Hi everyone: I launched a survey today to try to gather some data about what the iOS games market looks like. I've been building games for iOS for over 3 years and I keep reading articles that speculated on "average" iOS game revenue, while no one talks about things like "median" and "standard deviation". Given that most of us are indies and don't have the resources to hire large market research firms, I thought I'd put together a survey and share the results publicly. Please check out my blog post on the subject and take the survey, if you're making iOS games. I'll be posting the results next week to share with the iOS game dev community. Blog post: iOS Game Revenue Survey Direct survey link: Survey Monkey Please help spread the word however you can! Even if you only have one game that made $17, please fill it out. The more people we have take the survey, the more representative and useful the data will be. Thanks! Owen
Hey Owen, Great to see indies giving back to the community. I think it would also be interesting to get info on the following from your results: If the devs are full timers Rankings of games How much time is spent on projects How much money is spent on projects How much of this time/money is spent on dev vs marketing
I am asking whether respondents are full-time, part-time, etc, so that data should be available. I'm not asking any of the other questions, so I won't be able to draw any conclusions there. The original draft of the survey had a lot more questions, like you're asking. However, in talking to several people who have run surveys before, everyone's advice was the same: keep it as simple and short as possible to get the important data. The goal is to get a lot of people taking the survey, and the longer it gets, the fewer people complete it. So I had to make some trade-offs, unfortunately. Hopefully we'll still get some useful data out of it. Owen
Well I for one and definitely looking forward to seeing the results Have many people filled out the survey so far?
Was going to do the survey until I realized that we haven't released our first game yet.. ha. Just about to release in a couple of weeks but can't wait to see what this survey says.
Hi everyone: The survey closes on Monday at noon, EDT! Please take a minute to fill it out, if you haven't already. Thanks! Blog post: iOS Game Revenue Survey Direct survey link: Survey Monkey Owen
The iOS Game Revenue Survey closes today at noon EDT! Last chance to get your numbers in! http://bit.ly/iossurvey Owen
I put our numbers in. I hope you get a lot of responses so it can be meaningful. You may want to do a followup survey which you leave up for longer though...
The survey is very close to 250 responses, so hopefully the numbers will have some value. I'm not quite sure how much value there would be in leaving the survey up for longer, though. There has definitely been a steady decline in the number of people taking the survey each day. We were at 200 responses by the 3rd day, and there's only been 15 in the last 24 hours. My guess is you wouldn't see many more responses even if you left it up for a month...but if someone wants to try, I say go for it. Owen
This is a brilliant idea, and it's great you've had ~250 responses. Given it is completely anonymous not only will people be honest about their earnings but you will hopefully get a fairly typical spread of developers filling it out. I think if the media showed more of what an average iOS developer made (rather than only ever highlighting earnings of some recent #1 hit game) there would be less animosity from some gamers who do seem to often resent having to pay for apps, and particularly for extra content via IAP. Will be really interesting to see your findings.
The survey is now closed! Thanks to everyone who participated. I'm going to start going over the data now, and I hope to have the results written up in the next day or two. It will all be posted on my blog here: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/ I'll post a link to these forums when it's ready. Owen
