> Competition on the App Store has risen to a frenzied level.
This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels?
The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened. There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.
The problem isn't that it's popular. The problem is that it's not designed to it's current popularity.
5000apps added every day yet no way for developers to build meaningful relationships with their customers or creating trials make it a very irrational platform to be on.
Its nothing like how Google deals with popularity and quality. It's a huge problem Apple will have to solve. On the mac app store they completely given up.
Apple doesn't necessarily want to solve that problem.
Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]; namely the software, games and media that make their hardware useful. Software in the app store is a viciously competitive low-margin market; just like most other commodity markets. Which is why you need to treat it skeptically and work on building a name outside the app store before you are putting money into it.
Look at Twitter as an example. They give away their app to drive usage of the service, and in the early days they were totally OK with other developers making and selling twitter clients. This was because twitter clients are a complement to Twitter the service and their money comes from selling the analytics and advertising that the service enables.
> Apple is working hard to commoditize the complements to their hardware [0]
I've heard this argument before, and if it's true, it's suicidal. Apple will have failed to learn a critical lesson from Microsoft's dominance of the early PC era: it's the apps that matter. Even once there was a significant potential market of would-be platform "switchers" who wanted something beyond what Windows was offering, these switchers remained on Windows because the critical apps in their day-to-day usage (be that Office, CAD software, or whatever) only ran on Windows.
If Apple's view is truly so narrow that they kill the ability of their "complements" to make good money, then Apple is pushing hard to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Even if Apple had unquestionably the very best manufacturing processes, hardware design, and platform software design, it would all be worthless if no one other than Apple can afford to write and support high-quality software for that platform.
Now, I'll agree that from Apple's publicly observable positions with its App Stores that they (incredibly) don't seem to understand the need and necessity for maintaining a virtuous cycle between developers and their platforms.
A wild-a-guess: This may stem from a deep misunderstanding of the nature of software. Sure, a random tapping game or timer app or whatever is essentially a replaceable one-off, a fungible commodity. But software that's a fungible commodity fundamentally doesn't create any platform stickyness. If it's really so easy to recreate, it can and will trivially show up on a new platform. This is especially true in a world where many software organizations really are getting better at delivering on multiple platforms.
Beyond the fungible stuff, there's the important category of software that I increasingly view as a "living" thing rather than a static artifact. Such software requires ongoing maintenance and care. This allows it a lifespan across the changes of its underlying platform(s), and to absorb and embody deep problem domains. I pose that these apps, no matter the genre (games, "creative", technical, etc.) are the ones that can create platform stickyness. This, in turn, implies that humans must be able to make a living supporting that software. Undermining this is like cutting off the "oxygen" to a vital part of a platform's ecosystem.
I might be wrong but in the case of Apple it seems that to its customers it's Apple that matters, not apps. It's a brand many people want to buy because of the same mechanisms that make people buy luxury brands. The only time I remember when Apple's branding wasn't really enough has been in the 90s when graphic designers left Macs for Windows machines because Adobe software run so much better there. It was an undeniable combination of hw and sw problems. All of them came back and more thanks to the iPod first and the iPhone later.
So you might be right that too many inconveniences will send faithful customers away (I gave an example) but I don't believe commoditized apps are such a problem. People buy Apple because it's Apple and only a barren app store could drive them away now.
Once upon a time, Apple invested to own 19% of Adobe, which went onto become a powerful software anchor of Apple's hardware ecosystem. Perhaps a bit too powerful for Jobs' liking, hence the modern strategies to commoditize ISVs on iOS.
> the modern strategies to commoditize ISVs on iOS
What modern strategies?
I've seen this theory proposed multiple times, that Apple wants to commoditize software, but I've never seen anyone actually demonstrate ways in which Apple is doing that, just speculation that it would be in Apple's interests.
It's more about what they don't do to help developers make money. A web search will find research papers on software ecosystems, which discuss best practices for mutually-reinforcing, virtuous circle, feedback loops between platforms and developers.
it's not that they don't make money, but they don't allow developers to operate good businesses. being able to give trials to users, or to handle advertising in certain ways, or to have more flexibility with payments, etc - all of these things would be beneficial for businesses to be able to control directly, but they can't, as they're in the walled garden.
Many are making money right now, but I would suggest they don't have terribly good businesses, in that they don't own the relationship with the end user. One change of Apple's policies can put you out of business.
