Being successful on the App Store feels like a lottery says Tower Studios' Jon Hare

Age provides an opportunity for the more experienced members of society to look back through tinted spectacles, occasionally dropping a tear into their warm beer.

Still, when it comes to game development, those who have experienced success in the past can also provide an interesting angle on the state of the current business.

This seems to be the reason behind the release to the media of the thoughts of Jon Hare, once of Sensible Soccer fame, and now running his digital outfit Tower Studios.

"On the surface it would appear that today's developers have similar opportunities to those in the Commodore 64 and Amiga eras," he says.

"However, from a business perspective the landscape is very different. It is now increasingly hard for a successful, but non-corporate company to run a sensible and prudent creative business at a time where many consumers will only play-for-free, and the big hitting publishers use their occasionally loss leading marketing budgets to drown out the voices of the competition."

Hare's view of the digital download markets such as Apple App Store or PlayStation Network is that it now requires luck and timing, as well as talent and hard work to succeed.

"For every Angry Birds, another 999 games are vanishing in the void. 999/1 odds are OK for youngsters with nothing to lose, but not for people who are a bit older, and with a bit more to risk," he explains.

"Due to the current processes that dictate success on the App Store and other equivalent digital distribution mechanisms, being successful feels like a lottery."

So what's the solution?

One idea Hare raises is for similar companies to work together in a collaborative fashion to provide PR, marketing and monetisation strategies, with their bulk enabling them to work more closely with Apple and other industry partners.

"These days it seems that making great games is the easy part; it is generating enough publicity and getting consumers to put their hand in their pocket for something that is not mainstream that is the challenge," he ends.

And for the record, Tower is releasing Speedball 2 Evolution, a modern reworking of the classic Bitmap Brothers game on iOS and PSP Minis in early 2011.