anything to do with typing an app's entire name in the search bar and getting a ton of garbage unrelated results. Discovery being broken is not really a "commoditize the complements" play, it's just bad UX.
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- eridius 12y ago
  > to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the same thing as being featured on the store, and it's widely regarded as a scummy move. In any case, if you had to self-host your own game download instead of having Apple provide the download, that certainly wouldn't fix any of this. People still need to discover your game, which means you need to market it, and you can provide a link to the app store just as easily as you could provide a link to a self-hosted download.
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    - eridius 12y ago
      I don't know what you mean. Every "featured app" on the App Store was chosen by Apple. Nobody can pay to be featured. Apple decides what apps they want to feature on their own.
      - Mithaldu 12y ago
        Oh, ok then, i was entirely wrong. I thought it operated like Steam. (I don't own an iDevice.)
volaski 12y ago
Windows ecosystem had level playing field for each player. Appstore has rankings (which feeds into itself, which leads to developers having to pay people to download just to rank higher initially) and featured (subjective and non-transparent curation by the platform owner)
lmm 12y ago
> 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.
- eridius 12y ago
  > 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 down over time, which would suggest that competition in that market is lower than ever. If you rely on the App Store for discovery then you have a problem, but that's always been true for everyone except the most successful F2P games. > 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. Let me guess, Spirit Lords? I was actually really disappointed when I realized that game was neck-deep in F2P mechanics, because it was surprisingly high-quality otherwise. And yes, there are some other F2P games that are pretty polished. But the vast majority of F2P games do not have the same quality and polish that you'd expect from a game that you had to pay more than a few dollars for.
jasonlotito 12y ago
You keep saying iOS when the article isn't about iOS. It's about developing games for the iPad. Not iPhone. And making the assumption that they are the same ignore realities even Apple is aware of. One could very easily find value is developing for iPhone and not iPad. And clearly, developing for iPad alone wasn't worth it.
zmmmmm 12y ago
> "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.

by eridius 12y ago

rodgerd 12y ago

> Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development? In Windows game development you've have a long history of many ways to distribute your wares, with different pros and cons. Not so much for Androids or iOS. Note that similar complaints have been levelled at Steam, which is the closest thing to the iOS model.

eridius 12y ago
Is there really that much of a difference between "Click [here](link-to-app-store) to buy this game!" and "Click [here](link-to-self-hosted-page) to buy this game!"? The only real difference I can think of is when software was primarily distributed via physical media, but that hasn't been the primary distribution mechanism for a while (and I would expect that nearly all software these days doesn't even have an option for physical media).
- jblow 12y ago
  There are massive differences. For example, in the Windows world you are allowed to find out who likes your stuff and build relationships with them.
  - s73v3r 12y ago
    You mean iOS developers aren't allowed to do things like have Twitter accounts, Facebook pages, or host forums?
  - eridius 12y ago
    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 app from. The only other interpretation I can think of is "Apple doesn't let you respond to reviews on the app store", but the ability to respond to reviews is not an industry-wide expectation. I can't think of anywhere before the rise of mobile gaming that anyone considered the idea that a game developer should be able to respond to reviews.
    - jblow 12y ago
      It's not about giving your email address to everyone (I wouldn't want that either), but it's about having the friction-free option of doing so. There are a number of game-makers for whom I absolutely want to be emailed when they make something new, because I love their stuff. That doesn't happen on iOS very easily.
      - eridius 12y ago
        Why not? Every app page has a link to the developer's site, and the developer's site can offer a way to subscribe to some sort of newsletter. And games often provide links in the game itself to view information about the game developer. Edit: I recognize that it's not particularly common for developers to try and encourage users to sign up for some sort of marketing. But I think that's just because developers haven't really considered it to be an acceptable thing to ask users of their games for, rather than any actual difficulty in doing so.
s73v3r 12y ago
So? That's not really relevant. You still have insane amounts of competition on Windows, much like you do on iOS. On either platform, marketing is a requirement.

kbenson 12y ago

Whether the marketplace is profitable to a developer at their level is not always directly correlated to how popular that marketplace is. If the the App store is so competitive as to require a lot of up-front money to see a worthwhile return on investment, but other markets do not have that same problem, it may may sense to focus on those other markets.

