[potatolicious]

Not the OP, but I've been developing apps for years and agree with the sentiment. A few thoughts:

There are, in my mind, 4 broad categories of apps:

- 1: Games with microtransactions, think Clash of Clans, Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, etc.

- 2: Games without microtransactions (sold full-price), I honestly can't name any right now.

- 3: Apps tied to some kind of service not exclusively on the phone, think Uber, Grubhub, Amazon, Gmail, Facebook. These are apps who are

- 4: Apps that primarily provide value only on the phone, sold for money. Think Dark Sky... and not many others that are still alive.

Categories #1 and #3 are alive and well, and I think will continue to be for the foreseeable future.

Categories #2 and #4 are dead. The article says it's the "beginning of the end", but I'd argue it's very close to the end of the end.

The trend I've been seeing is that apps in category #4 are not only failing commercially, but also increasingly being pulled into the greater ecosystems of apps in Category #3.

Instead of buying a standalone flight-tracking app, it's now integrated into a travel company's app - think Expedia or Kayak.

Instead of buying a standalone weather app, it's now table stakes in either the OS itself, or integrated into larger apps like Google.

Instead of buying a standalone package/delivery tracking app, it's now integrated into a retail app, like Amazon or Wal-Mart.

etc etc, that's the trend I'm seeing. Apps-sold-as-standalone-products is generally speaking dead, their ultimate fate is that their feature sets are absorbed into apps/services that make Actual Money(tm).

[woliveirajr]

Perhaps dead, but #2 are the ones that I look for. I prefer to pay full price and get a full experience than expend .99 cents so that my little one is able to bake another batch of virtual cakes, then buy again in a week, then....

[potatolicious]

Agreed - I actually play little/no games on my phone/tablet because of the current state of affairs. It's nearly impossible to find a game that isn't just an abstraction of a slot machine.

Square/Enix has done well with some puzzle games - Tomb Raider, Hitman, and Deus Ex all have turn-based puzzle games that are fun and priced on level packs rather than some bottomless pit of microcurrency.

But they are the exception.

I think this is representative of a larger issue in gaming in general - development costs have grown dramatically faster than sales, to the point where the economics of game development have become marginal. Despite blockbuster marketing efforts and millions of copies sold, many games have trouble recouping their costs, not just in mobile-land, but also in traditional strongholds like console games.

[Silhouette]

Your basic conclusion -- apps as standalone products paid for up-front are dead -- doesn't seem too surprising if we consider that apps have trained people from day one to think software costs almost nothing. If you're selling anything with substantial development costs to a market that behaves as if $2 is a lot of money for something on their phone, the only commercially viable options left are to attract a high volume of customers making lots of tiny payments over time or not to expect your app to be a significant source of direct revenue in the first place.