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Re:Ask HN: My game was just featured in the Windows 8 app st... by hdivider on Sunday March 03, 2013 @04:25PM (#5315299)
"there are only 43.000 apps at the moment, meaning that there is very little competition"

The numbers get even more interesting when you move into some specific subcategories: according to my version (UK) of the Windows Store, there are currently ~230 action games, ~550 arcade games, ~180 card games, ~80 shooter games and ~60 simulation games on it.

I doubt the numbers for the US and other versions of the store are very different, since basically nobody will restrict themselves to only the UK market if the game is already in English.

Now, I don't know any statistics on how strongly users depend on using subcategories to find games, but I know that's what I'd do if I wanted to find an interesting game.

Re:Ask HN: My game was just featured in the Windows 8 app st... by Avalaxy on Sunday March 03, 2013 @04:42PM (#5315356)
Let me get you the statistics for the US market:

Education 3811

Entertainment 3587

Photo 562

Music & Video 1012

Health & Fitness 867

Security 134

Tools 2387

Government 111

Shopping 179

Games 3657

Lifestyle 1292

Food & Dining 754

Business 708

Travel 1050

Social 523

Finance 360

Productivity 1154

Sports 816

News & Weather 1598

Books & Reference 3158

As you can see there are only 111 'government' apps for example. Since the list of 'top x apps' only contains 100 entries, you're pretty much guaranteed to be in the top 100 of government apps when you make one (it can be anything, an app for a political party, an app for polls, etc.). The same goes for 'shopping' and 'security' (and a little bit for finance, which has 360 apps).

Edit: here are the stats for the different 'games' subcategories:

Action 183

Adventure 72

Arcade 512

Card 167

Casino 73

Family 258

Kids 390

Music 27

Puzzle 1269

Racing 33

Role playing 48

Shooter 92

Simulation 54

Sports 71

Strategy 203

Re:Ask HN: My game was just featured in the Windows 8 app st... by hdivider on Sunday March 03, 2013 @05:24PM (#5315483)
Very interesting, thanks. =)

I'm betting there will be a fairly sharp increase in the daily submission rate for games once Unity3D makes deployment to the Windows Store available for everyone. According to the Unity guys, they currently have 'no information' on when that will happen, but since some of their selected partners already have this option I'm guessing it'll be a matter of just a few months or so.