I know we say this ever year, but we keep doing that because it continues to be true: 2018 was an incredible year for iOS gaming. So many amazing games came out this year that just scrolling through our Game of the Week posts is a ridiculous walk down memory lane that even had us saying, “Wait, that game came out this year"" While the trend this year in the post-Flappy Bird world we live in continues to trend towards ad-based microgames, we still saw more great premium games hit the App Store than we even had the bandwidth to review. 2019, by all accounts, should be even better.
That is, if TouchArcade still exists. It’s pretty wild that whenever you hear about mobile games in the news, it’s often as part of the same sentence about how they’re breaking records with more players, more profits, and more people getting involved in an industry that’s somehow still exploding. Unfortunately, after ten years of hard work there just doesn’t seem to be a business model that works for third party editorial to survive in the booming economy of mobile games. Last year we posted about our dwindling Patreon support, and supplemented that by kicking off encouraging our community to do their Amazon shopping through toucharcade.com/amazon. That more or less stopped the bleeding, as we made a considerable amount from the App Store affiliate program, where Apple paid us a very small cut of all the games that were purchased through TouchArcade link...