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Top 1% of iOS Game Developers Make a Third of All Revenue
donniebaseball23 writes "The top one percent of iOS game developers earn over a third of the gaming revenue made on the App Store, according to a new survey of iOS developers. The survey, set up by Canadian indie developer Owen Goss, found that the bottom 80 percent of iOS developers are splitting a mere three percent of all App Store game revenue."
Requests to take the survey were distributed via the following social networks and web sites: ... ...
Reddit
I don't think they make grains of salt large enough to compensate for that bias.
A third of all the kids play the top 1% of iOS games.
I play PC games. Give me a call when you make a decent one. That is what phones are for.
App tax! Make the top third pay their fair share.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
80% of IOS (and android) games/apps are rubbish and nobody wants to waste money on them.
In other news, the sky is blue and water is wet.
And based on the average pay of a typical game developer (for iOS at least), I'd think twice about investing my time and money in the programming field. Sanitary engineers make more money than programmers, so maybe people should think about engineering instead of wasting their time trying to make money for big corporations. There's no shame in shoveling shit if you can at least get a guaranteed minimum wage from it.
You're clearly not a programmer.
1) Most mobile game developers aren't stupid enough to quit their day job to do it, at least until they hit the big time.
2) These people are the types who enjoy programming for its own sake. Developing games is fun (in fact developing even "boring" productivity apps can be fun, but games are more fun to test :p ). Shovelling shit isn't much fun.
3) Most of these developers are not working for "big corporations", they're self employed.
You can continue to keep your time and money to yourself. The rest of us are happy to enjoy programming even if you don't understand.
Disclaimer: I do get paid to do development, in the engineering/oil industry. No, I don't often write games. When I have I've released them for free, including the source.
which is totally what she said
>>If 1% making 25% isn't "large amount" then, erm, I guess you were brought up to Reaganomics.
Obviously we need to tax these "iOS fat cats" and send some of their profits to the poorer developers, eh comrade!
Developers of fart apps, rejoice! We will eliminate the iOS income inequality once and for all!
Seems like it would be reasonable to charge more successful apps more for distribution.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Except the App store is the only playing field of iOS and it isn't as level as you seem to think. Apps that get promoted by Apple within the store get a massive increase in sales, often propelling them into the top 10 / top 50. Top 10 / top 50 apps are naturally bought a lot more than others so they tend to stay in the top charts. Apps that don't get promotion by Apple languish in the depths of the App Store.
This wouldn't be such an issue if the App Store was organised better with better categories, or filters instead of having to endlessly hit "show me more" to get another screen of icons with no real info about what the game is. At the moment the order of apps is based on a combination of sales and star rating which wouldn't be so bad if the star ratings weren't so misleading (obligatory xkcd).
Well it is also the situation of production value. If you look at the app store, then you have 100 clones of one existing successful program, with myriads of developers trying to cash in on the same concept.
Those really getting money are either ones
a) with very high production value
b) with a very good concept and good implementation which has not been cloned to death
Its as easy and as hard as that. I just wonder who is constantly buying all the canabald clones all the zombie shooter clones and hidden object games which come out a dime a dozend every week?
Obviously someone must do it otherwise they would not come out anymore.
So... in your view successful iOS apps should be taxed and their proceeds spread around to less successful apps... so black people can eat?
I'm not sure what you're trying to say... so I'm guessing. But due understand you're talking nonsense. This thread is about how most iOS apps don't sell and only a handful are successful. That's all it's about. If you want to get get political about it... that's fine... but you'll basically be declaring yourself to be a nutcase.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Actually, the plus symbol has nothing to do with in-app purchases. It denotes universal apps -- apps which will run on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well as the iPad.
It is wildly popular - you only have to look at Apple's in-store lists where you can list the top 20 apps by revenue - a year or so after TomTom satnav came out it was holding second place as the highest revenue generator (it sold for £60 initially in the UK store) with the number one being Angry Birds (at £0.59).
I think pretty much everyone buys it, because it is a very fun game that is easy to pick up and put down - it's pretty much the sweet spot for a mobile game. Certainly other games have managed that, but none have been quite as successful as Angry Birds.
