It seems that there are always Indie Horror stories in the developers forums, and it is known that many of the successful games are made by high profile large game studios. But I have never really read any posts here from Indies that did well, and would serve as an inspiration of Indies to not lose all hope. I really think that part of this is due to human nature of not wanting to boast, and also because some developers probably want to keep their success hidden due to business tactics, but I was wondering, is it really that bad for developers as seems to be from reading this forum. Have any of you actually succeeded? Can Indies do well, and make at least what they expected, or are there some of you that made alot more than you expected? It would be nice to hear if there are some of you that have done well, and other Indies could use this as inspiration. There must be some success stories out there with the huge number of people that have idevices. Anyway, just curious, but there must be a way to make it in this market for the smaller Indie developers. Right?
We are doing well. iLifeTouch.com started less than 2 years ago. 1 new iMac 1 Programmer parttime ( supplied food) now Nice offices 20 systems staff of 14 and growing Profitable which allows for more growth We are closing in on 90 OSX Apps and 20 IOS Apps We don't have a single app that sells more than 100 $ a day Total investment was 40 000 $ Our approach with our developers " Build what ever the f*** you want but if we can't pay your pay check don't complain to us about it. Are we happy. YES Future: Stay in the black long enough to hit the mother load with a single app.
Actually, if people are looking for a business model, making lots of smaller apps to generate income might be the future instead of the "hit the big one". Sure we'd all love to catch the whale but, many at a little can be just the same as one at a lot.
There are a couple of success stories I have read. There is a guy who develops childrens apps and makes around $4000 a month. He is a indie developer using Corona SDK mostly but think he is now moving to another framework. There is the guy behind The Lost City (Joe Kaufmann), think he has made a huge amount from his graphic adventure games. Was number 1 in the charts for a long time. There are probably more who don't want to shout about it as someone might just copy what they do. Dave
Rome wasn't built in a day I guess... We're closing in on our 6th month of business. We have one game and one app out with another game to be released any day now (pending AppStore approval). Our Game Deadstorm has over 6,000 downloads which isn't too shabby for our first game. It is mostly social media networking and building a local following which got us to those numbers. Nothing we can quit our job off of just yet but we have a ton of game ideas which is always a good thing so we'll be busy for a while. Jumped into using Unity3D exclusively as well. Love it! BlaqkSheep.com is our site and we recently started up a Dev Blog so if you are a programmer/game dev then check it out. How's everyone else doing?
joe kaufman made a MILLION DOLLARS! :O http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/19/heres-how-you-become-an-app-store-millionaire-interview/ meanwhile i'm paddling along. 4 apps out total since june 2012, enough sales for me to keep going making apps. certainly not a millionaire............yet fwiw i did 3 of the apps by myself and the 4th with another developer- highly recommend pairing up, our app was tons of fun to make and we're finishing up a 2nd collaboration now. it's a great process- you each bring some skills to the table that the other might not have yet, it's a great learning experience.
Depends what you call a success For an indie dev is being successful just enough to survive? I think its a good start, personally. Our starting goal was just to break even and be able to live... anyway, with us, we're just 4 brothers who started N.Y.Zombies as a side project 3 years ago. It did well enough to make a second game, Bug Heroes... that did pretty well, to a point where the 4 of us were making enough to live, so we hit our goal by our second game. Our game plan of making kind of mixed games, geared more towards the middle gamer crowd seemed to be working (while many others were doing casual games). We took a risk, quit our day jobs, and went at it full time. The next year (2012), we were all psyched, ready to rock out the best year ever. We got an office in downtown Raleigh, and were pumped. Instead we had the worst. year. ever. Thankfully we had all saved up a bunch of extra cheese, because we were constantly drawing from those savings every month, and it became a real question whether we could keep doing this. (Lesson learned, for us at least - we will never make a casual game again Its easy to get fooled and misguided by what everyone else is doing... its dangerous to check out the top of the charts, see all those casual and freemium titles, and then try to emulate them... my word of warning for new developers... stick to what you WANT to make). Anyway, we went back to our roots with N.Y.Zombies 2, a game with a pretty large following for the original. It was enough to give us a little boost, but it was short lived. After taking 12 months to release 2 casual games that flopped, we decided to employ a different strategy. We were going back to our roots of more core games, and we were going to start developing several projects at once (we have the fortune of having many multifaceted people here, so many of our latest games are mostly developed by 1-3 people at any one time, with