There's a difference between Clash of Clans and GTA V, though. There is nothing on any mobile platform that can compete in any way with any AAA game made in the last 10 years (the most advanced mobile game I see is GTA:SA, which came out in 2004 or KOTOR which came out in 2003). Hypothetically, if someone spends $60 on Candy Crush and $60 on a AAA console release, the Candy Crush developers are seeing a much more massive profit from that than EA or Activision see from their games. AAA budgets are well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Candy Crush could be exactly replicated by a 14 year old in a high school Python class.
Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it.
Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.
By mid-2013 Candy Crush had over 500m downloads, and in 2015 was still pulling over 340m monthly players. By comparison, GTA 5 sold about 235m units total so your apple-to-apple comparisons are not so much.
As for "playing their game," I've been in this business since before the iPhone. I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing. Mobile gaming is fun and enormous and provides opportunities for small devs that consoles never did. That said, there is a wide range of free-to-play monetization, not all of which is pure pay-to-win. But this is the industry - you can bury your head in the sand, but you'll go out of business.
You may think jumping from one industry to another is easy, but you'd be mistaken. But you know, compare us all to King if it makes you happy. There are many people beating that drum, but they simply can't grip the economic realities of software and the mobile industry as a whole.
We work to make games people love to play. We have a lot of players. They've all told us how they prefer to pay for our games so that our families might eat. That's fine with me, and with our employees who love making games.
>I didn't choose to work in an industry that raced to the bottom for pricing.
I'm sorry but it doesn't matter how long you've been making games. If you choose to produce mobile games and then choose to make them F2P with IAPs and gems and bullshit, you did make that choice. You don't have to do that. Sure it might be the best way to make money on the iPhone, but selling drugs is a pretty darn good way of making money on the streets. It's a great way to make sure your family can eat. It still makes you a horrible person.
If you were making money before the iPhone, then there's your business model. Otherwise, go back and read your comment again, this time imagining a drug pusher explaining why he sells to addicts. "Sure meth is bad, but hey I'm making money and I'm giving people what they want, you just have to come to grips with the economic realities".
Thanks for killing the industry. Glad you're making a profit though.
Your personal preference for GTA V over Candy Crush is fine -- we're all entitled to our own likes and dislikes. But it's foolish to conclude, apparently based on your personal preference, that Candy Crush is trivial to replicate or less deserving of the money they've undoubtedly worked hard to earn.
AAA developers aren't entitled to make more than mobile games.
Even if you're not among them, I'm sure there are plenty of players who elected to make IAPs and are more satisfied with their purchases than if they'd spent their money on AAA games. To throw one more anecdote on the fire, I'd happily pay $60 for all my time in Candy Crush ... and another $60 to NOT have to play GTA V instead (just not my cup of tea, though some friends swear by it ;).
I'm not arguing that mobile developers have less right to make money than AAA developers, that's a reply to the guy above me saying that AAA developers are ripping off consumers by charging $60 when mobile users won't even pay $10. AAA games take hundreds of millions of dollars to make. There's never been a hugely successful AAA game made by one guy in his dorm room over the course of two days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flappy_Bird). Mobile games are inherently cheaper and easier to make than AAA titles.
>PS. Candy Crush is owned by Activision.
Yeah, I almost added a line about "that's why Activision bought King for $5.5 billion." Because they make a shit load of money scamming players and their games cost absolutely nothing to produce.
> But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app
Why not just play iOS games that you buy outright without IAP then instead of downloading the "free" trash that makes money then getting upset when they try and make money off you.
That what I do, but you get game companies that later go back and change the game to free to play and / or add in a ton of IAP's. Buying outright is no protection in the iOS app store.
Only 2.3% of Candy Crush players pay any money. Meanwhile, King has 1400 employees and revenue of over $2.2 billion per year. But you know what's not fair? Take-Two, the parent company of Rockstar and makers of a whole hell of a lot more AAA games than just GTA, has a profit of $2.3b. I think the profit scales are tipped a little more towards the app developers than towards the AAA developers on this one, especially considering damn close to 100% of the players of GTA V paid for their game, and paid $60 for it.
Sure, not every developer is King and not all IAPs are shitty like that. But the minute I see "buy more gems for $1.99!", I delete the app. You might not get any downloads if you charge money for your software, but then again, as a mobile developer, you chose to enter that market. Which means you chose to be compared to all the other bullshit IAP scam games that dominate the "highest grossing" list. Don't want to be compared to the scam artists? Then don't play the same games as them.