MeWare for Sale: Developer's Approaches to Serious Mobile Music Games

This study examines the design and business orientation of serious mobile music games on the iOS App Store, using Sink's MeWare, ThemWare, and UsWare typology to assess how developers conceptualized their users. The analysis centers on 175 games selected from 313 candidates, all rated 4+, with most supporting both iPhone and iPad and drawn from 74 unique developers. A handful of prolific publishers account for a notable share of the catalogue, most prominently AtPlayMusic with 23 titles, indicating a market shaped by a few concentrated sources of supply.

The findings point to limited ongoing developer investment. Over half of the games (about 54 percent) are classified as inactive, with no updates in six months, and music games generally receive fewer updates than comparable non-music games. Focusing on 124 games, the authors find that most are paid apps priced low, with a median around $2.49 AUD, updated infrequently, built around single-profile and single-device data management, and carrying few user reviews, with a median of four.

From these patterns the authors conclude that the majority of developers appear to treat these games as afterthoughts or as products built for personal use, which they characterize as MeWare. A smaller subset of more actively maintained, higher-priced, and better-reviewed titles from established developers appears to be pursued as a genuine income source, which the authors classify as ThemWare. The study thus portrays a bifurcated market in which sustained commercial effort is concentrated in a minority of products, while the broader catalogue reflects personal or secondary motivations.