I think there was more low hanging fruit. In 1993 or so it might have been possible to

When an easy way to make money is discovered, people flock to it, and it quickly becomes a more difficult way to make money.

Early adopters take a risk. They invest time and money and they're risk that the items will fail. They took a risk, and for those early adopters it happened to pay of spectacularly. People noticed, and flooded the market. Today there is still a huge risk, just a different risk of obscurity rather than a risk of the device not becoming popular.

There have been many such places where early adopters succeed. Early adopters in ebooks, who had books even when they were high risk, rode a wave to great profits even when their books were poor quality. Franchise restaurants in the 1960s took a risk on building businesses of unknown popularity and many became millionaires. In the 1990s a few groups took risks and made online businesses before the WWW was even a thing people knew, and some succeeded spectacularly, others wanted to repeat the success and flooded the market with a dot-com bubble.

Look around you, there are opportunities everywhere if you take a risk. They will require an initial investment. You may or may not succeed. If you succeed spectacularly you will find your previously untapped market flooded with people trying to imitate your success.

When an easy way to make money is discovered, people flock to it, and it quickly becomes a more difficult way to make money.

The easiest way (most easily grafted into any kind of game with minimum effort) is to build your game to support adds and have it be completely free, then, as an in-app-purchase, offer an item that disables adds and sell it for $1. Crackers will even remove the adds, probably, but usually people will just take the official free version with adds rather than risk whatever other malware a cracked copy might contain.

Less scrupulous publishers hire shadowy firms to inflate their initial download numbers so that they can raise into the public's conciousness, in hopes of cracking the top-10 list where the real money is.

I have 4 apps on the google play store, I'm not sure how much money I would make because they are all free, but I can tell you about how many downloads I'm getting.
Without any advertising my most popular app has had about 450 downloads in 7 months, In total all my apps have around 700 downloads.

Also Android has an "apk" issue.

Unduli, on 04 Oct 2014 - 04:16 AM, said:
Also Android has an "apk" issue.

I didn't get it....
what u meant by it?

APK can sounds like EPIC

ot too sure about that but I think there was more low hanging fruit. In 1993 or so it might have been possible to monetise a game on a platform like the Amiga for about €50 or something whereas now everyone and their grandmother is an App developer, free apps of course because it is hard to still sell one for even $.99

I don't think it was easier.

Back then, getting the equipment to develop was much harder. We didn't have the internet to learn how to make games, so we needed books etc.

I recommend listening to some of John Carmack's words on the days of Wolfenstein 3D actually for this. You'll notice that those that ended up developing games back then were taking huge risks (such as a lawsuit that would take over a decade to settle!).

It is easier to make games now, which means there are more games, but it doesn't go to say there wasn't any volume of luck back then, or that great titles didn't make it. It was a challenge then, and it is a challenge now!

An interesting dynamic is that the barriers to entry -- equipment, know-how, reach -- have been pushed down so far, especially where people begin. All you need is a PC, which you probably already have, a mobile device which you might already have, and $100 to get your app on the store. Knowlege is freely available if you have the time and ability to grok it. The rest is your own creativity and gumption.

The result is that almost no one fails before they hit the market, and combined with the apps gold-rush, one could only expect to see the kind of over-saturation and market dynamics that exist today. There's no natural forces keeping those doomed to fail out at an earlier stage (to be clear, I'm not advocating that the previous Plutarchy was "better" but it definitely was different, and those that actually made it to market had a better shot at meaningful success). This leads to rather few people making money at what's become a very large but rather dysfunctional market.

So, essentially, you're saying that those that should fail along the way get to hit market and wonder why they're not making revenue?

Or is your point rather that all of the shovel ware makes it actually harder for quality games to turn up a penny?