The Silicon Knights boss sees the App Store as a problem if no one’s making any money.
To hear Nintendo tell it, social games and iOS games are destroying the entire games industry, but it often sounds like they’re simply in denial about the success of Angry Birds. Nintendo, however, has a defender in Denis Dyack. While the Silicon Knights honcho doesn’t think that every iOS game is bad, he does think that there are far too many of them and no industry is sustainable when supply overshoots demand.
“My understanding is that there are 17,000 fart apps right now,” said Dyack in an interview with 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.”
Referencing an EEDAR report that indicates that the average iOS game makes a mere $700, he says, “I can guarantee you that a company like ours and most people cannot survive on a $700 gross. 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.”
“It’s frightening,” he continues, “but what it seems to be doing is eroding the handheld market where you’re actually getting really high quality games instead of fart apps. And I’m not saying there aren’t quality games on the iOS, 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.”
Dyack has sounded off on social gaming in the past, but I must admit that I’m actually inclined to agree with him here. I don’t think iOS games are any kind of plague – they’re cheap, convenient, and fun, and there’s always going to be a market for that kind of entertainment – but the App Store could definitely do with a bit of pruning and I’d rather see a smaller number of developers making money than a larger number of developers making nothing. At some point, there has to be some substance behind the speculation.
Source: Industry Gamers
