All-In-One Games

the one with the 72 games has very underdeveloped games

this is the best selling and perhaps best quality example http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/all-in-1-gamebox/id330759313?mt=8

 

All the ones I've downloaded have been pure crap, except for the Trinity Gamebox that jak56 mentioned - which is a decent sized pile of mediocre games.

 

exactly what he said. the games are ok-ish, and some are actually quite enjoyable! (prison break or whatever- a really nice 'Run!' like game)

they take up quite a lot of space though!

 

Game Packs..

We'll be adding the quality you crave to these types of application packs soon.

In most cases, the packs like this we've seen in the past have all been made up of apps from a single company. That makes the integration much easier. However, we've developed a platform that allows developers to easily integrate with our framework, giving each app it's own sandbox to run in.

We'll be announcing our first pack very soon, and these won't be simple j2me ports, but rather games you've seen favorably reviewed on this very site.

 

all in all its bad product design.

i bought all-in-one gambox, only to find jailbreaker was the best game on there -- i didn't play any others more than 5 minutes.

So, now when I want to play jailbreaker I have to run two apps to get to one. so its kind of inconvenient.

The only benefit is it makes it easier for customers to decide on the purchase or not, because they are getting so much for so little. Once they get into it though, if there are a few apps in the bundle that they don't like, it is now representing your product. In the end, you can't expect a 5 star rating.

Personally, slipster, I think if you are going to have all these "great quality" apps, you can make more money by selling them separately. The reason all-in-ones are profitable is because without being in a bundle they would make close to no money off them.

 

I'd say that's true for many of the bundles we see now, but not in the future. Simply having a great game doesn't get you much in the app store anymore. When we started looking at this idea, we were actually quite shocked by the quality of the games we were able to get. To me, this says very sad things about the app store as a development platform for indi developers.

The fact is that there are *maybe* a thousand apps selling more than a hand full of copies a day at any given time on the app store. If your not on a top-100 list and your not being featured, you simply are not selling many copies. Of those, a few hundred are games at most. And of those, only a few dozen are selling enough to pay for a meager living. And of those, a very small few are raking in a fortune.

So if we believe what your saying, then you are arguing that there are only a few dozen games worth having on the platform, and everything else is of mediocre quality. I don't buy that. Just look back 20 or 30 pages on this site and you'll see tons of good games that I can guarantee aren't selling anymore. This doesn't make them bad games, this makes them games that are invisible for all intensive purposes.

 

Overall not a bad idea, but with the option of DLC a developer can breath new life into his app himself. It seems to work, as it got "The Creeps" a "What´s hot" spot after all.

 

^ true, but when The Creeps first came out, it was featured prominently for a long while. It had it's own artwork background on iTunes too, so it's followers and popularity were over a year in the making.

 

Color me shocked that Apple hasn't feature you before! I'd imagine you have a pretty solid userbase to work from; can I ask what % of your users are responding to DLC?

 

That makes more sense. The Creeps also came out in a time when there was a small trickle of games, compared to the raging torrent we see now.

 

I´m not the developer, i took "The Creeps" as a recent example, as it just got featured.

 

On the surface, the all-in-one scheme looks like a good idea. However I think we need to look at how it will affect the overall industry.

Our games are already devalued, and virtually disposable through Apples viewpoint. They really don't care if your game falls completely out of ranking, because they know two things: Another App will take your Apps place, and there is a certain threshold of purchases that are obtained on any given day.

Every time we drop our price to $0.99, we devalue ourselves further. Every time our app goes FREE for a day, we devalue ourselves further. Every time we add more value at the same price ($0.99) we devalue ourselves further.

The single biggest mistake I made was to enter Flickitty at $0.99. This made Flickitty look like a bargain at the time, but at the same time, it devalued many other $0.99 games. I would have been better off entering at $1.99 or $2.99 in order to remain on a tier with my peers. I'm not saying that Flickitty is awesome, and worth more than anyone else' game- what I am saying is that if your game is currently sitting at a $0.99 price point, ask yourself 'why'. Is it really only worth the very lowest tier?

I didn't know any better, and I didn't know its effects.

For the last month, Flickitty as been at $1.99. Although daily sales are almost non-existent, they haven't dropped. I have actually DOUBLED my daily income by increasing the price.

How much more can we offer before we devalue ourselves into oblivion? If Apple suddenly introduced a new tier at $0.10, how many developers do you think would jump on board? A lot, I am guessing. We have actually devalued ourselves to that point.

By offering a bundle at $0.99, or $1.99, or $2.99, you are doing exactly that. Reducing the individual price of a game to $0.10.

Overall, I really, really, REALLY hope that I am wrong.

I think there are alternative ways to make a decent profit in the App Store, that doesn't include devaluing the entire industry, but we need to work on it together.

 

And nothing anyone here is going to do is fundamentally going to change that, unfortunately.

I agree, in general, many games are massively undervalued, and I think the free day is just the fad of the moment. I think many people are learning that unless going free has another revenue model, it doesn't get you much.

Thing is, many of the developers in the app store come from another market. One where free is the base price, and the idea of charging for content is still very new. The flash market. So to many of them, this seems like a much more viable opportunity.

Really all it did was make you look not confident in your application. People are very illogical about pricing; they see something expensive and assume it must be worth more than something cheap, even if it's not. When you set your app to 99c, you're saying "It's barely worth money", which is sad. When you set it to something higher, your saying "My app is worth it".

Oddly enough the same logic can extend in the other direction. The 22-in-1 app already in the store does this, as it seems like a 'deal', even if you likely only play one of the games.

Some of our developers report the same thing.