eridius 12y ago
How do you define "competitive" if you're not defining it in a way that correlates with "popular"?
- frandroid 12y ago
  Competitive is a question of demand versus supply; you can have super competitive small markets. You have 1 yellow marble, 5 blue marbles, and 10 people. 5 people want a yellow marble, and five want a blue marble. Blue and yellow marbles are just as popular, but the competition for yellow marbles is much more intense.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Given that we're discussing the supply side of things, I think your example is backwards. But even if you changed it to competition for supplying the desire of yellow marbles, I still don't think it's relevant. It's certainly true that there's an incredible supply of cheap/free games on iOS (typically of very low quality, or chock-full of F2P mechanics or ads). But there's a very low supply of high-quality serious games being sold for more-than-a-cup-of-coffee prices. I think there's certainly a market for those games, the problem is just that you can't rely on the App Store for discovery (but you never really could do that anyway). So it seems the real problem is just that Jeff Vogel doesn't know how to market his stuff, and rather than actually figuring it out, or, heck, hiring someone else to do it for him, he's just giving up on the market entirely. Which is a real shame.
    - kbenson 12y ago

jnem 12y ago

I don't think Vogel was saying the platform was too popular for users, but rather too popular for developers, resulting in too much competition. Besides, if you've ever read his blog, you know hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade, and has a charming way of not caring.

eridius 12y ago
I didn't say "popular for users", I just said "popular". And I strongly expect that "popular for users" and "popular for developers" are extremely closely correlated anyway, at least when it comes to consumer-targeted platforms (i.e. not Linux, where every user is also a developer). > hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade There's a difference between "haha I'm not good at marketing, I'm glad people are still buying my stuff" and "haha I'm not good at marketing, therefore I'll stop developing for probably the fastest-growing gaming platform ever and say it's due to competition".
- yellowapple 12y ago
  Is the App Store really the fastest-growing, though? It's a ridiculously-dubious claim (in addition to being pretty meaningless without context). It reminds me of a particular XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1102/ https://xkcd.com/1102/

ThomPete 12y ago

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 given up.

olefoo 12y ago
Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem. Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you are putting money into it. Look at Twitter as an example. They give away their app to drive usage of the service, and in the early days they were totally OK with other developers making and selling twitter clients. This was because twitter clients are a complement to Twitter the service and their money comes from selling the analytics and advertising that the service enables. 0. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
- ThomPete 12y ago
  Yeah I hear you. I had a reality check when I launched my mac app. Good thing it doesn't have much competition at least for now.
- serve_yay 12y ago
  Yeah yeah. But none of that has anything to do with typing an app's entire name in the search bar and getting a ton of garbage unrelated results. Discovery being broken is not really a "commoditize the complements" play, it's just bad UX.
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eridius 12y ago
> to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the same thing as being featured on the store, and it's widely regarded as a scummy move. In any case, if you had to self-host your own game download instead of having Apple provide the download, that certainly wouldn't fix any of this. People still need to discover your game, which means you need to market it, and you can provide a link to the app store just as easily as you could provide a link to a self-hosted download.
- deleted 12y ago
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  - eridius 12y ago
    I don't know what you mean. Every "featured app" on the App Store was chosen by Apple. Nobody can pay to be featured. Apple decides what apps they want to feature on their own.
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      Oh, ok then, i was entirely wrong. I thought it operated like Steam. (I don't own an iDevice.)

volaski 12y ago

Windows ecosystem had level playing field for each player. Appstore has rankings (which feeds into itself, which leads to developers having to pay people to download just to rank higher initially) and featured (subjective and non-transparent curation by the platform owner)

lmm 12y ago

> 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.

eridius 12y ago
> 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 down over time, which would suggest that competition in that market is lower than ever. If you rely on the App Store for discovery then you have a problem, but that's always been true for everyone except the most successful F2P games. > 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. Let me guess, Spirit Lords? I was actually really disappointed when I realized that game was neck-deep in F2P mechanics, because it was surprisingly high-quality otherwise. And yes, there are some other F2P games that are pretty polished. But the vast majority of F2P games do not have the same quality and polish that you'd expect from a game that you had to pay more than a few dollars for.

jasonlotito 12y ago

You keep saying iOS when the article isn't about iOS. It's about developing games for the iPad. Not iPhone. And making the assumption that they are the same ignore realities even Apple is aware of. One could very easily find value is developing for iPhone and not iPad. And clearly, developing for iPad alone wasn't worth it.

zmmmmm 12y ago

> "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.