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I really don't think the top 200 is as impressive a metric as you think for so called middle ground. I mean really, extend it to other industries.

The top 200 highest grossing album, concert, football player, movie star, corporate executive etc, are all making big money too, and not because these industries have a great middle ground, but because the top 200 on the planet in just about anything is the top 0.1%.

For example, I took a look at the very bottom of the list, the first company that had a report on its website I opened, which was Iggs, second to last game on the top 200 list, and it had 860 employees, mostly in low-cost areas like China. (more power to them, but for many HN readers, the prospect of competing with a team of 5 people who total your salary in the iOS game industry probably isn't very appealing). I'll grant, it's not their only game on the list, but if it was it'd still be a very sizeable studio.

This is by no means a middle-ground company. The notion you don't need to be top 10 or top 100 and that top 200 is good, too, is meaningless when such companies can have almost 900 employees. Check the list and you'll find lots of big ones, from EA, Disney, Zynga to Bethesda, hanging around at the bottom of this ostensibly middle ground list.

Anyway I do agree, there is a lot more middle ground than people make it out to be, but it definitely feels like an industry where mediocre talent doesn't really fly. Small studios have to do something special, unique, in a niche. That's a bit different from some other industries where you can make a living without really standing out. In that sense, the app store does feel like a place where the middle-ground is scarce and relatively competitive. And that's a new reality from 6 years ago, when you could still make money on flashlight apps, which is a lifetime ago in the appstore, but a short time for an entire industry in general to undergo such a paradigm shift. I think a lot of the myth you talk about is a narrative that contrasts the story we had not very long ago, when every app idea was relatively new and got the guaranteed downloads you mentioned already.

I don't think he's saying top 200/0.1% is middle ground. He said that level can probably support hundreds of employees, and that they take in ~10k/day, which is 7 figures annually.

He's saying he himself is in the middle ground, which is a 2 man operation pulling in 6 figures.

Which myth? Did we read the same article?

> That there's no more middle ground in the app store, only the Clash of Clans and Candy Crushes and the rest with no downloads

Did he say anything like that?

In the version I read he said that his games weren't making enough money to be viable, though he expected the market to be big enough to support their work. No mention of middles, Clash of Clans or anything.

FWIW: I also let my Apple dev license lapse, for similar reasons. Perhaps I could have gained that 'valuable knowledge' through years of experience, to get to a point of making a modest return. Perhaps. But, like Jeff, I found other platforms to be much more financially viable.

Sure, and to be fair to author, my point wasn't made to combat his article. I was more responding to the headline which reminded me of the "indieapocalypse" articles that make news all the time.

Sorry to hear it didn't work out for you. If you found more viable platforms of course that makes sense to pursue. I think that's what more developers who complain about the meager app store sales ought to do (explore alternatives), rather than just whine about the apocalypse and hope their downloads magically change.

I think it's more interesting that to keep maintaining the games he was forced to keep purchasing an Apple developer license, and that it was cheaper for him to pull the games than to risk reputation all damage with crashing apps, even if they are free.

This genuinely sounds like a problem for Apple. Without a healthy App Store ecosystem there is little reason to purchase an iPad!

To be fair, Llamasoft has be deliciously weird since I was a kid playing their stuff on the C64. It's not mainstream work. Their stuff generally looks terrible but is a delight to play. You live or die on the appstore based on screenshots and price point.

I can't help but note that the only game in the top 200 that is not "Free" is Minecraft.

Well, there's free and there's 'free'.

Indeed, this is the "Top Grossing 200"

I wonder what percentage could be classified as abusive software.

If that's the path I have to take to make money on iOS, I'll take a path on a different platform.

I agree. All my interest in the platform (mobile in general) dried up when I realized people really wanted free, and the way to monetize that path was rife with dark patterns. I don't like playing games like that, why would I want to make one?

Money and greed. It's as simple as that.

