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.
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
I've heard this argument before, and if it's true, it's suicidal. Apple will have failed to learn a critical lesson from Microsoft's dominance of the early PC era: it's the apps that matter. Even once there was a significant potential market of would-be platform "switchers" who wanted something beyond what Windows was offering, these switchers remained on Windows because the critical apps in their day-to-day usage (be that Office, CAD software, or whatever) only ran on Windows.
If Apple's view is truly so narrow that they kill the ability of their "complements" to make good money, then Apple is pushing hard to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Even if Apple had unquestionably the very best manufacturing processes, hardware design, and platform software design, it would all be worthless if no one other than Apple can afford to write and support high-quality software for that platform.
Now, I'll agree that from Apple's publicly observable positions with its App Stores that they (incredibly) don't seem to understand the need and necessity for maintaining a virtuous cycle between developers and their platforms.
A wild-a-guess: This may stem from a deep misunderstanding of the nature of software. Sure, a random tapping game or timer app or whatever is essentially a replaceable one-off, a fungible commodity. But software that's a fungible commodity fundamentally doesn't create any platform stickyness. If it's really so easy to recreate, it can and will trivially show up on a new platform. This is especially true in a world where many software organizations really are getting better at delivering on multiple platforms.
Beyond the fungible stuff, there's the important category of software that I increasingly view as a "living" thing rather than a static artifact. Such software requires ongoing maintenance and care. This allows it a lifespan across the changes of its underlying platform(s), and to absorb and embody deep problem domains. I pose that these apps, no matter the genre (games, "creative", technical, etc.) are the ones that can create platform stickyness. This, in turn, implies that humans must be able to make a living supporting that software. Undermining this is like cutting off the "oxygen" to a vital part of a platform's ecosystem.
So you might be right that too many inconveniences will send faithful customers away (I gave an example) but I don't believe commoditized apps are such a problem. People buy Apple because it's Apple and only a barren app store could drive them away now.
What modern strategies?
I've seen this theory proposed multiple times, that Apple wants to commoditize software, but I've never seen anyone actually demonstrate ways in which Apple is doing that, just speculation that it would be in Apple's interests.
Stardock's 2014 report touches on related topics, http://www.stardock.com/press/CustomerReports/Stardock2014.p...
Many are making money right now, but I would suggest they don't have terribly good businesses, in that they don't own the relationship with the end user. One change of Apple's policies can put you out of business.
If some app makers start to be unable to compete, competition will drop, and profits will increase, right?
Knowing Apple, knowing its history and people that work there and the things they care about, I think Apple is incapable of deliberately producing a bad UX. When it happens, it's caused by other factors rather than being an explicit decision. In the case of App Store discovery being broken, I think it's caused by the fact that the App Store seems to be run largely the way the Music Store is run (with the addition of app review), and nobody complains about search / discovery in the Music Store, but it just so happens that the infrastructure and design around the music store doesn't work quite so well when applied to apps.
"Apple Acquired Search Startup Ottocat To Power The ‘Explore’ Tab In The App Store"
I had a reality check when I launched my mac app. Good thing it doesn't have much competition at least for now.
Isn't that just a nice way of saying 'forcing a meaningful relationship' onto the customer? Obviously users can seek out more information from the developer's website / twitter / etc if they want to. Everyone else probably doesn't want to be nagged by SPAM e-mails and other forms of self-promotion. I feel like trial software falls into the same gimmicky category. Inevitably users wait to purchase until the trial ends and end up feeling annoyed for being forced to pay for something they were using for free. Even more so now that so many users are used to IAP feature upgrades.
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.
> 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".
It reminds me of a particular XKCD comic: https://xkcd.com/1102/
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.
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.
Even if we assume the App store today had the exact same number of consumers, there's many more apps competing for those users. The marketplace is very competitive, and the percentage of available users is less per app (on average).
My guess is that the reality is that the App store has many more consumers (or consumer dollars which is what we care about), but the number of apps has increased much more rapidly than consumer spending (e.g. supply increased much faster than demand).
How many flashlight apps were available 6 years ago? How many are available now? How has the average price changed? Given roughly equivalent ratings, how much research does the user have to do to figure out if one is better for their needs than another? How likely are they to do this? Are the per year proceeds of the average flashlight app higher now or back then? Even if we limit it to apps with a high ratings, how does it look? Are there other app store segments where the outcome is better or worse?
