Top 1% of iOS Game Developers Make a Third of All Revenue 244
donniebaseball23 writes "The top one percent of iOS game developers earn over a third of the gaming revenue made on the App Store, according to a new survey of iOS developers. The survey, set up by Canadian indie developer Owen Goss, found that the bottom 80 percent of iOS developers are splitting a mere three percent of all App Store game revenue."
Re:So (Score:4, Interesting)
A third of all the kids play the top 1% of iOS games.
I play PC games. Give me a call when you make a decent one. That is what phones are for.
I play Angry Birds and the other 1% top games on my iPhone and just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution on max difficulty on my PC, I don't see the big contradiction in that. The games on my phone are to pass time, I'm not expecting a huge game experience for $1 and I don't think the small screen and touch interfaces could provide one either. It's just there in my pocket every time I got 5 minutes to waste and I just grab something from the top 25 - sometimes top 100 - because they're probably decent then. Usually I go straight for the pay games with no in-game payments, because freemiums and those that try to milk you through in-game stores are plain annoying. The only frustrating thing is that Apple's icons are plain fraudulent, there are apps with in-game stores and purchases yet don't carry the "+" sign in the store like the Mighty Eagle in Angry Birds. I don't mind that they do, just be honest about it. Apple should just block any app that doesn't carry that sign from calling any purchasing API at all.
Re:Solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Every app developer pays Apple 30%.
That's alot more than can be said about our federal tax laws which are more like a record of bribery and scams than a rational tax code.
Google dodges taxes using techniques known as the "Double Irish" and the "Dutch Sandwich" to reduce its tax rate to 2.4 percent.
citation provided [bloomberg.com]
Re:This isn't too different from traditional softw (Score:5, Interesting)
Except the App store is the only playing field of iOS and it isn't as level as you seem to think. Apps that get promoted by Apple within the store get a massive increase in sales, often propelling them into the top 10 / top 50. Top 10 / top 50 apps are naturally bought a lot more than others so they tend to stay in the top charts. Apps that don't get promotion by Apple languish in the depths of the App Store.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the App Store was organised better with better categories, or filters instead of having to endlessly hit "show me more" to get another screen of icons with no real info about what the game is. At the moment the order of apps is based on a combination of sales and star rating which wouldn't be so bad if the star ratings weren't so misleading (obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]).
My kingdom for a mod point (Score:4, Interesting)
More to the point, app developers pay 30% on their GROSS RECEIPTS. If the US switched to a gross receipts tax rather than an income (personal) or profit (corporate) tax, many of the loopholes and dodges would disappear entirely and a flat rate would likely be in the single-digit percentages.
Re:top one percent of X control large amount of Y (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, and generally the situation is really bad, you really have to look hard to find real gems, like for instance Avadon.
Those games make their money, but the possible target audience have a hard time to find them. Instead you constantly either see
a) Another hidden object game
b) another physics puzzle variation of the same game
c) another even worse canabalt clone
d) another 2d zombie shooter
e) another bad tower of defense game
That does not mean iOS has not a really good games, but they are drowned in ripoff shovelware.
The same probably goes for apps as well, but I have my eye simply more on games.
Re:top one percent of X control large amount of Y (Score:4, Interesting)
What percentage of a persons income, no matter how rich, no matter if earned or trust fund baby, OR total wealth, do you think YOU are entitled to have redistributed away from them. Or even more bluntly, what percentage of a person's labor is their own and to what extent are they your slave?
If you really want a fair number, I guess it would be appropriate to divvy up a person's wealth between how much of it they earned themselves through hard work and how much of it was earned by leveraging societal constructs, no? Assuming nobody (including society at large) has ownership a patch of a land, or the resources on that land, and I go there and kill an elk with my bare hands, I can argue that nobody else should be able to take any of it from me.
But, that's not really the world we live in, is it? If your business ships products, you use the roads, rail, harbors, or air terminals that we all share. If you became wealthy by hiring good employees who were educated by a public school system, you really benefit from societies' hard work. If you were able to build appropriate plants/office space due to the fact that you live in a stable society, then you are getting rich on the backs of millions of people's hard work. So, I guess if you are wealth because you are a captain of industry, or a banker, or an entertainer, or a politician it wouldn't be out of line to tax you at near 100%, because everything you've earned is predicated on the business environment you are working within.
Put another way, if you removed 1975 Bill Gates from this earth and dropped him onto another habitable planet with no intelligence species but animals similar to those on earth, who will lose out most? I kind of think if he weren't around someone else would have built a comparably successful company (maybe better for all than MS, maybe worse). But Bill G on the other hand would be decimated.
FWIW, I don't really believe in 100% taxation. My gut tells me that somewhere around 50% is where you cross the line from potentially reasonable to exploitation. But, that's informed by my own societal pressures, so there's no really definitive way to say that's right. I guess what you'd like to see is proof about what levels of taxation make society at large wealthier. E.g. if 0% tax produces -1% GDP gains, 5% tax 1% gains, 15% tax 3% gains, 25% tax 4% gains, 35% tax 3% gains, 45% tax 2% gains, etc...then you could just look at that chart and say we should probably pick the 25% rate because that creates the most wealth. I haven't seen research for that though, but would love to if it exists.
Re:Tea Party Aversion to Simple Math (Score:2, Interesting)
You've got it backwards. The only fools saying "it's all about tax rate" are the ones opposing taxes. Certainly taxes have an effect, but it is only the simpletons in the conservative camp that think the formula is as simple as lower taxes = more jobs.
The tax rate declining with wages and jobs proves one thing: cutting taxes alone will not create jobs, much to the chagrin of every Republican candidate at the moment.