Poor and stupid - Simple you are. In a civil society those that provide a utility (or "fun") to others are rewarded and incentivized.

I have nothing against people being rewarded for doing stuff others enjoy. What I have a problem with is the freemium model that seems to have taken over. It's nothing but greed what some developers are doing. I had quite a few games that I paid for. Then, one day, the app claims that "due to compatibility issues, I need to download The New $game to continue receiving updates". Then you go and look at the "new" version to find it's free and full of IAPs. THAT is nothing but greed.

>> "If that's the path I have to take to make money on iOS, I'll take a path on a different platform."

I think this is about much more than iOS. Anything that can be delivered online (software, music, movies etc.) is something that consumers think should be free. Strangely they are willing to get milked after download through things like in-app purchase.

>Strangely they are willing to get milked after download through things like in-app purchase.

I don't think that is true. I doubt many pay at all. I think there are a small number of people who are massively exploited to generate the revenue for these apps.

I'm curious if you feel that WoW at $180/yr is an exploitation. And if not, why would you consider someone paying the same amount of money for bonuses on Candy Crush to be exploited?

I cannot speak with much authority on either game because I have played neither of them.

At the start of the year was the player aware how much a years worth of play would cost them? The key to whether or not something is exploitative in this respect is whether or not the player is spending more than they were prepared to.

Does either game disguise the cost and bring in extras incrementally to promote a sunk-cost fallacy? Do they force the decision to spend at points of particular tension in the game? Some games certainly do.

This is quite a good read.

http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-g...

Given the average WoW player likely plays 500+ hours a year, sounds cheap cost wise, but expensive time wise.

Years ago when one of my social circles decided to play WoW together, most of us found we had more money in the bank at the end of the month. It was far cheaper entertainment per day than most of the other options we would choose. One night out for drinks and you've paid more than a monthly subscription.

I feel like you're ignoring the ancillary cost of grinding heroics until the early morning hours with friends. There were some large pizzas, a bunch of soft drinks, and probably a packet of biscuits to accompany Tea...

That's gotta be at least a couple of rounds of drinks each :D

When I said we had more money in the bank at the end of the month, that wasn't a figure of speech. I meant that we had more money in the bank.

People spend 1,000-10,000$ per month on pay to win games. You don't need a lot of them to break even.

PS: It's actually become a fairly common issue people seek addiction counseling for.

"Milked" is seriously loaded. AAA console games cost $60 and up - do you know how hard it is to get a paying freemium user to even $10?

Yes. There are people that spend thousands. They also spend thousands on $60 AAA games as well.

The idea that players get "fleeced" is ridiculous. Spent $15 on Candy Crush, a game that you spent months playing? That really doesn't seem like a lot to me.

Edit: I should acknowledge that certain games, like Candy Crush, do play on psychological weaknesses. Not all free-to-play games (hell, I'd say vanishingly few in the sea of free-to-play games on the App Store) do. Free-to-play is the new shareware and try-before-you-buy. It's also the only real path to sustained revenue, and anyone that runs a game studio knows what I'm talking about with the roller-coaster that are games that take 1-2 years to develop and have an earnings bell-curve of 3 months.

I'm happy to pay $15 or even $60 for a game I really enjoy and play for more than a few hours.

I'm not willing to pay to win though, which is what most of the top grossing mobile games require.

No, but the point of this thread was that there is room in the middle to make money, you don't have to be in the top 200.

We use rewarded video and advertising and IAP in free-to-play games our users play, but we have no desire to be exploitative.

The amount of room between basic free-to-play and psychological warfare on your players is enormous.

If you sorted your customers by the amount of revenue they generate? How much revenue comes from the individual at the bottom of the top 50% of revenue?

It's mixed. Our most popular game is still supported by an old style of advertising, and some players that have played daily for years still prefer to look at/ignore advertising than pay the $2.99 (now $4.99) to get rid of ads. In fact, that's true of the majority of players - less than 5% of our revenue comes from that IAP. This is why I say people have told us how they want to pay us for their fun and our server costs. They've had the opportunity to pay us with money forever. Most never will.

