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Is the Apple App Store a Casino?
An anonymous reader writes "Fast Company takes a look at the Apple App Store and concludes that it's a casino where most developers are making tragic losses and a tiny few are striking it filthy rich. The article discusses a new book exposing the App Store millionaires, called 'Appillionaires,' which compares the psychological effects of a hit app on a programmer to a gambler's high. One millionaire programmer explains the intense feeling of being in the top-ten: 'The App Store had established some kind of intravenous connection to my body and was pumping me full of Apple-branded heroin.' But, the piece warns, the majority of developers fail to make any return on their app."
This is how it works. Tiny few become really rich, most barely make a living. Some better, some worse. It's not a casino, and it's not limited to app store.
Sounds like the results of putting an App for sale in the App store is like putting an App for sale anywhere.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
If John Q. Wallet invents some must-have widget which is easy to manufacture, cheap, and available everywhere; and suddenly sells millions of them, I'll bet he's feeling pretty good about that too. However, if he invents something that is a piece of crap that no one buys, he's going to have just as much of a loss.
This phenomenon is hardly new, and certainly not localized to the iTunes App Store.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Isn't the developer fee like $100 a year? That seems incredibly removed from tragic. Yes, a developer or team might spend some of their own money to develop an app or advertise it, but that money is going elsewhere, and not Apple (except for buying the required Macs to actually develop). So it doesn't seem like a casino to me, just inexperience or bad reading of the market.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Some people make apps for the same purpose of going to a Casino. :)
"Fun"
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
'The App Store had established some kind of intravenous connection to my body and was pumping me full of Apple-branded heroin.
Gee, you think this is the sentence that got this story approved for Slashdot?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
I would assume they are factoring in the usual overhead that non-indie development houses have:
- Multi-million dollar per year executive compensation team
- A-grade star voice acting
- 3-d art department
- product licenses (the official scooby doo ifart app as opposed to just another ifart app, etc)
- RIAA licensed music instead of magnatune or none
- release parties
- marketing
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Success in a Casino is about lack.
Making a successful application is about ability.
Make a good and fun game, and you will profit from it.
Make an exceptional game over an original idea, and win a fortune.
Make a mediocre ripoff of an idea already implemented a thousand times, have a loss.
It is nothing like a Casino.
Just because you don't understand why one app succeeds and another fails doesn't mean there is no reason. It is a complicated equation, and usefulness is only one variable.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Make a good and fun game, and you will profit from it.
Not if next to nobody finds your good and fun game, or even your exceptional game over an original idea, because all the median user is looking for is a specific Rovio product.
So if you need a 2007 Mac to run the iOS developer tools, then you need a new Mac every four or five years (to depreciate at $150 per year for a Mac mini or $250 per year for a MacBook Air). Combine this with a new iPod touch every two years (to depreciate at $150 per year), and we can estimate the total cost of hardware plus certificate at $400 to $500 per year.
If you develop yet another puzzle game, you're up to compete with the Zingas of the world, and chances are you'll hit the wall. On the other hand, if you focus on solving real problems and using the advantages of the platform to improve your customer's life, you might be onto something. Case in point, Appfluence (disclaimer: I co-founded it). We make Priority Matrix, a productivity app for a niche market that highly values time savings and clarity of mind. We're nowhere near top 10 (although we've been close at times), but it's consistent income with a lot of potential.
To do list for Windows
I don't know what anyone's crying about. This is how it works. You put your product out there and hope someone sees it and likes it. If it's good enough it will succeed. If not, oh well.
The reason this is such a bad analogy has nothing to do with whether an app succeeds because of luck, or how much the annual fees are. It has to do with where the money comes from. The money a developer gets comes, ultimately, from customers buying the app. Yes, the middleman takes a lot (but perhaps not more than more middlemen), but that doesn't make it a casino. In a casino, all the money coming in is from the gamblers, and all the money you win is from other gamblers (minus the house's cut). The same is true in a lottery. But an app store is completely different. Sure, it's unpredictable whether you will make big, medium, or no money, but the source of that money is not your fellow developers' entry fees.
.sig withheld by request
I can only speak as a game developer, but I have yet to be pointed to a game on the App Store that didn't make any money but had all the pieces together to be a commercially successful game.
Like any other gold rush, the first people in make a ton and everyone who follows them goes broke trying to match it. Unless you just have an amazing idea that hasn't been done before by anyone and doesn't require you to run a server to make the app work--I'd think twice about diving in with both feet this late in the game.
the majority of developers fail to make any return on their app
The majority don't lose a lot even if their app fails, unlike a gambler who must constantly bet a lot. Apps can be coded in your spare time, and if a concept becomes popular enough, you can follow it up with something a little more fleshed out the next time and keep iterating until you reach the point of diminishing returns. Then start putting out concepts again until you find your niche, and start iterating again.
Twinstiq, game news
You forgot the cost of setting up an actual online shop. SSL certificates aren't free, nor are online card processors which take a percentage.
But hey, at least he'd be saving $99 and sticking it to The Man...
Trolling is a art,
I'm reliably making money from the App Store, $75000 (on the side, in addition to my day job) in the last year and half actually. How? By writing apps for all those people that think they're going to get rich from App Store. I'd say probably 10% of my clients have made any money from their apps. Personally I don't try to feed their notions, I just produce the best product I can for them, and they can worry about making money from it, I'll take my money upfront for the coding thank you very much. I always turn down the projects where they want to do "profit sharing".
I do laugh at the guys that make me sign an NDA before they show me their super secret idea. Dude, ideas are a time a dozen, somebody's probably already thought of whatever idea it is you have.
Please point me to the market where i am guaranteed to profit.
It's an app store, idiot. When they describe a "gamble", smart developers will typically not work for shares, they will work for wages. So developers aren't really gambling anything: if you are the one who is dumping money on developers so that they can turn your dumb idea into an app, it is you who is taking the foolish gamble. If you are a lone developer making an app on your own time, then hopefully the time spent making your own app is valuable to you (learning experience, etc), whether or not that app is actually successful. What, you actually thought your one-off app was going to make you filthy rich?
These were the same dorks who pushed the "internet boom" in the 90's, claiming that every new startup, no matter how fucked their business plan was, was a "gold mine". We even had a parody called "F*cked Company" which daily documented all the businesses failing in Silicon Alley (NYC) during the bust period of 2000 to 2002.
They have a lot of nerve to call the App Store a "casino", when they are the lapdogs of the stock market.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Most application developers don't make any money *outside* the app store, either. Never have. Most fail. The thing with the app store is that many, many more get to try.
I recently bought an ipad2, and I was shocked at the fact that there doesn't really exist a free app for most of the common things one expects to do with a computer or computer-like device.
And since the majority of these apps don't work, or don't do what they say it will do, with absolutely no possibility of a refund, well...
the gamble isn't for the developers. it's for the consumers.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
But that's the point innit. The app store is full of Fart Apps. When The Cloud makes it trivial for anyone to create a Cloud Service, there will be half a million Fart Services.
You lose money on your Fart App? Great, that's exactly how life should be.
Or you could receive a windfall.