Oh dear. Apple's App Store - that paradigm-shifting site which, countless overexcited commentators constantly claim, is in the process of rendering conventional videogames redundant and killing off physical retailers - has been in the news again. And, horror of horrors, not for good reasons.
Apple has been throwing its weight around, removing shoddy rip-offs of popular iOS games (Angry Ninja Birds or the singularly derivative Plant vs Zombie, anyone?). Another developer has been singing like an (Angry) bird about how a dodgy company offered to get his free game to the top of the App Store charts, using a bot-farm, for the paltry sum of $5,000. Now that the sainted Jobs has assumed his place on high, is something awry in his ex-fiefdom?
If ever a website was due for a redesign, the App Store is it. In fact, it's in such a bad state these days that it actually makes one feel a tiny bit sorry for Apple, even if you rank the Cupertino concern among the most hubristic and overhyped companies in history. For the App Store has become a victim of its insanely huge success.
Getting mighty crowded
When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, it contained 500-odd apps. Today, it holds over 425,000 - the vast majority games. Of which approximately 424,600 are buried as permanently as a mobster in a Chicago flyover. So the age-old web page problem kicks in: once your app falls off the front page, it might as well become invisible, even though the App Store's search engine is pretty decent. And expensive digital marketing is required to get to that front page, let alone to stay there for more than a week or two. So most of the paid-for games you find there are published by big companies.
Of course, that contradicts the supposed ethos of the App Store, which is to emulate the early, Wild West days of games, when tiny teams with truly original ideas could knock out games in a matter of months which could become chart-toppers if they were sufficiently well constructed. Every iOS developer wants to make the next Angry Birds, but it's debatable whether Angry Birds itself would succeed now if it was self-published.
Of course, developers can put themselves on the map by giving away their iOS games for free. But to do that, they need some sort of Trojan Horse - a game that isn't their most innovative effort, because they would like to maximise their potential profits by selling their truly ground-breaking games. And the list of top free-to-download iOS games has recently begun to resemble a Shanghai market stall selling watches, handbags and sunglasses: full of cheap and nasty rip-offs. At least Apple has begun to crack down on such sharp practices, so there's a chance the free games list could return to more meritocratic ground.
Can you see the elephant?
And it's not just Apple that's afflicted (although the App Store is by far the biggest repository of download games). Gaikai's David Perry says: "I went up on gig.com. It has tons and tons of products on there, something like 15,000 Flash games. So I started skipping through the pages to look at them all, and there were 645 pages. I ended up going: 'Are you kidding me? What if you're on page 172 - no one is ever going to see your game. How do you beat that system?'
Comments
5 comments so far...
jonbwfc on 13 Feb '12 said:
Wow, that's one of the biggest pieces of spin I've heard in some time. In much the same way, I for one am very happy I don't suffer from having a problematically high volume of money. The problem with the Android store is not just that it has a smaller mass of content, but that also the signal/noise ration is even worse. The Android marketplace may have say three quarters of the number of apps in the apple app store, but it's probably got about five times as many knockoffs. It's almost impossible to find the 'proper' version of some apps, even if you know the name, what with people spoofing the metadata and trying tricks like replacing lower case 'L' with upper case 'I'.
There are plenty of ways to sort the chaff in online stores. Apple haven't implemented them because, well, let's be honest here - they don't consider the App Store to be their core business. They want to sell phones, iPods and computers. That's how they make their money. So as long as the app store 'works' in so far as you can download apps and pay for them and the money gets where it's supposed to be, then the only other thing they're actually bothered about is making sure the place isn't full of trojans that will give the phones a reputation of being unreliable and/or insecure. The fact you can't at a glance tell a great game from an average one.. I doubt they care. And given they seem to be making whale-choking amounts of cash almost by the minute, it's going to take something major for them to change their tack.
Google, meanwhile, want people to buy apps. The more apps you look at or buy, the more ads you see. The more ads you see, the more money Google makes. Letting people search for things and making money off the results is actually their core business. The fact they haven't done things much better than Apple is actually much, much more of a surprise than Apple not doing it themselves.
Jon
EvilWaterman on 13 Feb '12 said:
My Mrs has the ipad 2 and the store on there is awful, you cant find anything!
FixBeatGames on 13 Feb '12 said:
it is a nightmare, and this article is something i've been pondering myself. i head a 4-member team and we're working on 3 ios / android / html5 games and i've been desperately researching the best way about marketing them on a small budget when they're ready to go. there isn't any! i'm considering joining every single forum / gaming site in the world to spam the comments box
whenever i'm looking for something on the istore, i always always seem to end up seeing the same apps in the searches / recommendations etc. which with 400,000+ apps available seems ridiculous! i certainly haven't gone through them all to get back to the same old ones, so it does beg the question how are other people going to be able to find my games?
i like that idea of daves, kinda reminds me of the pixel-advertising that was all the rage a few years back.
TheLastDodo on 14 Feb '12 said:
First off before the usual idiots join in:
If you think there's only Angry Birds & Angry Birds rip off's on the App Store then you're an idiot.
If you don't know exactly what you're looking for, go to iOS section on Metacritic, that really is the simplest way lol, many of the games I've bought from the App Store I've either found from the latest iOS releases on Metacritic, through IGN's wireless section (they have a section of the site dedicated to iPhone/Android games, they have reviews, previews, videos, daily store updates containg new releases, price drops and free app updates).
Out of all mainstream gaming sites, IGN seem to be the best at displaying the mobile platform as more like an equal than a time waster so I'd say go to IGN if you wanna get your mobile games noticed by a mainstream gaming website.
I'll leave you with a few iOS games to look up
Jetpack Joyride, Superbrothers Swords & Sworcery EP, Epoch., The Dark Meadow, Star Command (not released yet).
OracleOfPokemon on 14 Feb '12 said:
Umm...
I think people are forgetting that Angry Birds is a rip off in itself...
Crush the Castle is exactly the same, except with rocks instead of birds, and royalty instead of pigs...
AND IT WAS MADE YEARS BEFORE ANGRY BIRDS!
So the Angry Birds rip-offs are actually ripping off a rip-off.
Plus, Angry Birds is crap.