As of today, in the UK store Angry Birds is number 4:
1. Fifa 12 (EA)
2. WhatsApp Messenger (WhatsApp inc) [cross platform messenger system for iOS/Android/BB]
3. Where's My Water (Disney)
4. Angry Birds
5. Flick Champions
6. World of Goo HD
He's AC, they rarely say anything worth mentioning. Best to ignore all AC posts, makes life simpler and more enjoyable.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
More to the point, app developers pay 30% on their GROSS RECEIPTS. If the US switched to a gross receipts tax rather than an income (personal) or profit (corporate) tax, many of the loopholes and dodges would disappear entirely and a flat rate would likely be in the single-digit percentages.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Just yesterday I downloaded a Disney game about a showering alligator which is actually pretty educational about hydraulics, obviously a large investment in time and money by Disney and worthy of earning a ton of money.
I LOVE that showering alligator game!!.... er, I mean, my children love that game!... aw crap this is /. we know no one here will ever breed.... yeah, it's me, simple 99 cent game, levels take less than 30 seconds with little thought required. Sometimes I like dumb simple games, and with 3,000+ 5-star reviews I figured what the hell why not? Think the game's called where's my water.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Unlike in real life, (most) iOS developers actually start in equal standing, so the distribution is fair.
Dilbert RSS feed
Yes, and generally the situation is really bad, you really have to look hard to find real gems, like for instance Avadon.
Those games make their money, but the possible target audience have a hard time to find them. Instead you constantly either see
a) Another hidden object game
b) another physics puzzle variation of the same game
c) another even worse canabalt clone
d) another 2d zombie shooter
e) another bad tower of defense game
That does not mean iOS has not a really good games, but they are drowned in ripoff shovelware.
The same probably goes for apps as well, but I have my eye simply more on games.
I see you aren't a programmer either. Until is a conditional too. As in
until (programmer.hobby_income >= enough_to_survive_on) or programmer.is_dead
{
programmer.make_games_for_fun();
}
which is totally what she said
The top 1% have 40% of the wealth in the US, hey.. the top 1% of the developers of iOS are getting a Bum deal, they are 7 percent behind the times!!
I can program myself out of a Hello World Contest!!
You could at least not be so obvious when making up numbers.
In the US, for 2008 (the last year data is available for), the top 1% of earners (those making more than $380K AGI) paid 38% of all income taxes, paying at a rate of 23%. Those in the bottom 50% of earnings (<$33K AGI), paid 2.7% of the total, at a rate of 2.6%. Those in the "UMC," making $67-114K, (between the 10 and 25th percentiles), paid 16% of the total, at a rate of 9%.
Source - http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
The math works like this...
Apple: Government
Top 1%: "Job creators"
Bottom 80%: The poor saps
Apple takes 33% from 100% of all developers.
USA: Government
Top 1%: "Job creators"
Bottom 80%: The "poor" ([rolls eyes] have you visited Bolivia? Somalia? Haiti?)
USA takes 10%, 15%, 25%, 28%, 33% and 35% from citizens -- generally, depending on income level.
The highest tax brackets have been in decline since 2000:
1993–2000: 39.6%
2001: 39.1%
2002: 38.6%
2003–2007: 35%
Coincidently, so have incomes for the bottom 80% of US citizens (especially if one considers cost increases e.g. health care, interest rates on personal credit).
Um, no. In America the top 1% pay 38% of all Income Tax and a really huge percentage of all revenue the government takes in from the other taxes that mostly hit the wealthy such as the Alternative Minimum Tax Capital Gains, Estate, etc . The top 50% supply 97% of all personal tax revenue to the Federal Governent. The bottom half pay 3%. Most in the bottom half come out ahead, even factoring in FICA due to the Earned Income Tax Credit and other income redistribution schemes.
So since you didn't know any of this I give you a pass for thinking the rich aren't paying 'their fair share.' But I must ask you, and any other Progs reading, to once and for all go on the record and tell me what you think 'their fair share' should be. Stop the talking points and demagoguery and put a real number on it. What percentage of a persons income, no matter how rich, no matter if earned or trust fund baby, OR total wealth, do you think YOU are entitled to have redistributed away from them. Or even more bluntly, what percentage of a person's labor is their own and to what extent are they your slave?
If you don't like my slavery formulation you are welcome to propose another.. if you can. Yes the State has a legit power to tax but only for the legitimate objects of government, defense, public works and infrastructure, courts, etc.
