Something like 70% of our revenue came from 2% of our users. Super bleak and helped contribute to my realization that there's just not reliable money to be made as a solo iOS dev anymore. Better to collect a paycheck building someone else's app.
In terms of video games. I'm personally not a mobile gamer though. Maybe it's quite a bit different from desktop and console.
> There's a subset of users who are hungry for high quality applications and games.
The amount of awful going on in the space of "mobile development" long passed unacceptable to me. The idea that McDonald's is $10.00 or $4.50 if I use their app that crashes, needs my location, sends me random empty notifications and every other minor and major brand's app that wants to slurp up any little bit of data they can and make my notification tray useless. I'm not happy with the "check this box and we'll track everything you do but 'trust us'" cloud-enabling Windows and every app being non-functional without an internet connection and the "functionality provided" often being "license validation" and/or "share this! social network features and data mining"... takes a breath yeah, that got away from me ... but it's just nuts.
[0] The reviews which mix in the mess of one-stars from "a bad release" among the five-star "some of which were clearly paid for" just leave one wanting to take up drinking.
Can you point to someone having this sort of success based on this model in the mobile space?
$5 up front, $5 for each expansion (currently 2) which add a substantial amount of content each.
The devs are active, patching regularly, and planning another content update this year. They just released a free new mode to the game as well.
No ads, no microtransactions just a fun and complete game with lots of replay value - I hope they can sustain it over time
I had this pain with my kids a few months ago while "looking to kill some time" in the Android world. I don't play a lot of phone games and was dismayed at the crap that was out there.
I like to introduce the kids to more low-fidelity games -- I started with 2048 -- I want to say probably 5-10 different choices; all I was looking for was "lets me buy away the ads", works offline (one choice was a webview to a URL which was not cached, several were very low quality) and has a small number of features that I like (and mostly sacrificed).
I ended up buying mobile version of The Kittens Game[0]. $2.99, minimally updated[1], and worth every penny. The pollution in the market as it were, I would have spent $9.99 for it.
Your comment kind of got me thinking, though. While searching, I used a "mental sorting method" (after I found a game matching my requirements) best summarized as "price, descending" because -- in a hurry -- I equated price with quality and assumed "a more expensive game in this category is not going to have ads/be a scam." In some spaces (slot machine/casino games), I wouldn't touch an app that wasn't "upfront payment only/no ads/no tokens" or "free without ads"[2], yet would happily pay for any that worked anything like the old Xbox Texas Hold'em (without voice/any casino-style game).
[0] https://kittensgame.com/web/ (I'm sorry for those who have yet to be exposed).
[1] So my kids got hooked which meant I went down that rabbit hole, again. I'm not sure when the last update was, but many bugs mentioned in the Wiki aren't present in the mobile game.
every platform has a free version (hidden beneath the ad-ware ones)
The Amazon Underground thing they used to incentivize their app store was pretty great also, the "Actually Free" games let you unlock everything in the App. That was discontinued in 2019.
It's interesting how much more effective advertising is than word-of-mouth. Maybe its because I'm not an "active gamer", but it's been hard to find honest recommendations for good paid games by small developers. Trying to research through the Play Store is very difficult though not completely impossible. The store credits from "Google Rewards" certainly lubricate the process of trying things out.
The App Store and Play Store are full of ad free and micro transactions free good ports of popular PC games if you are ready to pay the price. Some are strictly targeting the iPad but others can be played on a phone. I have spent an insane amount of time playing Slay The Spire on mine. They are not really put forward by Apple and Google however.
I'm guessing it's not a bad platform?
One way around it is Arcade, which has lots of quality games with no ads nor in apps.
I can't tell you how crazy it is on Android, to find a killer app that does something that's exactly what I'm looking for and to see perhaps it has or is a paid version, usually for just a few bucks, and I to go-to the store page and see some ridiculously small number under downloads. People will put up with a lot of cruft for free. Even worse in terms of apps and games is that younger people I know don't bat an eye at most it whether it be ads or IAPs. A younger guy I talk tech with will happily pay to win in games he plays, or expensive cosmetics, and he doesn't consider it at all. It's just how things are and he enjoys it. Sometimes I tactfully ask, where is the game if you just buy X or Y? And I don't think he quite gets what I'm hinting at and he's one of the most tech savvy zoomers I know.