Non curated stores like Android is a death trap for amateur developers trying to make a break.
It's swamped, there's too many games. There's no proper "New Game of X Genre" list at all. Only top new lists which require your game to compete with others for downloads, ratings & reviews to be on the list. This means its a race to "who can market better" their newly released mobile game. The small developer loses out because we don't have the budget to compete.
Without being on any list that gamers can easily find, your game is as good as dead on arrival.
Welcome to Android.
On iOS, at least you are on lists that everyone can find. There's proper new games/apps list, with its own categories or genres. Want to find new strategy game releases? Done deal, its there, sorted by release date. Boom. Instant eyes on your game. The rest, it's up to whether your game is any good to convince people to give it a go. But you can't say it wasn't discovered or people didn't see it.
Same for Steam. Newly released games are guaranteed 1,000,000 impressions on the front page. Steam also has categories of genres and tags that is sorted by release date top to bottom. As a small time indie, when you release on Steam and it doesn't do well, you cannot blame anyone but yourself, regardless if you have a marketing budget or not. Why? Because millions of gamers have seen your game. If you fail, it's because they deem it not worth their time and money.
So if you want to make games to earn money, stop wasting your time and effort making games for Android (Android *only* = no way, just quit and save yourself all the eventual disappointment), particularly when there's just so damn many out there already that are similar to it or even better that are free.
Note: This is from my own experience, it may not apply to everyone. But IF you want to release for Android a "premium" game, make it free with a single IAP to unlock all content once (restorable), this way, it's like a demo, if players like they buy the rest.
This man speaks truth about the Android market... It's the same exact reason why I long ago gave up publishing personal Android games to reskin games and sell them on sites like Flippa, Chupamobile and CodeCanyon. I make more money doing that instead of waiting for 100 downloads to get like 0.02 cents in a day...
[quote:1nkjcaby]Really, the focus has changed. From "making something you are proud of" to "making something that generates money". Not true? How many flappy bird copies came out, how many match 3 games do you see, how many FarmVille clones are out there? Etc.
This is sad but it's true. Everyone trying to do what thinks they can make a living off from.