dev times of about 2-4 months). We also decided we were going to focus on efficiency (mind you, efficiency does NOT mean putting out crap quickly... it means putting out the same, high quality work in a fraction of the time. imo, in a fast moving industry like this one, I think efficiency may be one of the most important factors in development. I can't help but feel sorry seeing people put years of work into games that release and fail...). We also were going to be more diligent about what features did and didn't have to make it into launch, instead of just throwing in every new feature and mode that we thought would be cool... again, this doesn't mean putting out an unfinished product, it means being smart about how much is too much for an initial launch in the mobile market! Anyway, Heroes and Castles was our first game of 2013 (dev time of about 2.5 months with ~2-3 people working on it), and that's when things changed for us. We got a feature, the game was an interesting new mix of gameplay, and it was a game for gamers - what we had decided to go back to making. I guess things just clicked with people, because in a few days it hit the #18 game in the US, and #58 top grossing - needless to say we were all really surprised that a game like this - an unknown, more serious game this challenging - was able to have that kind of success. Even not very "gamery" people seemed to be loving it! Lets just say that H&C took a LOT of pressure off of us for the rest of this year, and it continues to hover around the 200's in games, doing very well for us We're about to roll out our next game, Block Fortress in another week and a half, and are excited to see how that goes! Moral of the story is, keep going for it. The blessing and curse of the App Store is "you never know!" With every new game you have a completely new chance. But the other thing is, be objective about your work (is it good or not - you can only get better if you're honest with yourself). Go out there and meet people in the industry. Go to conventions and meet the press. Do everything in your power to get your game out there (even if it looks like its not making a difference). Also make sure to have some kind of hook for every game... make sure you've got something interesting to talk about with your game... how will it stand out from the rest? Don't just make a game for the sake of making a game... Anyway, our story certainly isn't over yet. This is our first real taste of success after 3 years, and we don't know how long it will last - whether it will grow, or if this is just a one time, lucky thing. But we're going to stick with our plan, keep pumping out quality, unique titles as efficiently as possible (again - without sacrificing quality ), and make sure that our fans don't have time to stop talking about our new releases!
Awesome man. This is a great post. You should put this in a blog or up on gamasutra. I think it's definitely a dream for most of us here to be able tell a similar story . I hope you guys have continued success, and I'm sure of it with your upcoming fortress game.
Foursaken Media, Thanks for taking out the time to post your viewpoints, and even though I haven't played as much as your game as I would have liked, I did buy it, and it is great. What has impressed me the most though is your friendly demeanor, and your ability to gain a big following on Toucharcade from a lot of the senior regulars. This is nice to see, and I supported and bought your games, just cause of that. But yeah, maybe you are right, the reality isn't really getting rich, it is having the ability to make a comfortable living at it, so the following games can be even more successful and hopefully hit the jackpot. With so many thousands of apps and developers nowadays, it is interesting to me, what makes a game and developer successful, the hope and inspiration for any of us here to succeed, and to see if there is actually light out of the end of the ios tunnel. Thanks again, I will try to play some Heroes and Castles tonight. Last time I played multiplayer online with Ninjackid, he laughed at me.... Sigh....
Our Tap Studio games are still going pretty strong after 3 years, 5 million downloads and nearly 400,000 taps in the online Tap Vault. Just a couple of guys in our spare time. No motherload yet though.
Daredevil Dave was my first commercial game. Back in 2010 it hit #8 in the App Store. I soon quit my day job (which sucked anyways) and have been working on the sequel, as well as some side projects, ever since. Things are different in the App Store now. Daredevil Dave 2 is going to be a different kind of launch, with much different strategies than the first game. In my mind I've succeeded, with much room for improvement. My financial life was a mess until the game went on sale. Dave did way better than I ever expected and it changed my life in a huge way. It attracted a lot of attention too which has opened a few doors for me. I'm not rich, but I'm doing okay, and the future looks promising. FWIW, I got my "start" here at Toucharcade in these forums. I'd learned of a program called Unity hehe and heard it would have iPhone support soon. A year later my first game was done. One word of advice: don't take 3 years to do a sequel.
My first iOS game, Pocket Ninjas, has managed to keep me self employed and pay my bills for the past year so I guess that's a success here's a write up from when it really took off this past April - http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-05-01-pocket-ninjas-hits-500k-downloads-in-5-days Its still steadily bringing me $100-$200/day through IAPs and Ad revenue.
