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sethnintendo on 08 August 2012
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mrstickball said:


The issue with iOS entirely deals with the issue of application/game discovery. The article wfz cited earlier shows that: The most successful developers spend about $30,000 on average for marketing. That helps with discovery, which then helps titles jump up the various charts, which then helps with additional discovery, as users aren't going to venture outside of the top-200 lists often.

Such an ecosystem in the internet age can survive and thrive. The analogy with Atari is a poor one in some cases, because the issue was that users had no way of rating or ranking good titles against the crappy ones on the shelves at a local store. With iOS and Android, you have user ratings and other ranking services that allow for a real-time feed that allows users to rate quality games, and discourage shoddy games from purchase.

The same can be said about the internet: The internet is so vast, and available to everyone, so how does one even discover new sites? How do new sites generate user interest in a world where they may be competing not against dozens, but millions of other sites? Marketing, which results in new ways for user discovery.

That is the key. Most iOS developers are incredibly stupid when it comes to discovery, thus why you have about 5% of apps generating 90% of revenues. However, if you look at how large the pie is, it is an incredibly attractive picture, because top-200 games are generating thousands, if not tens of thousands of dollars daily.

Yea, apparently there is a flood of developers that aren't on top of their game.  I suppose the main thing that sticks out to me would be Android related which I mentioned a little on my first response (fragmentation).  Android might be wrecking shop over iOS but there is a huge fragmentation problem that I see.  While it isn't a very big problem it still seems to piss off a decent amount of people.  Just look at most games on the Android market and you see the same comments (doesn't work, force closes, freezes, sound freezes, no sound, etc).  The fragmentation has led to an environment on Android where even if it says it is compatible with your phone an update could change that instantly (cause crashes, etc).   I was looking for a chart about the fragmentation and it led me to a site that pretty much stated that it was the cell phone carriers fault for not allowing updates , etc.

You don't know exactly what will work even if it says it will work on Android.  Case in point: Look at almost all the EA games on the Android market (Life, Monopoly, Need for Speed).  Users nail them like crazy on the comments / reviews because their games just don't work with a decent amount of phones and this is from a publisher as big as EA (not really saying too much but still..).