Denis Dyack believes that the iOS App Store and its overabundance of cheaply priced replicas are bringing the videogame industry down.
Nintendo has taken a certain amount of heat due to its official stance that cheap games like those found on the iOS App Store are devaluing the videogame industry as a whole. Sticking up for Nintendo’s view is Silicon Knights’ Denis Dyack, who believes that the flood of more useless apps than anyone could ever consume is the main issue.
“As an example, my understanding is that there are 17,000 fart apps right now,” Dyack told Industry Gamers. “Those are more fart apps than anyone could possibly ever consume. What that does, when you start having performance oversupply, it accelerates the commoditization that drives the value of games down.”
Dyack goes on to note an EEDAR study that put the average gross for an iOS game at $700. “I can guarantee you that a company like ours and most people cannot survive on a $700 gross,” he adds. “So what’s happening is you have a lot of people going into this hoping that they’re going to get this smash hit like Angry Birds and you have a lot of investment in this industry and it’s not clear if that’s a viable industry.”
Dyack says that the app market “seems to be eroding the handheld market,” where there are actually a good number of quality games. “I’m not saying there aren’t quality games on the iOS,” he continues. “Because there are; there are some good games there, but there’s so much performance oversupply and so much commoditization, that it actually is affecting, in my opinion, the industry in a very negative way.”
He agrees with Nintendo that the industry has to be careful with apps due to the “dramatic disruption” they’re already having. Dyack previously made similar comments on social gaming, also questioning its viability as a profitable business in the long run. I guess this means we won’t be seeing Too HumanVille or an X-Men Destiny fart app anytime soon… *sigh*.
Source: IndustryGamers
