25 developers account for half of the revenue in U.S. Apple App Store and Google Play
So the biggest names in the business earn the most money, not something completely shocking.
Bah, I didn’t need that study. Heck, I bet the top 25 grossing apps actually monopolize half or over 45% of the app store revenue, and that would bring the list of actual developers way under 25 since the list contains multiple titles by the same developers.
Also from the article:
No $h!7? Look… I know we here ourselves struggle a lot with getting our titles noticed, but let’s be honest: when was the last time you heard TheraBreath complain that Wal-Mart needs to work in their product discoverability?
The true problem is not “discoverability” but marketing. I feel like a broken record but too many developers of all types of apps think all they have to do is make an app and sink it in the app store. As game devs we are lucky about these two points:
Games are sought on a daily basis to kill time.
Apple features new games on a weekly basis, so new games, if good, may get some attention.
If you make some thermostat or mapping app, or who knows what, it’s harder because you can’t depend on a rotation of users showing up the week you launched, and no one may notice you the day they need it. But with games devs, we may get at least a week or two of sales.
But the real thing we need to fix is a way to effectively market games, one that is not broken in proportions of return of investment (mobile ads may end resulting in perhaps a $10 cost per new user, a huge loss if we must sell our games for 99c.) Ad prices will be out of our reach as long as freemium models are the rule, though. Freemium game makers bid a lot of money on ads, this drive the price per impression rather high. They do this because they know, in average, their strategies actually pay off, they can make way more than $10 per user in average.
What can we do? Well, we need our equivalent of GamePro for one. And not just one, Toucharcade is great but we need more. Slide To Play is a nice second. We also can wait for the freemium model to collapse. We can conform and rely on Apple’s feature for our launch.
We may be able to setup “unity clubs” for cross-app promotion (a plugin that adds “More Unity Games” instead of just “more games by us”) may help US (if not anyone outside our circle.) Sad thing is: not everyone can win. Only thing Apple can trully do to increase visibility for all is to limit how much they accept, something that won’t be good for many.
I get your point, but the fact is that Walmart does go to great lengths to advertise for companies. They have sale fliers every week, and sometimes more often. They have special sales. They have displays in the store in various places including the isle that the product is on, end-caps, islands (in the middle of the walkway) and even banners that hang from the ceiling.
They do this partly to make more money themselves, but some of it is prompted by the companies themselves.
I see a lot of app and game developers complaining that Google, Apple and Steam don’t do enough to promote their games, while they sit and do nothing about it themselves. But it’s in everyone’s best interest if good games get advertised well on those services.
The companies themselves tend to pay Wal-Mart for those promotions and extra floor space (if needed.)
The fliers only advertice temporary price cut deals, and those also tend to come from the distributor’s bottom line. Walmart extremely rarely sacrifices profits to promote any given product, if anything it may take advantage of some good deal in supply to bring customers to the store, not to sell the product but to bring in more people (you may notice they only promote already popular brands, thats due to the brands having money to pay AND the brands having the power to bring people into the store for that one good deal and buy a lot more while there.)
The thing with Apple is that they do their “banner/promotion/isle” equivalent in the ways of the Featured section. They only highlight what they consider quality product and like any effective promotion, they have very limited display space before it just becomes a bucket of noise.
Google is different, their featured section may show once in a while “picks” from the store, but it seems they mostly select stuff that either was popular in another platform, was already very popular in Google Play, or simply paid for their feature (I bet you GameLoft has deals with Google for feature space.)
Steam does a LOT to promote people, though, but it’s mainly because they limit drastically how much launches every week. They don’t flood the pipe with anything that wants to come out, they feature the new stuff well, all of it, and work with publishers to make amazing deals that generate tons of money. But the key in their service is that it’s a very exclusive club. Few games ever get in.
For the exception of Google, these digital retailers tend to do a lot within the confine of their stores to promote new and popular products. If you think Apple and Steam do nothing to promote, then you have not paid enough attention.