Many people still think the iPhone
app market is a chaotic melee where hits are created and then vanish in
an unpredictable way. In some ways, the opposite is true: the iPhone
paid download chart is extraordinarily conservative, effectively frozen
in time. The entertainment industry tends to be dominated by fresh
product. On December 28th, seven out of the top-10 movies in America were released within 10 days. The oldest was released 50 days earlier. Seven out of the top-10 songs on the Billboard 100 were released within the past 91 days. The NPD Group’s chart of the top-10 console games in November was ruled by brand new titles. But the mobile app market is the mesmerizing exception.
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Year after year, people expect
old school apps to start fading as a new generation steps up. Yet the
ancient hits from 2009 and 2010 still hold tight while new entries race
up the chart and drop out like clouds of mayflies.
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On December 28th, six apps on the iPhone’s top-10 paid download chart
were at least 400 days old. Three apps were 800 days old or even older.
Since Angry Birds Star Wars and Bad Piggies
are spin-offs of the 1000-day-old Angry Birds saga, fully eight out of
the top-10 download franchises belong to the Methuselah Club.
Only two of the top-10 iPhone
apps are fresh, Wipeout and Need for Speed, both boosted by massive name
recognition from other media platforms. What this means is that the
only original mobile app success stories on iPhone on December 28th,
2012 were games launched between 2009 and 2011.
This is truly exceptional. We have never seen a content industry
where hits from previous years are trumping over new entries to this
degree.
There are eight apps in the
iPhone’s top-40 paid downloads chart that are 900 days or older. These
blockbuster games were mostly created back in 2009 and they populated
the evolutionary niches of the iPhone app market with ruthless
efficiency. The first wave of quality apps that arrived in 2008 were a
bit too crude to become evergreen. The Class of 2009 was just sleek and
deep enough to render future challengers impotent.
The 1,119-day-old Words With
Friends is the word game that’s good enough to see off new challengers
year after year. The 1,043-day-old Angry Birds and its brood of
spin-offs are the iconic catapult games. The 1,249-day-old Doodle Jump
is the platform jumper that won’t fade away. The 1,044-day-old Plants
vs. Zombies is the defense game champion.
These old-timers have effectively
conquered most of the popular casual gaming niches. They are proving to
be exceptionally difficult to displace, mostly because in the app
market, the product evolves. Unlike blockbuster movies or Billboard hit
singles, the top apps keep getting new expansions and upgrades, often
every two or three months.
New consumers now compare Angry
Birds with its literally hundreds of levels to other catapult games with
far lower level count. Of course Angry Birds is better value for your
99 cents. The massive network of users that Words with Friends has
amassed is fiendishly difficult to replicate. Plants Vs. Zombies has
expanded to a sprawling saga with an endless series of bonus levels and
extras.
In the free download category,
there is a cornucopia of innovation and brand new challengers vying for
top-10 positions, both on iPhone and iPad
platforms. But the paid app market remains dominated by the old
champions, perhaps for years to come. Maybe that is why most vendors
developing new games now only target the free download segment.
Galaxy Note II
