As of last year the average return on iOS games was $700 gross. That may have improved a bit since then, but that's not really painting a pretty picture, especially when you keep in mind that average includes the anomaly that is the headline grabbing Angry Birds, which last I saw had just about made $100million in revenue, but we don't know exactly what their costs are to give profit. Logically the costs won't be that high though.
However, I'd imagine the average return on handheld games is a bit more than $700. Taking Nintendo, seeing as they are the kings of the arena thus making them the fair comparison to the kings of iOS, NSMB would have given them many multiple times the amount Rovio earned from Angry Birds for just a fraction of the sales. And then they had Mario Kart, Pokemon, etc doing it as well.
Do their costs for those specific games really scale up that much to make up for the massive difference in return there? I doubt it.
VGChartz