Rewarded video makes up about 10% (currently it's not in a very prominent placement, some games make a majority of their money that way - see Shooty Skies).

So to kind of answer your questions, the longer people play, the more they're worth to us, which feels fair to us (and again, they can pay to rid themselves of ads anytime they want). We will be featuring rewarded video more prominently, which allows the user to have more choice in the matter (although I'm betting they chose ads over cash most of the time, but that's just years of experience talking).

Edit: I should add that our ARPU (average revenue per user) is less that $4.99, so we'd still much rather people buy ads away with IAP.

I paid a ton of games. the one that got closer to being a game i can actually play for more than a week was FTL. but then playing on the phone/tablet is pure hell on higher difficulties (which is required to play it besides the very first week)

after years searching, i am back at an open source chess client. sadly they are trying to add their own in-house-chrome-cast instead of just improving multiplayer.

...think in the end i always pick the games that give me an excuse to code patches. sigh. I am a lost case.

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.

So, GTA brought in 2.5B, not all of Take-Two.

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.

According to Wikipedia, Take-Two's revenue in 2013 was $2.3b

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take-Two_Interactive

>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 ;).

PS. Candy Crush is owned by Activision.

>But it's foolish to conclude... that Candy Crush is trivial to replicate

It literally is, because it's literally a clone of games that have been around for decades prior. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-history-of-bejeweled-2014...

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.

I've paid money for more than enough games that pull the "buy more gems" bullshit on top of my purchase price. You can't win.

I should clarify. I meant they were getting milked in that if the game cost $1-5 dollars (a one time fee) they would be against paying it but they are oblivious to paying $15-20 over a year through in-app payments. I did not mean that the developer was extracting more money from them that the product is worth.

I think they should have developers choose a monthly limit for their games. This limits the abuse and prevents addicted "whales" from spending all their money on the game. And if the limit is too high ("free (up to $1000/month!)") people might think twice about buying it.

I'm not against this at all. I don't want to survive as a studio on people paying $10k/month. $10/month I don't mind.

For what it's worth, "rewarded video" is, IMHO a nice middle-ground. It's a trade of time for value that doesn't require an out-of-pocket spend, and is user-initiated, and still allows a studio to survive.

NBA 2K16, Bloons TD 5, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Terraria, Geometry Dash, Trivia Crack, Heads Up!, Neo Monsters & Plague Inc. also made it into top 200 grossing games in Q1 in US on iPhone.

Worldwide wise, paid games are doing worse off overall -- so US is over-indexing on paid games compared to the rest of the world.

The context is that this is Jeff Minter's blog. His iOS games have received high acclaim over the years, especially early on in the App Store.

Yep. I hope a few people reading this know who the hell Jeff Minter is and why he's worth listening to.

(PS Jeff - if you're listening to. A new take on Llamatron would make me a very happy man)

One of those iOS games was in fact a new take on Llamatron:

http://minotaurproject.co.uk/Minotaur/minotron.php

It's very good :). If it's not on the store anymore I hope you find some way to get hold of it.

Ah yes - I actually played it when I had a borrowed iPad for a while.

It's essentially a port though. I'd love to see what Jeff would do with the Robotron format 25 years after his previous attempt.

(This makes me wonder why - given his love of Williams arcade games - Jeff has never tried a take on Defender...)

> My two person iOS dev studio has pulled in 6 figures a year for the past 4 years.

This statement does not say much, because in the worst case, that's $100.000 divided by two equals $50.000, which is less than average wage for programmers.

In the best case, you make a pretty good salary :)

Anyway, I just wish Apple would disclose some numbers about app sales. There's one thing worse than government regulating a market, and that is a company regulating it.

Yeah but if it's passive income for majority of time on existing titles, during the year that's great.