Apple could attract more developers (and thus more iPad users and more corporate revenue -- reversing declining iPad growth) if developer success was more closely aligned with Apple success.
I think there's lots of evidence for that theory. For example, giving away iLife, a package that contained replacements for many of the most common app types, with every Mac. Also, if you look at their Pro apps, like Logic & Final Cut, Apple has consistently undercut the competition agressively, likely as some kind of loss-leader to sell Macs. For example, I remember when Apple bought eMagic (the developers of Logic) they slashed the price from something like $600 to $200, a shockingly low price at the time. All the other software makers had to respond with "lite" versions to compete in this price bracket.
Yeah yeah. But none of that has anything to do with typing an app's entire name in the search bar and getting a ton of garbage unrelated results. Discovery being broken is not really a "commoditize the complements" play, it's just bad UX.
Bad UX in an Apple component is not a "dark pattern". It's just, well, bad UX.
Knowing Apple, knowing its history and people that work there and the things they care about, I think Apple is incapable of deliberately producing a bad UX. When it happens, it's caused by other factors rather than being an explicit decision. In the case of App Store discovery being broken, I think it's caused by the fact that the App Store seems to be run largely the way the Music Store is run (with the addition of app review), and nobody complains about search / discovery in the Music Store, but it just so happens that the infrastructure and design around the music store doesn't work quite so well when applied to apps.
Because the people that care about design don't really care about the App Store (they care about products instead), and the people that run the App Store don't really have an incentive to try and make dramatic changes in something that, from their perspective, is wildly successful. Change might break things, especially when operating on the scale that Apple is (just think of what the load must be on the App Store).
That's true. And if you care about this issue, you could try appealing to Apple executive leadership (emailing tim cook, or running a PR campaign designed to get Apple executive leadership to see your arguments).
Trials? How much does a paid game cost; a few bucks? People really want a trial before they make a $1.99 investment? When you go to a restaurant, do you ask for a piece of steak before you actually order it? Do you get a trial of a movie before you buy a ticket? A trailer doesn't count because apps can have trailers too. Why is this trial obsession such a big deal for such cheap products? I personally would love to see the end of the in app purchase model. When I buy a game, I want to have the game and not have to be feeding money into it to unlock stuff. But, the market likes them because those games appear "free."
Thats part of the problem though. Because there are no trials it's forcing down the prices the developers can charge for the games which again make them unsustainable and thus back to creating a very skewed distribution of income from the market 1-9-90 distribution and that's probably being nice to how the distribution goes given the 5000 apps being submitted each and every day.
> no way for developers to build meaningful relationships with their customers
Isn't that just a nice way of saying 'forcing a meaningful relationship' onto the customer? Obviously users can seek out more information from the developer's website / twitter / etc if they want to. Everyone else probably doesn't want to be nagged by SPAM e-mails and other forms of self-promotion. I feel like trial software falls into the same gimmicky category. Inevitably users wait to purchase until the trial ends and end up feeling annoyed for being forced to pay for something they were using for free. Even more so now that so many users are used to IAP feature upgrades.
I don't think Vogel was saying the platform was too popular for users, but rather too popular for developers, resulting in too much competition.
Besides, if you've ever read his blog, you know hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade, and has a charming way of not caring.
I didn't say "popular for users", I just said "popular". And I strongly expect that "popular for users" and "popular for developers" are extremely closely correlated anyway, at least when it comes to consumer-targeted platforms (i.e. not Linux, where every user is also a developer).
> hes been self ridiculing his own marketing skills for over a decade
There's a difference between "haha I'm not good at marketing, I'm glad people are still buying my stuff" and "haha I'm not good at marketing, therefore I'll stop developing for probably the fastest-growing gaming platform ever and say it's due to competition".
> "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true
But isn't that the crux of it? If you are charging $5 per game and you spend $100k developing then you simplistically need 30k installs just to break even. When the app store was small and you had a good chance of being the only app in your category that was not hard to achieve. When you are just 1 of 100 other apps in your same category it is 100 times harder to achieve. If you could charge $20 or $50 which was historically how software was priced then you could tolerate 4x - 10x less installs, but the app store culture has been permanently set now such that it will not tolerate that. 99c apps got Apple off to a great start, but it has locked in a situation where only the largest (or most sophisticated) developers that can reliably get to the top of the charts can stay afloat.