Democrat delenda est
I think it is a commonly held misconception that most iOS devs are bedroom hobbiests who throw something together in a couple of days and punt it on to the App store in the hope of making a few quid. Practically all iOS games that anyone has heard of are made by professional development companies with a significant budget.
For instance people seem to think Angry Birds was this out of the blue success. Actually it was produced with a budget of 100,000 euros a full development team and was the 52nd game they had produced.
In that same chart it shows that the top 10% pay roughly 70% of the taxes. Seems like a lot... until you consider they control 80% of the wealth. The bottom 90% of people control 20% of wealth, and pay 30% of taxes.
This is why people in the bottom 90% complain.
I'll tell you what I believe, though I can't speak for all "Progs".
I believe that 'harder' work should always yield better income than less work; I believe that someone making $1.5 million/year should take home more than someone making $0.5 million/year. Nothing too radical there, I believe.
I believe that once you start getting into higher income brackets, it should be exponentially more difficult to take home even more money. Sure, you can make an extra $million/year, and a percentage of it *will* go into your pocket, but you won't be taking home all of it, or even most of it. According to you, this will make it so all the rich just give up and go homeless or move to Somalia or some other bullshit. I believe we should tax the fuck out of large estates when the person/couple who built the estate dies. I disagree that taxation equals slavery; THAT is a talking point and demagoguery.
The *reason* I want vast sums of wealth taxed out of existence is that wealth has a huge, distorting effect on a) the free market, b) the economy in general, and c) politics (which then enables further distortions on a and b). I believe that NOBODY should be able to live on compound interest for generations. I believe that there should be no entrenched entities (Rockefellers, Carnegies, Bushes, Kennedys) that are essentially guaranteed to be inter-generational major players unless somebody REALLY fucks up. If someone has to keep working to keep their wealth, I see that as a GOOD thing; not just the one-hit wonder musician that is able to live off of royalties for their entire lives, but also the trial lawyer who wins a class action lawsuit and takes home millions -- it's great that they accomplished something good, now keep doing it if you want to keep living high on the hog.
The thing you have to remember, and seem to fail to understand, is that everybody works. I know in the minds of many people, anyone that isn't making $100k/year is some sort of fucking parasite that would be better off just euthanized, but believe it or not I think that the janitor working 40 hours per week should make a wage that allows them to live a comfortable life. I believe that someone flipping burgers or working behind a cash register for 40 hours per week shouldn't be treated like some second class citizen that has to scrape by just to pay rent. I don't think that just because you didn't go to school to get a law degree or become an engineer that you should be doomed to live hand-to-mouth for your entire life. I don't think that if someone making subsistence wages decides to splurge and, say, pay for cable or a (heaven forbid!) cell phone, they should be demonized for not saving every fucking penny they have. (Which will just be depreciated to worthlessness anyway over a few years) Sure, the person who chose to go to school should be rewarded somehow -- maybe they can afford the Lexus instead of the Honda, or can buy a slightly nicer house or whatever they choose to spend their extra cash on; but NOBODY deserves to make hundreds or thousands of times what the average person does.
I believe we have *plenty* of resources in this country: we're tearing down houses because nobody can afford to live in them -- not because nobody *wants* to live in them, but because nobody can *afford* to live in them. We have plenty of food -- when was the last time you heard about a famine in the US? We have plenty of cars -- the government just bought a bunch to destroy to get people to buy new ones. We have plenty of gas -- I've never been unable to get my car filled up, and I'll bet you haven't either. We have enough manpower to get things done, there is enough concrete and asphalt to make/repair all the roads we want, we have materials to build the structures we need. We have enough resources to go around. We have enough *tangible* things that nobody should ever go hungry or not be able to make rent. What we don't have is "money," which is a completely abstract concept that we essentially use to determine who gets access to
Jesus was a liberal
What percentage of a persons income, no matter how rich, no matter if earned or trust fund baby, OR total wealth, do you think YOU are entitled to have redistributed away from them. Or even more bluntly, what percentage of a person's labor is their own and to what extent are they your slave?
If you really want a fair number, I guess it would be appropriate to divvy up a person's wealth between how much of it they earned themselves through hard work and how much of it was earned by leveraging societal constructs, no? Assuming nobody (including society at large) has ownership a patch of a land, or the resources on that land, and I go there and kill an elk with my bare hands, I can argue that nobody else should be able to take any of it from me.