That said, here's something to think about: I myself have paid real money for a flashlight application for my smartphone. Why? Because I wanted a flashlight app that didn't take three screens and button presses to get to light, and I also was a little leery of what the ad supported apps were really using the network for, so I wanted one that didn't require network access. This was a few years back and on Android, but I think the point is applicable, what you think you know about a market on a cursory review may not turn out the be correct upon deeper inspection. Some people made money on these apps, either through advertising or through the initial app price.
Flashlight apps may have been a poor choice on my part, but I think the original point stands. How does the market for tower defense games look? What about platform games? Do you think the average developer in these markets markets makes as much as they did 5-6 years ago? Do you think the advertising cost is the same?
As for your original point, I'll grant that you have a point, but I don't necessarily agree with it. I'm finding it hard to speculate about markets where I have no actual data, but my hunch is that the market for tower defense games is larger today than it was 5-6 years ago (i.e. I think the genre has grown more popular). I don't know whether that correlates with increased revenue for developers of tower defense games, or whether the number of games has outstripped the demand for them. Although I think it's fair to expect that there are a few developers making lots of money, and bunch of developers making a moderate amount of money (that may or may not offset the cost), and a bunch of developers making very little money. It turns out the App Store in general has a very steep revenue curve, with most of the money going to relatively few developers. But I think it's always had that curve, we just didn't used to have the data available to see it as well as we do today.
I think the more important question with regards to the App Store is not "how much money are developers making?", but "how easy is it for a new entrant to make money?". And I don't know the answer to this either, but I would be interested to find out.
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.
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.
Probably when the market was flooded with garbage quality games and the bottom fell out of it[0].
Fun fact - the reason the NES looked like a nondescript square box in the US with the weird spring loading cartridge (meant to resemble the mechanism of a VCR) as opposed to looking like the Famicom, was fear that after the crash, Americans wouldn't spend money on a 'videogame console' but they might buy something presented as an 'entertainment system' that just happened to play video games.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_cras...
Ah, that's why I'm not familiar with it. That was a long time ago. I'm really only familiar with everything from the NES onwards.
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.
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.
The original post here was on Spiderweb Software's forums, which have been around in some incarnation or another for over a decade and hosts a community that has built up around their games. This is a company that has always relied on a close relationship with its customers.
As a buyer on Steam actually I didn't feel I had a direct relationship with jblow as the developer, but I would have been very happy to receive his marketing material, especially if it was programming tips!
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-5-tips-of-a-productive-dev...
(...looking forward to The Witness)
When you buy an app, you are basically looking at sales sheets from people you don't know making claims you can't verify. The only way out is to go find reviews about the apps from blogs you can't trust.
Now think about buying an iPhone. I've owned an iPhone for 8 years. I know intimately the support experience. I know intimately the build quality. Software quality. Product lifecycle. When a new iPhone comes out I have basically all the information I need to make a purchasing decision, without ever laying eyes on the actual product. People who don't have that information can go to a retail store where they can try the product and talk with knowledgeable and friendly people about it, and many of them turn into me in 8 years.
I want to be able to create that kind of experience with my products. Because if smartphones were sold the way that apps are today I don't think many people would buy them.
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.
My comment does not address the rest of what you're saying (in particular, I don't care at all about iOS games or their app store), only that one point.
iD/John Carmack, David Braben, Sid Meier, Rockstar, Volition, Gearbox Software... I could keep rattling off names and developers, but those are all examples of companies and individuals who have dedicated followings who follow them from game to game or platform to platform.
Games on PCs, Valve's best efforts notwithstanding, are not yet so reduced.
There are a lot of people who like having tons of new games available to try for a few minutes or hours or days, and then throw them away. But the existence of those people / that market does not mean that there isn't also a market for games that people stick with for a long time, and that are sold and maintained for a long time.
iD and Bungie both have a long history of heavy interaction with their customers. That's rolled off for iD, but Bungie's back-and-forward seems as lively as ever.
Given you're fighting with actual, successful game developers as well as adopting a take-em-all-on style with everyone else I'm not sure you want to be clear.
It was common many years ago. And some indie developers still engage their fans, solicit advice, etc...
It is impossible on the AppStore ...
Yes, of course you can go out of your way to get connected to the people making a game. But it's just harder to do that on iOS than on Windows, and this has consequences in terms of the viability of these platforms for small developers. (It is by no means the only factor. The race-to-zero pricing on iOS is probably a bigger factor.)
It was a major distribution medium until fairly recently, even if not primary. Heck, you can still go into lots of retailers and buy physical media for PC games.
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.
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.
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.
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.