Whether the marketplace is profitable to a developer at their level is not always directly correlated to how popular that marketplace is. If the the App store is so competitive as to require a lot of up-front money to see a worthwhile return on investment, but other markets do not have that same problem, it may may sense to focus on those other markets.
Competitive is a question of demand versus supply; you can have super competitive small markets.
You have 1 yellow marble, 5 blue marbles, and 10 people. 5 people want a yellow marble, and five want a blue marble. Blue and yellow marbles are just as popular, but the competition for yellow marbles is much more intense.
Given that we're discussing the supply side of things, I think your example is backwards. But even if you changed it to competition for supplying the desire of yellow marbles, I still don't think it's relevant. It's certainly true that there's an incredible supply of cheap/free games on iOS (typically of very low quality, or chock-full of F2P mechanics or ads). But there's a very low supply of high-quality serious games being sold for more-than-a-cup-of-coffee prices. I think there's certainly a market for those games, the problem is just that you can't rely on the App Store for discovery (but you never really could do that anyway). So it seems the real problem is just that Jeff Vogel doesn't know how to market his stuff, and rather than actually figuring it out, or, heck, hiring someone else to do it for him, he's just giving up on the market entirely. Which is a real shame.
You're assuming he doesn't know how to market it. It's entirely possibly he's run the numbers, and found that for the required outlay the expected return isn't worth it, keeping in mind that his time and ability is finite, and that there may be other opportunities that are better investments of his time and money. In fact, he basically says exactly that.
In the beginning, the App store was popular (people used it), but was not competitive (there weren't a lot of apps, comparatively). Thus, many apps earned quite a bit of money than now because they got a larger percentage of the available consumers.
Even if we assume the App store today had the exact same number of consumers, there's many more apps competing for those users. The marketplace is very competitive, and the percentage of available users is less per app (on average).
My guess is that the reality is that the App store has many more consumers (or consumer dollars which is what we care about), but the number of apps has increased much more rapidly than consumer spending (e.g. supply increased much faster than demand).
The "gold rush" mentality was always a bit of a myth. There were a few apps that really did strike it rich, but the App Store has never really been a place where you could submit an app and watch the money roll in. That's not true now, and that wasn't true when it launched either. It's just a fantasy that a lot of people have.
Whether there was a gold rush or not is irrelevant for my argument. This isn't about being the random popular app, it's about the marketplace, supply and demand.
How many flashlight apps were available 6 years ago? How many are available now? How has the average price changed? Given roughly equivalent ratings, how much research does the user have to do to figure out if one is better for their needs than another? How likely are they to do this? Are the per year proceeds of the average flashlight app higher now or back then? Even if we limit it to apps with a high ratings, how does it look? Are there other app store segments where the outcome is better or worse?
I don't understand your argument. Flashlight apps? There was a brief flurry of flashlight apps, and fart machine apps, and Apple then declared that they would stop accepting trivial clones of existing trivial functionality like flashlights / fart machines. But that's not really relevant, especially as the average price for those apps was generally $0. Those apps existed because they were easy to make, people who made them thought it was fun / funny / a learning exercise / whatever, but it was never a money-making category of apps. Ever.
I thought it was fairly self evident that I used flashlight apps as a stand in for any specific segment you want to isolate in the app store.
That said, here's something to think about: I myself have paid real money for a flashlight application for my smartphone. Why? Because I wanted a flashlight app that didn't take three screens and button presses to get to light, and I also was a little leery of what the ad supported apps were really using the network for, so I wanted one that didn't require network access. This was a few years back and on Android, but I think the point is applicable, what you think you know about a market on a cursory review may not turn out the be correct upon deeper inspection. Some people made money on these apps, either through advertising or through the initial app price.
Flashlight apps may have been a poor choice on my part, but I think the original point stands. How does the market for tower defense games look? What about platform games? Do you think the average developer in these markets markets makes as much as they did 5-6 years ago? Do you think the advertising cost is the same?
I can readily acknowledge that some people made some amount of money on flashlight apps. I expect that research would indicate that it was in fact "very few people" and "very little money" (relatively speaking, at least; I'm sure it's so cheap to develop a flashlight app that practically any money would offset the cost).
