| Nearly ever top grossing app in the Apple App Store is a game. Few of them are services or "remotes." Among the games, only about 1/6 are sequels (e.g., Angry Birds Space) or based on other intellectual property (e.g., Iron Man games). That means nearly all the money in the Apple App Store is earned by social games you've never heard of. Barry is right that at least part of the charting comes from how payments are recorded. Many services don't sell subscriptions through App Store IAP, both because subscriptions are newly permitted[0] and because a 30% revenue share is a lot to ask from a low-margin business like Pandora. But he is very wrong about the trend of software and services sales in general. Games have and always will dominate consumer software and service sales. He seems to describe himself as a remote-control app "whale," or someone who makes an extraordinary number of purchases. There are very many more gaming whales with smartphones than there are "remote control" whales with smartphones. But generally, "remote control" apps—which again, seem to just be non-gaming services apps, by Barry's definition—don't have very many profitable things to sell. How can you compete with the margins of virtual coins? Even music and movie services pay margin-eating licenses on their content, especially when, like Pandora, it is distributed for free. And all those other services—travel or whatever—need to pay a lot of physical people for a lot of physical things. Non-gaming services are hardly profitable. A trend of adoption of "remote control" apps should not be conflated with a trend of profit. The composition of the top grossing charts of any software platform are unlikely to change away from games. [0] https://developer.apple.com/appstore/in-app-purchase/subscri... |
It all ads up...from $1,500 for TV sub, plus biz travel with hotel tonight, taxi's here and there, netflix, spotify. You are dead right on games, and that the IAP economy is hidden. Same too, the credit card economy/transactions through apps is hidden. There's a lot of money behind free apps, and everything is ad related.