Re:Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad
by krapp on Thursday April 16, 2015 @07:30PM
(#9391370)
> I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash"
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...
Re:Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad
by eridius on Thursday April 16, 2015 @07:42PM
(#9391428)
> 1983
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.
Re:Why We Are No Longer Developing for the iPad
by cwyers on Thursday April 16, 2015 @07:43PM
(#9391439)
You're probably too young (so am I). He's talking about the crash that wiped out Atari and others in the home market. Nintendo had to market themselves as an accessory for a toy robot just to get U.S. retailers to stock them. The single biggest example is the E.T. game, which had thousands of unsold copies shipped straight to landfills.
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.