As for your original point, I'll grant that you have a point, but I don't necessarily agree with it. I'm finding it hard to speculate about markets where I have no actual data, but my hunch is that the market for tower defense games is larger today than it was 5-6 years ago (i.e. I think the genre has grown more popular). I don't know whether that correlates with increased revenue for developers of tower defense games, or whether the number of games has outstripped the demand for them. Although I think it's fair to expect that there are a few developers making lots of money, and bunch of developers making a moderate amount of money (that may or may not offset the cost), and a bunch of developers making very little money. It turns out the App Store in general has a very steep revenue curve, with most of the money going to relatively few developers. But I think it's always had that curve, we just didn't used to have the data available to see it as well as we do today.
I think the more important question with regards to the App Store is not "how much money are developers making?", but "how easy is it for a new entrant to make money?". And I don't know the answer to this either, but I would be interested to find out.
I think you're right about the revenue curve, I think our whole discussion has been about whether the slope has changed over time. I've heard a lot here from developers that mention that it's harder now than it was, but that's obviously not a rigorous way to go about figuring the truth of the matter.
> This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
I'll make the explicit argument: iOS games are at the decline point of the hype cycle. Irrational amounts of effort have been expended on developing iOS games, both by individual developers bamboozled by a few success stories stories and hoping to strike it rich, and venture investors bamboozled by a few success stories and hoping to strike it rich. This has happened on other platforms - remember the great videogame crash? - perhaps not on windows due to some peculiarities (games there are often ports of successful console games that wouldn't cover their costs on windows alone).
> The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened.
Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up. Imagine 5 people are willing to spend $500 developing a game that would have made $1000 a year ago. Sounds smart, right? But because there's 5 of them their games make $200 each and they each lose $300.
> There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques.
I think maybe the changes have crept up on you. I'm playing an F2P game at the moment for the first time in a couple of years and the depth of the content and polish is staggering, unbelievably high production values.
No. What are you referring to? I've been playing games all my life and I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash".
> Maybe, but the number of developers has kept going up.
And so have the number of users. And nearly all developers are focused on cheap / F2P games. I would wager that the proportion of high-quality/more-than-a-cup-of-coffee apps has actually gone down over time, which would suggest that competition in that market is lower than ever. If you rely on the App Store for discovery then you have a problem, but that's always been true for everyone except the most successful F2P games.
> I'm playing an F2P game at the moment for the first time in a couple of years and the depth of the content and polish is staggering, unbelievably high production values.
Let me guess, Spirit Lords? I was actually really disappointed when I realized that game was neck-deep in F2P mechanics, because it was surprisingly high-quality otherwise. And yes, there are some other F2P games that are pretty polished. But the vast majority of F2P games do not have the same quality and polish that you'd expect from a game that you had to pay more than a few dollars for.
> I have no idea what you mean by "the great videogame crash"
Probably when the market was flooded with garbage quality games and the bottom fell out of it[0].
Fun fact - the reason the NES looked like a nondescript square box in the US with the weird spring loading cartridge (meant to resemble the mechanism of a VCR) as opposed to looking like the Famicom, was fear that after the crash, Americans wouldn't spend money on a 'videogame console' but they might buy something presented as an 'entertainment system' that just happened to play video games.
You're probably too young (so am I). He's talking about the crash that wiped out Atari and others in the home market. Nintendo had to market themselves as an accessory for a toy robot just to get U.S. retailers to stock them. The single biggest example is the E.T. game, which had thousands of unsold copies shipped straight to landfills.
> Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
In Windows game development you've have a long history of many ways to distribute your wares, with different pros and cons. Not so much for Androids or iOS. Note that similar complaints have been levelled at Steam, which is the closest thing to the iOS model.
Is there really that much of a difference between "Click [here](link-to-app-store) to buy this game!" and "Click [here](link-to-self-hosted-page) to buy this game!"? The only real difference I can think of is when software was primarily distributed via physical media, but that hasn't been the primary distribution mechanism for a while (and I would expect that nearly all software these days doesn't even have an option for physical media).
Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform. The only way I can meaningfully interpret your claim is by replacing "build relationships with them" to "and market directly to them", i.e. being able to email your customers with marketing messages. And I'm glad Apple doesn't give my email address to everyone I buy an app from.