While I don't disagree with this logic, there are other effects at work to consider. First off, the sales feedback loop of getting into the top 25 or top 10 apps is so great as too mitigate all other goals. If an app gets into that position for any reasonable length of time, it stands to make far more than 10 apps just breaking the top 100, even after a royalty split. As long as apple keeps promoting top sellers and top money makers, the feedback loop created will obliterate all other goals. Getting into that list and staying there is the ONLY thing that matters from a profit perspective.

With that in mind, when bundled you have the reputation and marketing efforts (past or current) of many different developers working together. From a consumer perspective, if I was interested in one of the games already and can get the others for free/cheap, it seems like a no brainer. For instance, I know about Flickitty from TA, checked the app out when it was featured, but never purchased it. There were likely a dozen other interesting apps competing for my attention that day as well, and I bought one of the others ones. Like many apps, it left my radar fairly quickly.

However, if I saw an app bundle that had Flickitty and several other games I'd thought about buying, it'd be an attractive offer. The more of those games that seemed interesting, or I knew from past views, the more likely I'd be to buy. The reality is that spending $2 on a game isn't going to make any difference to my bottom line; I could easily buy all of them separate as I make a decent living; but I'd never go back and find those apps; the time has passed.

And if that lure brings the bundle into the top-25, well, the developers of the bundle all win. In the end, like everything else, it's just another way to potentially vault our work into the profitable sections of the app store.

 

While I don't disagree with this logic, there are other effects at work to consider. First off, the sales feedback loop of getting into the top 25 or top 10 apps is so great as too mitigate all other goals. If an app gets into that position for any reasonable length of time, it stands to make far more than 10 apps just breaking the top 100, even after a royalty split. As long as apple keeps promoting top sellers and top money makers, the feedback loop created will obliterate all other goals. Getting into that list and staying there is the ONLY thing that matters from a profit perspective.

With that in mind, when bundled you have the reputation and marketing efforts (past or current) of many different developers working together. From a consumer perspective, if I was interested in one of the games already and can get the others for free/cheap, it seems like a no brainer. For instance, I know about Flickitty from TA, checked the app out when it was featured, but never purchased it. There were likely a dozen other interesting apps competing for my attention that day as well, and I bought one of the others ones. Like many apps, it left my radar fairly quickly.

However, if I saw an app bundle that had Flickitty and several other games I'd thought about buying, it'd be an attractive offer. The more of those games that seemed interesting, or I knew from past views, the more likely I'd be to buy. The reality is that spending $2 on a game isn't going to make any difference to my bottom line; I could easily buy all of them separate as I make a decent living; but I'd never go back and find those apps; the time has passed.

And if that lure brings the bundle into the top-25, well, the developers of the bundle all win. In the end, like everything else, it's just another way to potentially vault our work into the profitable sections of the app store.[/QUOTE]

I completely agree, and this had actually entered my mind when I wrote my original post but I chose to leave it out for one reason: This is easy to one-up.

The competitor has 25 Apps? I'll get 30. Eventually we'll have 100 quality apps in one, at a hefty download and a dirt cheap price. Admittedly, this is simply designed for the short term and doesn't fix anything.

I might propose a different option that is probably impossible to pull off:

What if the games were set up Buffet Style? For $5, you can choose ANY Ten games from our catalog of 100 games, and choose the games at your leisure. This would get the games that are high profile the profits that they deserve, and provide the lesser titles with exposure they need.

This would essentially be a store within the App Store. A single app could actually appear in several of these stores, much like a Coca~Cola appears in convenience stores, Wal-Mart or a vending machine.

 

That is a great idea. However, it does sound a bit crazy. But then again, crazy is always good.

 

while this sounds good - you still need to deal with the fact that there is one central payment point; that all developers must put trust in to around getting paid from. secondly; what if one developer feels his app is worth more than an equal cut of the game? i saw this done a while ago with four-five indie developers here on touch arcade; maybe they can report on their success?

the 75 all-in-1 game application is a joke; lots of very bad reviews - its all done by the same group, so, merging all the games into one isn't complex. i also did this with GW Series; merging all the GW xxx games into a single application - easy to do when you have all the source code.

 

its an interesting discussion here and an interesting read

a few more points I would like to add about the pricing:
1) I absolutely agree with Flickitty that going for 0.99 is being cheap. But at the same time - there's very, very little room to go up. for 2.99 you can already find some discounted games by big developers, for 4.99 you can get really BIG games (like Civilization). heck, some of the Gameloft's things are for 0.99... the whole market has a very flat pricing scheme - when you go to Steam new "big" games are offered for 40-60$, indie games are for 5-10-15. that's a big, big difference. while looked at by the percentage they seem similar, there is a big difference between paying 2-3$ extra for a game coming from a large developer (on iTunes) and paying 20-40$ extra on Steam

2) After one year and a half AppStore is still just one giant lottery. Im absolutely sure that each and every one of us developers had a moment when he/she was looking at the charts and saw some small app occupying the number #1 spot, wondering how is that even possible. you spend weeks or months making and polishing your app, then it goes unnoticed. yeah, you have a few thousand players, they write nice reviews, game is appreciated but its not earning. at the same time many games that reached top spots were really small, many had negative opinions, but they earned tons of cash. which makes you wonder - is there any, and I mean ANY sure way to make a game that would actually earn for itself ?

3) Which brings me to the point - you cant fight Apple (whose attitude certainly doesn't help indies), so you try to exploit the rules, try to experiment, try do do new things. and bundling games is another of a long series of such experiments. will it work ? I hope the one from StuffedTurkey will, we have our game in there after all

 

I am also interrested about the technical part of the subject but have no clue...