You mean you created one and it's been an hour and nobody joined it? That does sound a bit odd tbh. I usually get em back within a few minutes.
No I didn't create one yet might try that but was seeing if there was any games with room first. Oh ok created one and joined one.
Unfortunately the race to the bottom was inevitable once Apple created the App Store the way they did. With so many devs and the App Store rules that they set up, there was no other possible result.
As a gamer and consumer I want low prices. Competition is a very good thing, it drives prices down and quality up. As a developer I want higher prices but It's not going to happen, it's a downtrend
We have a niche space RPG game that's priced at $4.99 for the SD and $7.99 for the HD version. Surprisingly, it sells better on Google Play where we've never had a price drop compared to iOS where we've experimented with the pricing going as low as $1 for the SD version during Black Friday. I don't think this price point would work for a casual game, but it can work for niche games like ours. We're still actively working on it, so our strategy is to keep improving it--make it simpler and more beautiful all the time to keep expanding the player base. While it's not the runaway hit we've hoped it would be, it still helps pay the bills. We're splitting our time now with one dev improving Dangerous while the other works on our next game, a casual game with a fun new mechanic. That one will probably be priced in the $.99 range unless we make it more of a story-driven platformer.
What do you think is the reason behind the consistency in the google play store? My initial guess would be because the google play store contains far less apps than the App Store. This would make it much easier for your game to be discovered amongst android users.
The number of apps has less bearing now that Google Play has reached a sort of critical mass I think, but that's probably part of it. Hard to know for certain, but the factors probably also include: - competition is way intense on iOS where there are more high quality titles - players on iOS are used to everything being $.99, even the non-casual games eventually get there. So players expect it or have enough (cheap) high-quality titles such that they can wait for the inevitable price drop - players on Android are more likely to be techies/nerds, so can appreciate the depth of our game. As compared to the predominantly casual iOS players who prefer our more casual competitors like Galaxy on Fire 2. - Google Play is rife with crapware, so a good title stands out all the more. The fragmentation on Android is real and makes it harder to develop for, so a lot of developers take the safer but blander route. - since we've held firm to our price points, Google Play members don't have to worry about a future discount that they just missed getting - and one of the biggest reasons is it's easier to find our game on Google Play: since it has sold enough to surpass some hidden threshold, our game is listed on "users who viewed this also viewed" and "users who installed this also installed" with other high profile games like Mass Effect Infiltrator. We likely never surpassed that threshold on iOS (and so searching for our exact title still doesn't list us first on iOS).