The only other interpretation I can think of is "Apple doesn't let you respond to reviews on the app store", but the ability to respond to reviews is not an industry-wide expectation. I can't think of anywhere before the rise of mobile gaming that anyone considered the idea that a game developer should be able to respond to reviews.
> I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform.
The original post here was on Spiderweb Software's forums, which have been around in some incarnation or another for over a decade and hosts a community that has built up around their games. This is a company that has always relied on a close relationship with its customers.
I would think jblow knows what he's talking about here, he's delivered at least one great game to the world (to me, Braid had the perfect difficulty ramp and an awesome level of inventiveness).
As a buyer on Steam actually I didn't feel I had a direct relationship with jblow as the developer, but I would have been very happy to receive his marketing material, especially if it was programming tips!
Compare and contrast the experience of buying an iPhone with the experience of buying an iPhone app.
When you buy an app, you are basically looking at sales sheets from people you don't know making claims you can't verify. The only way out is to go find reviews about the apps from blogs you can't trust.
Now think about buying an iPhone. I've owned an iPhone for 8 years. I know intimately the support experience. I know intimately the build quality. Software quality. Product lifecycle. When a new iPhone comes out I have basically all the information I need to make a purchasing decision, without ever laying eyes on the actual product. People who don't have that information can go to a retail store where they can try the product and talk with knowledgeable and friendly people about it, and many of them turn into me in 8 years.
I want to be able to create that kind of experience with my products. Because if smartphones were sold the way that apps are today I don't think many people would buy them.
If you sold your app for $600 I bet you could create that kind of experience. And if Apple sold phones for $2 you can bet the buying experience would be a lot different.
It's not about giving your email address to everyone (I wouldn't want that either), but it's about having the friction-free option of doing so. There are a number of game-makers for whom I absolutely want to be emailed when they make something new, because I love their stuff. That doesn't happen on iOS very easily.
Why not? Every app page has a link to the developer's site, and the developer's site can offer a way to subscribe to some sort of newsletter. And games often provide links in the game itself to view information about the game developer.
Edit: I recognize that it's not particularly common for developers to try and encourage users to sign up for some sort of marketing. But I think that's just because developers haven't really considered it to be an acceptable thing to ask users of their games for, rather than any actual difficulty in doing so.
In the ~17 years I've been involved in the Descent community online, I've had conversations with the developers of Descent 1, Descent 2, Descent 3, a project that was going to become Descent 4 until Interplay pulled support, and Descent:Underground (which just successfully kickstarted last week.) In particular, the Descent:Underground group is currently improving parts of their game based on conversations with me and others who play the older games.
I'm not sure what your point is. Are you trying to argue that it's impossible for iOS developers to form communities where they can talk to their users? Because that's obviously false. Are you trying to argue that PC game developers got such communities "for free"? Because that's also obviously false.
I'm addressing your comment that "form relationships" can only be meaningfully interpreted as something other than "relationships", by noting that I have formed actual worthwhile relationships with game developers in the past and present.
My comment does not address the rest of what you're saying (in particular, I don't care at all about iOS games or their app store), only that one point.
> Relationships? What are you talking about? I can't recall the last time I ever felt I had a "relationship" with a game developer, on _any_ platform.
iD/John Carmack, David Braben, Sid Meier, Rockstar, Volition, Gearbox Software... I could keep rattling off names and developers, but those are all examples of companies and individuals who have dedicated followings who follow them from game to game or platform to platform.
Yeah, you can follow companies, but "relationship" generally implies that it's reciprocal. A one-way "relationship" is called "stalking" ;) I don't really see why the App Store affects the ability for customers to choose to follow their favorite developers.
Because it commoditizes the product. Apple wants apps to be fungible and rapidly consumed and thrown away, and that does not lead to a real relationship with a producer. You have no reason to form a relationship with the provider of something that is placed, and consumed, on the same level as a Snickers bar.
Games on PCs, Valve's best efforts notwithstanding, are not yet so reduced.
There's plenty of incentive for Apple to make apps plentiful and easy to acquire, but I strongly disagree that there's any incentive for Apple to want apps to be fungible. Why would there be? This is a claim I've seen repeated a few times without any supporting evidence. And I can't think of any reason why Apple would want apps to be fungible (more-so than any other software platform, at least; there is an incentive for there to be competition within any given category, but that's not the same thing as having the apps actually be fungible).
