> If Jeff Minter can't make the App Store work then no-one can.
As a counterpoint I grew up on no small amount of Jeff Minter games, lost more hours to Tempest 2000 on the godawful Jaguar than one should admit to in polite company, and have downloaded almost all of Llamasoft's iOS games due mostly to the fawning reviews in Toucharcade and played them for not all that long because -- frankly -- they are simply not very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS.
The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.
So the reality is that even if you're a semi-famous developer who has a practically guaranteed revenue and media coverage from your fans, it still isn't enough. You need to make a game that competes on quality with the studios that spend $millions on their apps.
Thats not a very promising proposition to anyone considering making a game.
> So the reality is that even if you're a semi-famous developer who has a practically guaranteed revenue and media coverage from your fans, it still isn't enough. You need to make a game that competes on quality
Yes
> with the studios that spend $millions on their apps.
No, there are plenty of studios that compete on quality without spending millions.
Sort of. I wouldn't say the quality went down so much as what would was a great game in 1983 turned out to be meh in 2013. Also the level of polish in Txk (the "1000 x revenue" PS Vita game) vs any of the iOS releases is pretty stark.
As a counterpoint I grew up on no small amount of Jeff Minter games, lost more hours to Tempest 2000 on the godawful Jaguar than one should admit to in polite company, and have downloaded almost all of Llamasoft's iOS games due mostly to the fawning reviews in Toucharcade and played them for not all that long because -- frankly -- they are simply not very good. They aren't bad games but they certainly don't stand out among the hundreds of games I've tried for iOS.
The comparison he makes in this blog post between the income of (a) games he independently released on iOS and (b) a game Sony paid him to make for the PSVita but was shut down from release on other platforms because it too closely copied T2K is beyond disingenuous.