But, that's not really the world we live in, is it? If your business ships products, you use the roads, rail, harbors, or air terminals that we all share. If you became wealthy by hiring good employees who were educated by a public school system, you really benefit from societies' hard work. If you were able to build appropriate plants/office space due to the fact that you live in a stable society, then you are getting rich on the backs of millions of people's hard work. So, I guess if you are wealth because you are a captain of industry, or a banker, or an entertainer, or a politician it wouldn't be out of line to tax you at near 100%, because everything you've earned is predicated on the business environment you are working within.
Put another way, if you removed 1975 Bill Gates from this earth and dropped him onto another habitable planet with no intelligence species but animals similar to those on earth, who will lose out most? I kind of think if he weren't around someone else would have built a comparably successful company (maybe better for all than MS, maybe worse). But Bill G on the other hand would be decimated.
FWIW, I don't really believe in 100% taxation. My gut tells me that somewhere around 50% is where you cross the line from potentially reasonable to exploitation. But, that's informed by my own societal pressures, so there's no really definitive way to say that's right. I guess what you'd like to see is proof about what levels of taxation make society at large wealthier. E.g. if 0% tax produces -1% GDP gains, 5% tax 1% gains, 15% tax 3% gains, 25% tax 4% gains, 35% tax 3% gains, 45% tax 2% gains, etc...then you could just look at that chart and say we should probably pick the 25% rate because that creates the most wealth. I haven't seen research for that though, but would love to if it exists.
Nobody ever says anything bad about building up infrastructure. It's when people engage in wealth redistribution that it it strikes a lot of us libertarians as being unfair.
If 99% of apps don't make any money, does Apple or the other developers owe them something?
Yeah, the government designed it in such a way as to profit from both ends of the stick. On one hand it's profiting from the specific monopolies they create, because they get their money for elections and their jobs once they are done with government there. On the other hand they are using the populist moves that in reality hurt the individuals, especially middle/lower income people, but they gain large constituency this way, because poor people who government gives hand outs to are an easy to get voting block. Just talk about all the crutches you give them and they'll vote for you. Promise them better crutches, chrome plated crutches and they'll cheerfully vote for you.
Just make sure they never figure out that you broke their legs. So ensure that the education system never brings this point across.
You can't handle the truth.
I think there's a simple solution. Make the wealthy responsible for employment. If employment goes below certain threshold, you start taxing their wealth progressively to the amount of risk they take.
- so you just want people to hide their money? Henry Ford hired enough workers to keep the assembly lines going, but he definitely could use thousands more people if he did NOT build the assembly lines.
Of-course he was producing the cheapest, highest quality cars in the world, benefiting the market by providing that type of wealth, and cars are wealth.
The point is that in normal free market you don't need any more incentives for rich to want get richer, they already do. Also the poor want to get rich and the middle class want to get rich, everybody wants to get rich. So in a normal free market economy, where you don't punish people for hiring, there will be more work.
Just left Zurich yesterday and came to Germany, listen, there is only 4% unemployment in Switzerland. It's because there is very little real labor regulations there and the taxes... well, let's put it this way - if you have to pay something and you disagree, you can actually negotiate as to how much you pay this year with your canton, and tax evasion is not an actual criminal offense. REAL unemployment is about 4%, it's very low. That's of-course before they decided to turn Franc into Euro, we'll see what happens now (I bet unemployment will go up and Swiss will not be happy about it.)
Now let's look at what you are proposing:
Take less risks (more liquid position, lower beta positions) such as "hold more cash", "hold more gold", hold more AAA bonds, and you are taxed very swiftly. Invest in start ups, venture capital, etc. and you'll get a larger break. Same with companies.
- so you want to tax the pensioners the hardest then?
How are you going to tax my gold, by the way? I hold the metal, you don't even know how much. Get in line, you won't be able to tax real assets and it makes no sense for me to hold gold if there are better opportunities. Get me a working economy, I'll invest more into production capacity rather than into inflation hedges.
Eg. 2. Invest in foreign assets, or have wealth that is concentrated abroad, you are taxed more. If they want to go live somewhere else, they lose all the protection the country provides.
