Talking about software #3 - making games has come full circle

In the last post in this series, we saw some headline figures about Apps, but do we know anything a bit more specific about how people are using and consuming Apps? Indeed we do. One online collective has examined this issue and has some tentative findings to report (Appsfire, 2011):

1.      A typical iPhone user has downloaded about 80 Apps to add to the 20 pre-installed by Apple.

2.      Users spend upwards of an eighty minutes a day using these Apps.

3.      Just over half of the Apps downloaded were ‘free’

App Usage by Category

                                    Appsfire.com                         

The Business and Culture of Gaming has Come Full Circle

As can be seen, games form a substantial part of the buying-and-selling of Apps. A particularly interesting thought about App games is the extent to which the business and culture of gaming has come full circle. In the 1980’s – ancient history now – the creation and marketing of computer games was a cottage industry. More accurately, it was a bedroom industry – teenagers and twenty-somethings were able to teach themselves the skills and knowledge through trial and error. Over and above a home computer very little was required and the scale and nature of the product meant that one person could create the whole thing. Codemasters started like that, as did many other firms and now senior individuals in the industry. As technology evolved, and the potential for complexity of design and structure set in, the industry evolved from a semi-professional sector into one requiring significant capital investment in high-end equipment and highly specialised design/coding/creative roles. A big game on a major platform like Playstation or Xbox that it is hoped will be a big seller is likely to have involved the efforts of several hundred people and an enormous amount of hardware. The recent game – Grand Theft Auto IV - is understood to have cost upwards of $100m to produce. $10m was spent on the audio component of the game alone. In the modern marketplace for PC and console games, the individual or small firm cannot hope to bring a competitive and attractive product to market, and the same is true for most other categories of software.

Apps, and games Apps in particular take us back to the beginning of this cycle. Certainly some of the big players have established business divisions to focus on Apps, but a small firm can bring a product to market using nothing more than a standard-PC and some cheap software. You can read about the nature, culture and success of such SMEs in a paper like O’Dwyer (2009).

Appsfire (2011) Infographic: iOS Apps Vs Web Apps From: blog.appsfire.com/infographic-ios-apps-vs-web-apps

O'Dwyer, M. Gilmore, A. and Carson, D. (2009) Innovative marketing in SMEs, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 43 Iss: 1/2, pp.46 - 61