Nice thread.
Here's my personal experience with a few hints/info:
In the last few weeks I've looked into Google Play store and android apps. Even though the game niche is highly saturated, there are so many people downloading them, so there's money to be made.
I invested in a few tools
- A wacom intrius tablet drawing tool. This is for drawing game characters and environments, and just general messing about.
- Artrage 4. For use with the intrius, to draw really unique game art quickly
- Spriter. A 2D animation program. Really fun, and can easily make character animations from artrage images
- Clickteam fusion. A drag n drop game maker. Android exporter - includes chartboost and leadbolt modules. iOS exporter. Developer upgrade.
- Joined up with Chartboost (I'm banned from Adsense and admob .. bastards!)
All in all, these cost a total of about $500. I treated them all as treats for myself, but I do have some interesting game ideas and now I can easily realise them. I also have the oppurtunity to make apps for offline businesses now too , so I'm pretty confident i'll make that money back with time.
I've got 3 or 4 apps in the store, gotten a few thousand downloads already with very little work, and cross promoting apps (easy with chartboost), and have facebook like buttons in all apps which is slowly building a following.
There are other programs out there - drag and drop type that make app dev easy, not necessarily game apps but just general apps. Whether this produces a high quality app is debatable.. but this is blackhatworld.
One plan I have is
-Make 5 game types (for example, pong type, brick type, flappy bird type, infinite runner type, helicopter in cave type)
-Make 10 sets of characters of celebrities (justin bieber, one direction, miley cyrus, etc.)
-Make 50 apps from these, all free with ads, get reviews, get downloads, get ranked, get more FB followers.
If nothing else it would be interesting to see how much this would generate. It's very scalable. Others are doing this and have 50,000 , 100,000 etc. downloads per app.