Does Apple Really Need A Separate Store For iOS Games?

There is a plea gaining ground among various news outlets and tech blogs that Apple urgently address what's rapidly turning into an imbalanced and overwhelming App Store experience. The primary issue, from a consumer discovery point of view, is that it's becoming more and more difficult for developers--both established and up-and-coming--to effectively promote their wares within the walls of this rapidly-expanding, competitive marketplace. To that end, outside cost-prohibitive targeted advertising, most independent studios rely on the App Store's in-built ranking system (and requisite charts) to boost consumer awareness. There's just one problem: Games. As Appsfire contributor Ouriel discusses in a recent post,

Take a look at the top 25 free apps right now. ... [As of] a couple of days ago 15 of the top 25 apps are games. 1 category for more than half of the hits. Take a [look] at the Top 50, most of them are games also. No surprise. Games are the hit category. ... The only problem with that is that, Games are distorting the discovery of the other 20 categories. It is really really hard to get noticed in the charts if you’re not a game.

That certainly seems true, and the fact's been a point of contention among developers and Apple for some time. Logically, though, there seems no compelling reason to separate said games from other apps in the Top Charts section of the App Store. This area reflects nothing more than simple statistical truth (which is, incidentally, the entirety of its purpose). Furthermore, the number of games making the list is far from atypically disproportionate when considering the real-world popularity of the category against all others. By Ouriel's own count, exactly 60 percent (15) of the top 25 apps are games. That jibes perfectly with last year's statistical breakdown, where 58 percent of all apps fell under the "Games" category. And games numbers should be up year-over-year, so the category may actually be under-represented by the current top 25. Of course, there's more to Ouriel's argument.

Apple would make a great service to the developers’ community but also to gamers, if, like music, movies, books, they created a separate store with its own sub categories... Games have their own nervous center (the Game center), their key monetization path (in app, which is mostly used by games), its own user base and ecosystem...

Some good points. But ill-considered. As are similar assertions from Erica Ogg of GigaOM:

Apple has done some curation, like creating lists, to help ameliorate the [games] issue. ... For certain topics, Apple already is embracing curation around themes: Newsstand, which creates a separate place to buy digital newspapers and magazines, with a digital “shelf” for storing them. ... Apple has demonstrated it wants to be known as a place you go for games. It’s pushed the iPod touch as a gaming device through ad campaigns... So why not take it a step further and give games their own store?

Well, there are several reasons why not. Games are fundamentally different than the "similar" categories Ouriel and Ogg discuss. Songs aren't apps -- They're media purchased to be played in an app. Movies aren't apps -- They, too, are media purchased to be played in an app. iBooks aren't apps, either -- They're media purchased... You get the idea. But games are apps. They stand alone within iOS. As for Apple's Game Center, the feature is by no means an envelope for the category. Many games don't even support the service, and it's unnecessary (and inappropriate) to require parking every available title under that umbrella. Game Center isn't a store, nor was it ever intended as such. Rather, it's an in-house vehicle for social interaction for games that opt to enlist its services. Still, the real reason this lofty request is destined to fall on deaf ears is that Apple--time and again--has shown its favor to fall in line with metaphor. From hit-or-miss design cues to digital delivery models, iOS strives to showcase translation of the real world and its classic media. Ouriel says that, in the "Retail and the Software industry, games are not sold next to productivity software, even in Apple Stores." But such a stand misses the bigger picture almost entirely. Sure, productivity titles won't be stocked on the same shelf as the latest first-person shooter, but they will be in the same store. Just like music and movies are (or, at least, were) traditionally found under one roof. You know, like today's iTunes. And just as brick-and-mortar bookstores mainly sell books, such is the model for iBooks. (Really, the only bit of incongruity Apple's introduced is Newsstand, which--like Game Center--aggregates compatible titles and links user searches back to the App Store. One could reasonably wonder why Newsstand searches aren't logically rolled into the iBooks store, but that's a discussion for some other time.) Another separated store can only add to customer confusion. The more a system is fragmented by additional subsystems, the more troublesome it becomes for the average user to find what it is he's looking for. It's natural to look for software in a software portal, for songs in a music portal, for books in a book portal. Breaking any of these down into disconnected sub-stores would be wildly counterintuitive and, therefore, philosophically counter-Apple. The App Store's preponderance of games simply isn't an issue. And, to be perfectly honest, Apple does an excellent job separating them already. Games are in their own category, curated with lists galore, searchable and sortable by almost any criterion you'd care to use. If you want to know which other kinds of apps are their category's current best-sellers, just filter your results by popularity. It couldn't be easier. And, while there aren't any firm statistics to back the notion, it's a safe bet that the allure of games in the App Store does quite a lot more to help the discovery and sale of non-game apps than splitting the venue ever could. By focusing on the "muddled" Top Charts section alone, the critical media is working itself into a lather over a problem that doesn't exist. You can't pull out every popular genre and give it its own store. Remove games, and some other category will take its place to "drown out" the rest. Hey, if we want something to complain about, let's talk about the horde of simple-text ebooks still being allowed to be sold in the App Store. That's a real problem. [Lead image credit: textually.org]

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