According to Kotaku, the secret to creating a successful game for the iPhone is producing a product so simple it can be described quickly to someone else. The comment came to an audience at the Game Developers Conference 09.
“I think quality is largely irrelevant,” Adam Saltsman, creator of Wurdle, told the crowd during a discussion of independent game development for the iPhone and iPod Touch. “I think the defining thing is how quickly you can describe your product to someone else.” This position flies in the face of assertions by other developers during GDC that the iPhone was a powerful platform and not to be underestimated.
The balance of a polished product to the element of ‘fun’ is probably the biggest factor. For example, Infomedia who created the iFart app, apparently earned over US$250,000 for what surely amounts to very little development compared with more useful applications. The real shame of it all is that there are fantastic iPhone games available. Playing with apps may be like chewing gum, once the flavor is gone, you go for something else, therefore once the fun is out from an app, we look for something else.
[via Kotaku]
“I think quality is largely irrelevant,” Adam Saltsman, creator of Wurdle…
That explains a lot. Wurdle is a buggy POS, and now I understand why they haven’t bothered to fix a bug I notified them about and even told them how to fix.
What bug was that? Did you email our support address? There’s a good chance it has been addressed in our massive update already. We’ve overhauled every major system in the game, and we’ve been working on it for a couple months now. It should be dropping in the store within the month. Hopefully it will address any issues you might be having with it!
Remember that sensational headlines, and simplified, out-of-context quotes get syndicated much more rapidly and widely than well-reasoned, logical observations that are not even remotely revolutionary and which apply to all commercial industries. You know, stuff like “sometimes a shiny turd outsells a rough gem”. Wow, mindblowing stuff, nobody’s ever heard of that in a commercial industry before!!
We’re trying to make polished gems – that’s why we are in the middle of developing our 5th prototype for our second release, and that’s why we’ve spent nearly three months completely overhauling wurdle!
At the end of the day, we’re just two guys, and if there’s a bug that hasn’t been addressed, it is either:
1 – in the next update
2 – somehow got lost in the noise (rare, but possible)
3 – an actual hardware bug (again, rare, but do exist)
Anyways, I’m not usually one to post to a blog like this, but I’m stuck on a weird problem in the new prototype :P So…yeah.