I find it incredible how Gameloft's games from 5 years ago still have more depth and higher productions values than whatever they're churning out these days.
I agree yet on the other hand i'm sure their shareholders/chairman want Gamelofts profits to keep rising. You see it in companies all the time, cut corners here and there to save money and make more profits. Look around on the forum, games for $2 and you have people saying 'i'll wait till it drops a dollar or when it goes free'. None of that helps companies. They make less money, then either have to make staff redundant or make games 'cheaper' or quicker to generate more money. Freemium makes a ton of money so they follow that path. Lots of indie devs or other companies go bust as they spend 9 months working on a game and it generates say 500 sales (5000 downloads when its free for a day). We're all partly to blame
Yeah we are partly to blame, but so are the devs since they don't pay to advertise their premium games very often. Just look at any game site and see what brings in the ad revenue... it's not often premium titles because for whatever reason, small devs don't like to spend money outside of what they had to in order to make the game. It's like stores that open and they don't have any signs out front and the windows are blacked out. How do they expect to get people to notice them... well... they go free for a day or two and of course everyone jumps in and downloads the game for free and then that builds up a little feedback on the game but the game has already been free once so it'll go free again and most often it does. So they kind of shoot themselves in the foot right out of the gate. They breed the initial mentality that games go free as do all the devs that follow the same practice. Yet look at the top paid games... where is Minecraft PE in that list? It's always up high on the list because it's never been on sale if someone wants it they know they gotta pony up the cash. It's like cars. Who pays full price for cars when they always have some big sale coming up soon with extra thousands off and extra cash for trade-ins and stuff. The market breeds these expectations into people. If devs stopped making their games go free then maybe it would help. But it wont help that the market is so oversaturated with games that it's hard to stand out in the crowd... so that's where advertising comes in. The sad reality is, most iOS devs should see game development as a hobby outside of their normal job... yet most see the big dollars a few devs get and so they want to roll the dice and see if they can make a mountain of cash for little work. That's not a healthy way to approach this market. It's like growing tomatoes and expecting to go to a massive farmers market and make big money when there are dozens of people that grow tomatoes. .... Back go gameloft... I think they started off making some great premium console-like games. Many of them I had great fun with. But the market has changed and if they don't take advantage of that change then they will eventually shrink and die. So they seem to do a little of both. Some full freemiums for the casuals, some hybrids that seem to target everyone, and the occasional big premium game that aims for those that are willing to buy games. Yes as a whole gameloft has gone down in quality stuff that I can enjoy, but I feel like a lot of bigger developers are kind of forced down that path if they want to survive.
