11,414 Reasons There Are Too Many iPhone Games

11,414 Reasons There Are Too Many iPhone Games

This pocketgamer chart — showing how many games are submitted to Apple for release on the App Store every month — was mentioned in a chat at GDC earlier today, and it’s been dropping jaws pretty much everywhere it’s been passed around since.

It shows that last month (February 2015), 11,414 games were submitted to Apple for release. The month before, there were 12,035, and the month before that, 13,002.

Hundreds of games a day. Thousands of games a month. Hundreds of thousands a year. While not all of them reach the store — many will be derailed for being inappropriate, broken or scams — that’s still an obscene amount of content being pushed towards the store. No wonder Apple’s track-record at monitoring the games actually reaching it is so patchy.

People got huffy last year when it was revealed Steam’s releases were being tallied in the hundreds, over a course of months. And that’s just a fraction of what Apple is facing!

As a consumer, you probably don’t even notice this. You fire up the App Store, you’re greeted with Apple’s mix of curated and charted content, and you probably make your purchasing decisions based solely on this info.

What you don’t notice, though, is what’s missing from those pages, and this is also the thing that will be crippling devs not lucky enough to be promoted by Apple on the store’s front page.

What are the chances of an unheralded, quality game emerging from that maelstrom of iOS garbage and actually getting noticed by people?

They’re approaching “win the lottery” odds. And this chart isn’t even counting Google Play…


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