http://goldenhammersoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/big-mountain-snowboarding-history-and.html I wrote up a long essay about all the various things we've tried with Big Mountain Snowboarding, how long things took, and how much income each approach contributed. I thought it might be useful for other developers to see what a middle of the road app looks like. Not enough sales to live on, but better than average.
The app store model is broken when one idiot can torpedo your company by posting one bad review and having your sales drop 5x. This should never happen.
Gotta make those early customers happy. Once you have enough reviews a bad one here and there doesn't have much effect. edit: I see the wording is a little murky there. The initial sales had dropped off by then so it was more of a $30->$10 drop, which still hurt a lot.
Since it's USA only and they only have two ads available...yeah. We ask for an iAd and if that fails we ask AdMob. It's looking like each is about $5/day. I imagine it probably scales linearly with more downloads, and an app like an IM program probably brings in a lot more ad revenue.
Great post, thanks for sharing! Do you have any idea why there is such a high refund rate? Is it due to unsupported handsets? People abusing the system? Is this common occurrence on Android? cheers -marc
Hi, Appreciate your sharing of your experience with the Iphone and Android markets. Just a shame your experiences, to this point, have not been more positive. David
This is really hard to say with authority. From what I've read, you can expect anywhere from 15%-50% return rate on games. You have a 48h(?) period to return anything you buy. If I had to guess at why we're on the high end I'd say a combination of: 1) Doesn't seem to work on Droid Eris and a few other phones. 2) It's not SSX. People who want SSX will be disappointed. 3) 2 days is a lot of playtime for a game like this. 4) We didn't have a demo version for android until a couple hours ago. I see a lot of people buy it and then return it just before the time is up. One guy actually bought it, returned it before the 48 hours was up, then immediately bought it again.
Great read. FTA: I updated one of my old games from 2008 to universal and it ended up being featured on iPad N&N on the device itself. That brought in a good bump for a few weeks. So I think making your app universal doesn't mean it won't be featured. re: Android Thanks for sharing these numbers. I've been looking at the Android market for the last few weeks, but haven't taken the plunge. Definitely a growing market, but a lot of concerns like you wrote.
I hope it didn't sound completely negative. We're still doing better than most non-hits, and we now have a pretty nice cross-platform engine to make more games with.
Hi, No, did not sound completely negative but sure could have been more positive. I do not mean the tone of your piece, just the actual details of the piece. I hope your future projects, based on this experience, are more profitable for you. David
Guess I was wrong. Not doing a separate version did prevent us from showing up on the new releases list though. I look at the android port as a resume builder. Plus now that it's done it's free money on any future projects. Porting our next game to android won't take more than a week or so.
I read your post earlier today and now found the thread on TA. Great, very insightful, thanks for sharing! Just two comments: Depending on how long you use Admob you might see their optimization algorithms serve your app better ads and overall give you a higher return, happened to me on the iPhone side, took like two months to see that effect. Hope! On Android, I see a return rate of 10%-15% on my apps and that rate I can live with, I prefer a happy customer to an unhappy one, esp. if it is the app that is not working on certain devices. Anything above that, I would seriously question the return policy as such, but I think you are right on with your explanations and it might have to do with your app. Did you check out the new online crash reports that the Android market provides, might give you even more insight what goes wrong? Another good idea on Android that I know other devs were successful with, is to include a bug report/feedback form into the app, it channels the frustrated customers away from the reviews and you can include information that helps you to find problems (a true win/win). Also, for the other devs who are looking at Android, for a variety of reasons Android is centered around free versions so it's a good strategy to embrace that and do what GoldenHammer did plus release the free version first plus give the free version as much content as you can, preferably through a small number of meaningful updates. Hope you find that useful, thanks again for your post! Markus (some kids games out there on both platforms, right now working on Space Master 2, @markusn on Twitter)
Yes, that's true. If you have hundreds of reviews, then the occasional bad review no longer affects the sales as much. But for a new game from a new developer, it can be very hard to recover from that kind of event. Apple already has a review process, so they have the power to reject bad/buggy apps. Also, they could do something simple such as forwarding the bad reviews directly to the dev for a new game, and then give the dev some time to address the problems. Even for free apps, I've noticed good or bad reviews having a positive or negative effect on downloads. Unfortunately, I had a similar experience but I made a crucial business decision not to finish my racing game. Even with what I know today, I'm not optimistic I can release it and have it be profitable. If I ever finish it, it'll be for my resume, to raise the technical profile of my company, or because I just want to make a cool racing game for myself. Ad revenue doesn't scale linearly with your DAU. It would be nice if it did.
I would love for Apple to give developers a way to respond to reviews. I love the ones for Underworlds that are like: "Great game, but not as good as Diablo on the PC!"
It's actually 24 hours, not 48. I think it's that very system that stops a lot of developers creating Android versions of games, that and of course the mega-simple ease to install pirated games (drag and drop basically for those not in the know). Will read the link in the first post later, thanks for sharing your experiences, I always find articles like that a good read
If you don't mind sharing, could you comment on how you made your engine cross platform? Android is Java based while iPhone is ObjC/C/C++...
That's a big enough topic for it's own blog post, but here's the short version. 60k lines of C++, 3k lines of objective c, 3k lines of java. These are rough numbers I'd need to double check them. We also run on windows and mac. Only the bare minimum code lives in the platform layer, and the rest lives in C++. On iphone you just make a .mm file with a c++ class in it and you can call both types of functions. In java you need to set up jni calls. The android C++ code has jni calls into java for things like "give me a file handle, start playing this sound." The java has calls into C++ like "run a frame now, here's your openGL surface, here's some input information."