- how are they going to be taxed more if they are not bringing the money in? People DO leave, I left.
---
Your solutions are no solutions. They are more of government type regulations, but that's just going to modify human behavior and you will always get the opposite results of what you are trying to achieve with that. It's like trying to create a perfect DRM - IT IS GOING TO FAIL. It's because people with money want to make money, but if you punish them for it and create environment that is punishing them for having money and making money, it's in their best interest to find ways around that, and that's good. That's good.
I don't want people, who have money to waste it by giving it to governments, so governments can grow and bail out their preferred monopolies, like AIG, GS, JP Morgan, etc. It makes no sense.
The REAL solution is to get the government in line, to return to individual liberties, allow people to do whatever in business, as long as it does not violate 2 things:
1. Criminal law.
2. Contract law.
Make sure that States do not create barriers to entry. Stop subsidizing monopolies. Stop printing money. Stop setting false money prices (interest rates). Stop regulating industries out of competition. Stop regulating labor out of work.
It's all about modification of human behavior, and as long as government does not stand on the way, people will be hiring people to make money on their ideas and projects.
Once government gets in the way, a lot of the effort goes not into useful market solutions that create wealth, but instead it creates make-shift work for some, like lawyers and tax-accountants, and the economy suffers, because the efforts are not to create products but instead the efforts are spent to avoid government PUNISHMENT for work.
You can't handle the truth.
All the assumptions are wrong. There is no free market.
- correct. There is no free market, however there are degrees of freedom to consider and also what needs to be understood is that the market rules never actually stop working.
So even when the market is being manipulated by a third party (government), the rules of market continue working. It's like breathing - you need air and your body tries to inhale, but if there is third party between you and air - water, then you still continue to breath it. So the function of breathing continues to work for some time, of-course the water will flood the lungs and then function will cease, but that's not precisely what happens in case of market. Market functions never cease, they continue responding to the external stimuli by working out the answers. Of-course the outcomes of the answers may not be what people LIKE but the outcomes are consistent.
My point is that market provides consistent outcomes to inputs, this doesn't stop just because a third party is destroying normal market feedback mechanisms.
They are already in the way.
- yes, but again, this is about degrees of being in the way. So while in USA the degree of entanglement of government is very high, it's much lower in Switzerland, it's lower than that in Singapore and it's lower than that in Hong Kong and lower than that in mainland China.
The opposite. That's why I mentioned liquidity as a criteria. Hiding it under the bed is 100% liquidity.
- sure, except that the definition of money needs to be cleared. Gold is money. Fiat is paper that many people consider to be worthless. Many people will lose their shirt being in t-bills/bonds/USD.
There's no such thing as hidden.
- what does that mean, no such thing as hidden? You assume too much.
You either spend it, invest it or save it.
- even when you spend it or invest it, it can be hidden.
The mattress is the worst way to save, as for reactivating the economy depends ENTIRELY on the government spending for them, and that means either more debt or more taxes.
- no no no, no amount of spending by government can EVER reactive the economy :)
That's where we do differ - I do not accept that there is ANY amount of spending that government can be involved in that will actually do anything to improve the economy. This has been tried a number of times, total command economy doesn't produce anything useful at all and it always leads to an economic collapse due to impossibility of actually consuming anything, the demand is huge, it's total. But there is nothing produced and nobody wants your fake money.
Government cannot create economy. Government can appear and become bigger and bigger in a strong economy, but it cannot create one. Economies are created completely privately always. There are individuals that want to live better, but they must produce to do that. Government can only TAKE from economy to spend on programs (hopefully on very small number of agreed upon programs, such as border protection, criminal/contract law and such.)
What I meant by create employment is really that they need to spend it, even to the point of becoming a bit less wealthy, or invest them at a risk.
- government is standing in the way, always trying to remove risk. The problem is that it can never actually remove risk, but it tries and that's what creates the imbalances, as the market never stops working, the imbalances grow and eventually economy is lopsided, credit is somewhere it shouldn't be in, it's all mis-allocated, debts are held by people/corporations/governments that cannot pay it back.
It's all happening because gov't is standing there, saying: you don't have to worry, we are going to protect you.
This is FDIC, FHA, Freddie/Fannie, SS, Medicare, minimum wag
You can't handle the truth.