Oct 6th 2014, 7:01:56
Originally posted by Trife:
tulosba made the point i was being a smartass about - an earth empires app would cost no where close to a half million dollars to develop, lol, dunno where you pulled the 500k figure from
earth has never had graphics, i dunno why the fudge we'd need them now
hell, even if there was an earth empire app, you could have push notifications for your country news and all that jazz - it can just basically be the mobile version of the site we have now, but in app form.
earth has never had graphics, i dunno why the fudge we'd need them now
hell, even if there was an earth empire app, you could have push notifications for your country news and all that jazz - it can just basically be the mobile version of the site we have now, but in app form.
Considering I work in the games industry as a game programmer, those numbers aren't out of my ass. They are real numbers.
Believe me, making EE into an app with push notifications wouldn't make it any more appealing to play. Considering the proliferation of IRC bots for announcing attacks already, it would barely take half a day of work to add Android/iOS push notifications from the same IRC bot. What's the catch? You need to run a server (not an issue if you already run an IRC bot), and then you need to pay Apple $99 per year for developer status, and you only get 100 device slots during app testing (that is, you can only test your app on up to 100 unique test devices - The limit is only for apps in testing, not for apps approved on the app store).
If a game doesn't capture your audience's attention within the first 5 minutes of launch, your game is as good as gone. Nobody wants to sit down for hours reading startup guides, or figuring out what a "casher" is, particularly *mobile* games.
Originally posted by Trife:
It takes a half a mil to make an app? Wow there are folks who make apps that have like sub 500 downloads. Are they just rich guys who are bored and decide to build an app for giggles?
They are people who do it as a hobby to learn how to write programs, this also allows them to add it to their resume for job interviews, as part of their portfolio.
Most of these apps never see the light of day outside of the 500 downloads via a few Facebook posts to friends. If you don't market a game, no one will see it. The ones that do make it rich, like Flappy Bird, basically struck lottery, and that one only because a famous Youtuber happened to play it. There are 12 million apps out there.
The games that you describe, while they obviously take nearly no capital to make, usually also lack _depth_. Games like 2048 obviously are an exception, but if you read back onto what it is a clone of (1024, which is a clone of Threes), you'll realize that even Threes was in development for a whole 1.5 years. That's right. Threes, a game that can be easy cloned in half a week, was in development for 1.5 years because the game mechanics wasn't quite right during all that time.
Not only that, trainboy initially made the comparison to Clash of Clans in his opening post. If that is the triple AAA standard we are talking about that is referenced when making an EE app, then you better cough up the money, because the time needed to make the app is significant.