Dollar Apps Killing Traditional Gaming? 343
donniebaseball23 writes "There can be no denying that the rise of smartphones and tablets has had a major impact on the gaming business. The prevalence of free and 99-cent apps has changed consumers' perception of value. Mike Capps, president of Gears of War developer Epic Games, said, 'If there's anything that's killing us [in the traditional games business] it's dollar apps. How do you sell someone a $60 game that's really worth it? They're used to 99 cents. As I said, it's an uncertain time in the industry. But it's an exciting time for whoever picks the right path and wins.'"
Re:Profit dollars are what matters. (Score:2, Informative)
If your game costs $1,000,000 to devlop for a phone or portable device, then stop right there, close up shop and go home. You are doing it wrong and will only produce crap.
Yes it's neat that you paid a world crafter to spend 8 hours a day for 6 months to place every pieces of junk in your world, ala: fallout 3 and some gamers might notice and appreciate that, but 90% will never notice and dont care. So stop paying a "artist" low 6 figures to do grunt work and hire a student at low 5 figures to do it instead.
Honestly, hiring rock star programmers and artists on a $1.00 iOS game is utterly stupid. And only a complete moron would do such a thing.
Games like angry birds, coded up in a month, art done in 3 months by a medicore artist. ALL DONE and even at dumb silicon valley pay rates you are still under $100,000 and they made that back in the first week of sales.
Re:Profit dollars are what matters. (Score:2, Informative)
Here's some simple math for you to illustrate the reality of the app marketplace. By Apple's own claims it has (A) generated $2,000,000,000 in revenue for developers, and (B) hosts 350,000 apps in its store. A / B = $5714.29 per app on average, the vast majority making significantly less than that. That's no way to make a living. The winning strategy seems to be to make lots of garbage quickly and hope something sticks. Any other strategy is akin to to winning the lottery.
Re:So (Score:3, Informative)
I have written a iOS game called MatchuM. Its a Mah Jong solitaire game without all the "oriental baggage" you get in those games. It is on the app store but hardly anyone knows its there. It doesn't matter how good your game is, once it has fallen off the "new releases" screen in iTunes then what do you do? How do you let people know its there? The "freeappaday" people want £2.5K to advertise it, but thats probably more then I have spent on hardware in the last 20 years, so thats a no go.
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/matchum/id379622306 [apple.com]