There are a lot of people who like having tons of new games available to try for a few minutes or hours or days, and then throw them away. But the existence of those people / that market does not mean that there isn't also a market for games that people stick with for a long time, and that are sold and maintained for a long time.
> Yeah, you can follow companies, but "relationship" generally implies that it's reciprocal.
iD and Bungie both have a long history of heavy interaction with their customers. That's rolled off for iD, but Bungie's back-and-forward seems as lively as ever.
I'm still unclear on what part of the App Store makes it impossible for companies to engage with their customers. I've played many Bungie games, but nowhere in the purchase process for any of their games was I encouraged to form a relationship with the company. Any back-and-forth with companies happens in channels other than the retail channel; twitter, forums, websites, etc. I don't understand why selling on the App Store vs, say, PSN Store, or Xbox Live Arcade, or any of the numerous Windows PC retail channels, affects the ability to engage with customers in this fashion.
Given you're fighting with actual, successful game developers as well as adopting a take-em-all-on style with everyone else I'm not sure you want to be clear.
It's impossible to build a community of users if you publish on the App Store? That's nonsense. All 3 of those games are by known developers with a pre-existing fan base and all 3 have user communities that are distinct from their retail channels. There is no reason to believe that the retail channel must provide a user community in order for a user community to exist.
jblow: So follow them on Twitter? Go to their website? Seriously, you're acting like a developer can never see the outside world after they sign the developer agreement.
It's about how much friction is imposed on what. As anyone designing a "funnel" for web purchasing (or whatever) will tell you, a little friction goes a LONG way.
Yes, of course you can go out of your way to get connected to the people making a game. But it's just harder to do that on iOS than on Windows, and this has consequences in terms of the viability of these platforms for small developers. (It is by no means the only factor. The race-to-zero pricing on iOS is probably a bigger factor.)
> The only real difference I can think of is when software was primarily distributed via physical media, but that hasn't been the primary distribution mechanism for a while
It was a major distribution medium until fairly recently, even if not primary. Heck, you can still go into lots of retailers and buy physical media for PC games.
So? That's not really relevant. You still have insane amounts of competition on Windows, much like you do on iOS. On either platform, marketing is a requirement.
> to be discoverable one has to pay the advertisement dollars to be displayed in the top spots
That's not how the iOS App Store works. You cannot pay Apple to be featured. The closest approximation you could do is pay one of those companies that try and game the ranking system by getting "fake" downloads (e.g. paying people to "buy" the game, etc) in order to get placed highly on the top charts, but that's not the same thing as being featured on the store, and it's widely regarded as a scummy move.
In any case, if you had to self-host your own game download instead of having Apple provide the download, that certainly wouldn't fix any of this. People still need to discover your game, which means you need to market it, and you can provide a link to the app store just as easily as you could provide a link to a self-hosted download.
Windows ecosystem had level playing field for each player. Appstore has rankings (which feeds into itself, which leads to developers having to pay people to download just to rank higher initially) and featured (subjective and non-transparent curation by the platform owner)
You keep saying iOS when the article isn't about iOS.
It's about developing games for the iPad.
Not iPhone.
And making the assumption that they are the same ignore realities even Apple is aware of. One could very easily find value is developing for iPhone and not iPad. And clearly, developing for iPad alone wasn't worth it.
This is a curious argument to make. The platform is too popular? Would it have made any sense at all if anyone made the same claim about, say, Windows game development?
I suspect what this really means is "there are more games than ever, and the iOS App Store is becoming increasingly difficult to rely on as a discovery mechanism, thus requiring advertising to users with other mediums", but that's kind of always been true, and it's certainly been true of all desktop platforms. Which makes me wonder why iOS can't simply be treated the same way non-mobile platforms are and rely on more traditional marketing channels?
The only other way to interpret this that I can think of is "it's becoming increasingly difficult to justify a >$5 price for a game", but I haven't seen any sign of that being true. iOS has had a "race to the bottom" mentality for prices since the app store first opened. There's always been a ton of free or $0.99 games, and a relatively low number of pricer-but-higher-quality games. I don't think this has changed in years, with perhaps the only real difference being that game developers are becoming increasingly sophisticated about how they apply F2P techniques. And as a bit of anecdata, the most impressive game I've seen on iOS in a while is a brand new one called Implosion that costs $9.99 and, at the time of this comment, has a solid 5-star rating with 311 reviews.