While that is a noble assessment, if we look at similar industries to gaming we see that quality is rarely enough as well. Music, movies and writing have been under this model for many many years and proven that the reality is that no one really makes any money except a few at the top. They are all tournament economies at heart. VC's have come up with the pseudo intellectual term "Network Effect" but really its just the luck of a hit. Sometimes the Beatles do appear, but mostly its bands that have a couple years of success only to disappear. Part of that is because there is just soooo much competition. The signal to noise ratio is insane. This is because people create music, movies, art and now games and applications for the love of it. So even when sane economic incentives dry up there are still far too many submissions which makes any type of sustainable living still possible but highly unrealistic.
in fact, i kind of cheated and skirted this issue with the flexible definition of "quality". for example, the difference between comparing your (not yours personally, but the royal "your") game with last year hits papers please vs. next year's presumed hit ori. quality in that case is relevant to the competition at the time a game is published.
moving goal posts ftw!
however, i believe this still holds up: make a quality game where quality is present-competition quality, not last-year-competition quality. but that bar just gets higher and higher every year that goes by.
in other words, it's pretty obvious this guy shouldn't be spending $100k making hobby games and then blaming their failure on the terribleness of the app store. that's just silly.
