Shaun Musgrave on what the App Store was like in earlier days:
Now, I’m not going to lie, friends. Playing Ravensword: Shadowlands makes me a little sad. When this game hit, things looked really hopeful for premium, relatively high-end RPGs on iOS. The market enthusiastically supported games like these, and thus publishers were able to justify sinking greater and greater costs into them. But things were already changing as Ravensword: Shadowlands hit, and the market would soon swing in a major way.
It’s a real shame that games like this are no longer sustainable on the App Store. I’d love to see something like The Elder Scrolls making it to mobile devices, but the reality is there is no way any game developer is going to sink their money into a project like that. It seems that as iOS hardware gets better, games are getting less complex, and can only stay profitable through in-app purchases.