http://itunes.apple.com/nz/app/infinity-blade/id387428400?mt=8
infinity-blade
I’m sure almost everyone know this.
i guess there would be two thing that would happen sooner or later.
1.indiegame would get smaller and smaller place to live beacause the money for production would push to a new level.
2.iphone game’s price would start to get higher beacuse first reason.
So,you all know what would happen to the risk of indiegame.
But,i don’t know what would happen next.
I think it happens in any system. There will be AAA quality games, and there will be indie games. PC, Xbox, Nintendo, and Playstation all have an environment like this.
Example, the PC is dominated by lots of AAA fps games, and yet here comes along indie game Minecraft which became quite a relative success.
pretty sure that indie game would still be there.
what i mean is the number of indie games.
by now,maybe there are 90% or more in appstore are indie games.
but as the money for production increase to a new level, indie games should be fewer.
maybe the number of indie games would be like when they are on PC,xbox ,ps. the number could be ignore.
Your second point is why indie games will thrive in the appstore.
Indie games are generally priced a lot lower, and the millions of iOS users out there expect low prices. Yes there are those who are willing to pay $5 or more for a game on their phone, but a large portion are attracted to lower priced games.
How much of the market is going to pay $8 for a cell phone game. Darn
I agree, but the cost of production doesn’t matter either your in indie or not, the most important is creating highly enjoyable games. There are a lot of games out there that despite of lack of graphic innovation, it stands out from the crowd.
What dongliang28 wants to say is that indie developers are in danger because, since high-quality games are coming out in the iPhone, people will start expecting higher quality games on the iPhone, which indie developers can’t create, because of lack of money or manpower.
Cost of production matters, you don’t want to spend so much money developing a game only to find out it fairs poorly in the market.
But I do believe people will not scoff your game even if it has graphics not as good as AAA games if the game is good. Again, look at Minecraft.
You can get away with graphics that can’t compete with the likes of Infinity Blade but still look aesthetically pleasing.
Indie games are alive and well co-existing with AAA games.
First, I don’t think indie games are in any danger (especially in the iTunes store), for a couple good reasons:
budget risk verses return… iTunes comes with none of the standard publishing “comfort zone” features of a boxed retailer, so when you sit to plan how much to invest into a single title, you need to remember there are no end-caps, no bulk orders, no minimum orders, and so on.
Mobile customers… the vast majority are very casual gaming oriented, games like Angry birds, iShoot, Zombieville USA, etc… are good quality, but they aren’t going to make your eyes water from the graphics. They are just easy to learn, good quality, and D*mned fun to play. Yes there is a market for higher end “AAA” games, but they aren’t going to sweep away the games that have proven to have real staying power in the top 10 paid app categories.
price… I don’t believe mobile (especially iOS) customers are going to let themselves be drawn into the standard price ranges of mobile gaming platforms (like DS, PSP, etc…). Some would happily pay $8-10 for a game, but to build and sustain a whole industry’s worth of AAA studios, you’re going to need either bigger margins (which with Apple means higher end-consumer prices) or guarentees of volume (I don’t see Apple doing that anytime soon).
As long as all studios are forced to live with sub $500K budgets indie’s will have a fighting chance (full studios are expensive to run 
). Oh, and the big studios are going to have to live the “indie” way more often (ie. less assets, reusable engines, components, etc…and so on), which is already happening on the larger scale as traditional sales shrink. One of the strongest indicator trends is the drive toward multi-platform reusable game engines (See Gamasutra and GamesIndustry.biz for articles, and the EA enterprise license agreement with Unity for more information ).
I think the folks that did that game did a great job. I’d love to know what they’re P&L looks like to return profit, but it’s good work none the less.
Cheers,
Galen
It looks nice, but at $8 and 318MB, I think many will pass. Also, it requires iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4 which also shuts out a fair bit of the market. With that, I would worry many people who just don’t know better would buy it, then not have it run well (if at all), then leave terrible reviews.
How can people pass because it’s 8$ ?
Such a quality deserves such a price, and people who refuse to purchase the game because of its price simply don’t deserve this game :o
Natural selection !
I don’t think its the size. Rage HD is, as I heard, approx. 700 MB to download and 1+ GB once installed, and yet it jumped to the top 10 apps after few days of its release. Its the price point. Rage HD is a nice high-quality game for $2
Looking tasty on my iPad anyway and 8$ are not going to ruin my bank
People cant afford to make games like that on a platform like iPhone since the risk is bigger.
I was a litte surprised how it really looked on the iPad after i saw those screenshots in the app store. It works so much better on the iPhone 4 retina display. I guess they just made the iPad version unlit or something… very flat without all the lighting.
I disagree. This is a fear that has been passed around forever, and never come to pass. Just recently, very recently, Nintendo proved, yet again, that pure production cost will not guarantee success, nor dominance (granted, Nintendo is nowhere near an indie developer, but most industry/hardcore types gave them a bleak prognosis before the Wii gen started, using the same basic logic).
The biggest problem for indies, has, and forever will be exposure, IMO (marketing, portal gatekeepers, and lack of coordinated community support).
It looks nice, but nothing a small Indie team couldn’t accomplish. (at least iPhone4)
Rather see people set their ambitions bit higher than another “match 3” game.
Perhaps…a match four. An idea so crazy that it just might work.
Oh my god no no no ! Do you imagine the amount of GAMEDESIGN DOCUMENTS the devs would have to produce ???
I think the mobile market is an at least double edged sword. It may seem most attractive to many indies because it is in comparison easier to get onto some of those platforms than onto the consoles (other than when talking about xbox live indie games which has other restrictions like only supporting xna made games).
But then it is way more risky because in theory one could earn a lot with a single game but at the same time there is A LOT more competition than on any other platform, besides maybe compared to flash web games.
People are also generally used to extremely low prices for content on the iOS devices and even more so on the android devices, so either your game has to be extremely special and have a lot of marketing or you have to have good contacts or a lot of luck, or you can´t sell it for a high price.
And just selling it for a low price doesn´t automatically make it stand out either, because there are a lot of games for low prices which are pretty good.
I quite enjoy developing for some of the mobile platforms, but other than when doing client stuff i never expect any sort of income from those game as certain, one just can´t tell.
I know many developers who had 1-2 smash hits but then also various titles which haven´t returned half the dev costs back.
Epic and id software can release such big titles with such long dev cycles (in comparison to many other iOS games) and money put into them for a low price because due to their name recognition and the hype the games already created before launch they can be pretty sure they will sell a lot in either case. I wouldn´t be surprised if they lover the price of infinity blade some in a few weeks and still make several millions with it.
With the average indie he can´t be so sure about that, even when doing a great game.
I´ll still also do stuff for iOS and other mobile platforms, and like the next guy sure i´d be glad if every now and then one of those games sells great, but yeah, i have way less expectations on that end than when doing things for other platforms where one can also sell a game with less marketing behind it for more than a few bucks.
(Just take Minecraft as example, the real hype in the media in broad scale started going once he had already made some propper money from it, which he could have hardly made if he had tried to sell that game for 10 bucks on the app store with no marketing and name recognition behind it. Now that the name is known he could of course release it on pretty much any platform).
now,infinity_blade got in the top paid in many country.
the people love it,most i think is because the graphic.
i don’t know this is a good thing or bad.