>This statement does not say much, because in the worst case, that's $100.000 divided by two equals $50.000, which is less than average wage for programmers.

Depends on where you live. Not everybody lives in the US, or even the valley.

Plus, even if $50000 is easy to pull in a lot of places as a programmer, with the mobile games they get to do it being their own bosses and creating the programs they want -- which beats working for a pointy haired boss or pulling all nighters for some "Facebook for turtles" startup.

The sentiment is totally right -- especially if you take other countries into account. The numbers you mentioned are pretty far off for US -- a typical rank 200 game in iPhone earns around $4000-6000 or so per day, but worldwide we can expect the top 100 app to earn around 100k / day on both platforms, and the top 200 app earns roughly half of that.

This is wonderful because this kind of revenue can sustain a lot of companies and studios -- and it does not take ad revenue models into account.

This is after apple/android 30% cut.

"A lot of companies"? With 2+ million apps in each app store, the top 200 is still the top .01%. It does nothing to refute the idea that app store income follows a power law distribution.

Even if being in the top 5% was sustainable, that's still a far cry away from the rest of the computing field.

Are the rough figures you cited the app purchase price, advertising revenue, in-app purchases or some combination of the three?

99% of them are in-app purchase revenues.

"I hear this myth"

With it happening to more and more developers, you can't really call it a myth. You can say that maybe their stuff wasn't really that good, or that they're an outlier, but you can't call it a myth.

As the number of developers grows, so does the number of failure stories. That tells you nothing about the proportion of developers that are failing.

Success is based on market presence, knowing what you are doing, ability, and luck (and other things). With a lot of developers, many of them failing, the threshold of success is really high. That tends to say to me, avoid.

There is also the problem of other people engaging in the sunk cost fallacy. If your competitors keep throwing good money after bad that tends thrash your business as well. Problem because there is always a greater fool with more money than you.

>not only the top .1%

>look at the Top 200

There are more than 200,000 apps out there.

True, though they're not all games.

Games is the biggest category. http://www.pocketgamer.biz/metrics/app-store/ says there are over 500,000 games active now.

How many of these games are made by full time salaried studios?

True, but this tell you nothing about percentage of profitable companies versus the number of companies who make games full time. Most games are not made by fulltime mobile dev companies doing so as their sole income.

And my point with the top 200 was that that's way beyond profitability for a small studio. None of our apps are currently in the Top 1000 grossing (I don't think).

So would you say there is no middle-ground for new developers? It seems what you're saying is that people with an already locked-in user base continue to thrive while newcomer apps are crowded out, regardless of quality.

Hmm, interesting question. I would say it's just rarer to make a sustainable business from it with no experience and existing users today, because you have no room for error or experimentation.

For example it took us 5 failures before we figured out what worked. Unless you're rich or have very understanding investors, you just won't get 5 opportunities to fail today.

Despite that, I still think anyone can make it to a sustainable small studio if they understand the app store market and their demo and have the resources to execute their plan.

Are you sure it's 5%? Apparently 250,000 games shipped for iOS last year. If true you're suggesting of those quarter of a million games 12500 of them are making enough for a small studio? I have a feeling that's a pretty high number but I have no evidence to back it up. 1% would be still be 2500 games and even that seems high.

I certainly haven't looked at 2500 games in the last year, probably not more than 100 if that (then again I'm not a the target consumer so I have no idea how many games people look at). Still 2500 games (1%) is over 6 games per day.

Not game-related, but in the "app utility" space, there's still a lot of room to grow if you're creative and can actually build tools that enhance people's lives. We've done 6 figures the last couple years on that alone.

If you don't have a freemium game (I strongly dislike that business model), I would love to know what you're working on

EDIT: Nevermind, think I found it down below: http://www.bmcm.co/

Care to share a link to your games?

Search his username on github and it will tell you his dev studio name. You can then google his dev studio and find out his niche.

http://www.bmcm.co/

> top 100

> middle ground

pick one.