A contrasting company would be someone like inkle's 80 days - that's was an odd iPad game that was hard to sell just on screenshots, but it was marketed brilliantly and had a vision throughout the product that was reflected in taht and the buzz around it was and is huge because of that
The whole point is that it is doubtful that they will stay solvent if they put more money into production values on that platform.
Nice graphics are very expensive. (They are more expensive than any other aspect of game development, in fact). If it seems unlikely that enough people will buy their game given that type of investment, then it may be a good choice to stay away from that.
On top of which, maybe they just don't want to spend all their time doing graphics. Maybe they want to work on the story / world / etc.
Alarmingly true. Good 2D graphics for a game like Avernum could easily scale into the tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars.
(Source: my spreadsheets. :-/ )
It doesn't matter how much work you want to put into your graphics, story, world, or whatever if no one knows that your game exists.
Yes, it is possible but not easy - look at for example Shenandaoh's Desert Fox / Battle of The Bulge). But I don't know if that is a long term model for success. $19.99 is the highest price point you can set for a game and then you are competing with things like FMC2015 or Xcom (heck, you can get GTA San andreas for $6 or so - is your game better than GTA?!?) which are full PC ports. Clever developers will I think make a game for more established platforms, and if successful port to iPad for additional revenue. The iPad has millions of active premium gamers, but a tiny number compared to any non-portable system.
Fact is all iOS categories and ratings are useless to me, mostly rubbish game built for freemium and with loads of marketing wind behind get visibility on the store, while real games get buried and I've had to follow third party website just to even know their existence
At this point App Stores are nothing more than extremely expensive anti viruses for all the applications installed. We'll see on the long term if giving up so much control is worth it for a security scan :|
anyway, even steam has given up, but at least they added curators before opening the early access floodgates
I see this as, first you have the stuff that's top ranking on the app store which is mostly f2p optimization problems. But hardcore gamers should be able to spread the word about an actual good ipad game, right? Or is the notion of an ipad game itself not hardcore enougH?
The ipad is a marketing platform in the best and worst way I can mean that. Looking at this company they seem aggressively anti-marketing. Their entire presentation style and format is opposed to the kind of experience the ipad offers. They are the anti-flipboard. The fact that someone as interested in ipad gaming as me was not even aware their games existed until now suggests it is probably not the best platform for them at all.