| Soundwave said:
It's called iOS/Android and Steam. If I'm an indie dev why should I pay $10-50k for a dev kit and then on top of that give you $10 for every copy of every game I sell? Today is truly a golden age for indie devs where you can as a garage developer come up with an idea and bring that idea to an audience of millions. Sony/MS/Nintendo honestly from an indie developer POV? F*ck 'em. Their business model is horribly outdated. Look at iOS vs. 3DS eShop, most devs ignore Nintendo like the plague. They don't need Nintendo. Its far cheap to get a game up and running on iOS. Nintendo is going to be one scrambling to try and improve things now because they've seen (probably to their horror) the rise of the iOS market has completely taken away their Brain Training/Nintendogs audience. Nintendo makes great games, but painting them as some messiah for original game content is laughable. What new studios has Nintendo invested in? What new IPs have they let any new studio work on? At least Sony invests a lot of in new studios (Media Molecule and so on) and lets them work on new, original IPs, not sequels/spinoffs to the same 7-8 franchises over and over (and over) again. |
The iOS/Android market is overrun with "indie-devs" and their games. Only few games are profitable and many games are blatantly copies of console/handheld games and miss even a little spark of imagination. Statistics say that more than 85% of iOS games & apps are only downloaded one or two times.
Apple has a big interested to convince small developers that there is money in their market. Regularly you can read some sensationally articles about one app that brought millions to a small developer. Apple has a big interest in such articles, because developers must buy a Mac for development and some apple devices for test purposes and on top of that they must pay the yearly bill to have the "right" to publish in the apple store. Most of these small developers made one or two games and left the market fast after that. Even for this apps Apple took 30% of the price! Apple and very few lucky developers are the only winner.
