Silverfish MAX - (by Chaotic Box)

[ChaoticBox]

Originally Posted by Delusionaltool

im glad to see silverfish is still kicking ass, when you first released it you were down a bit cause sales were not the best, it looks like it got much better for you

Oh, sales still suck - worse than ever - I just got tired of complaining

[LordGek]

I just noticed that the game is NEARLY retina enabled! Frank described it as not being "truly" retina enabled but, dang, you could have fooled me as all of the text looks razor sharp and the game's primary graphics are so retro that, if there is any fuzziness with them, you'd swear it was intentional.

[ChaoticBox]

Originally Posted by LordGek

I just noticed that the game is NEARLY retina enabled! Frank described it as not being "truly" retina enabled but, dang, you could have fooled me as all of the text looks razor sharp and the game's primary graphics are so retro that, if there is any fuzziness with them, you'd swear it was intentional.

YES. Each texture is scaled using a filter appropriate for that art - keeping sharp stuff sharp and glowly stuff glowy

Stopped by to note that new updates for Silverfish MAX and Silverfish are now available. These fix some minor iOS 6 related bugs, have better Game Center & iCade support, and Silverfish now supports iPhone 5/5th gen iPod 4" screens.

[PixyJunket]

I just wanted to pop in and say thanks for the continued support.

I'm about to get an iPad and Silverfish Max will be one of the first purchases I make for it.

Are you ever considering adding more achievements to the game? You're only using 390 points!

[ChaoticBox]

Originally Posted by PixyJunket

Are you ever considering adding more achievements to the game? You're only using 390 points!

Silverfish first shipped with 3 modes back in 2010 and I had plans to add another 3 (or more) modes in updates depending on how well it was selling. So, I left some room in the achievements to accommodate those potential future modes. Fast forward a bit and it now has 4 modes, but economically even that 4th mode didn't make much sense For right now it's in maintenance mode while I focus on new games and *sigh* client work.

[masvil]

Originally Posted by ChaoticBox

depending on how well it was selling.

Can you please reveal how many Silverfish and Silverfish Max copies did you sell until now? There are 13.848 players on Game Center, but it's not enought to evaluate.

[ChaoticBox]

Originally Posted by masvil

Can you please reveal how many Silverfish and Silverfish Max copies did you sell until now? There are 13.848 players on Game Center, but it's not enought to evaluate.

Including yesterday's 2 sales:
Silverfish: 10,381
Silverfish MAX: 4,237 (Thank you, Apple feature)

The leaderboards are not shared between the two games, so I'll let you decide how the iPhone version has more GC scores than paying customers

Now I know some folks will look at those numbers and think "YOU GREEDY BASTARD!" - a quote literally taken from an iTunes review, but I digress - Let's break this down...

Silverfish development began end of November 2008, and continued on-and-off in 2-3 month spurts over the next two years, till the first release in November 2010. During that time I also did some client work, released flOOid (the result of a couple weeks I took off Silverfish to polish up the fluid fx that would ultimately be folded back into Silverfish), and spent nearly 5 months on Pollywog, which was a spectacular flop.

Conservative estimate is around 9 months work went into Silverfish v1.0. Another couple months went into the next few updates (Haste mode, d-pad controls, iOS 4 backgrounding) plus a couple weeks for the short-lived Silverfish Free. Silverfish MAX was about 3 weeks work for the initial release. So not including all the time spent on marketing I had put nearly a year's work into this thing already. Silverfish MAX introduced iCade support, and since then I've added a button control scheme, Joypad support, retina updates, plus a bunch of bug fixes/improvements for iOS 5 and now for iOS 6. I really haven't kept track of my time on these later updates, but it's not insignificant.

As you might imagine, the bulk of the combined 14,618 sales happened during the various 99¢ promos, but I did average a bit more than the typical 70¢ cut per sale due to the $1.99 (and occasional $2.99) regular pricing. It's hard to say how much money that actually translates into because exchange rates haven't exactly been stable these past few years, but $15K CAD is probably in the right range.

tl;dr: $15K CAD return on 1 year+ work. Before tax, excluding external costs and time - marketing, customer support, hardware/software updates, Apple fees, etc.

The Silverfish games now sell a steady 5-10 copies a week combined.

You asked

[slewis7]

With so many stories like this of excellent games having poor sales, how does one explain the continued onslaught of new IOS games being published?

[ChaoticBox]

Originally Posted by slewis7

With so many stories like this of excellent games having poor sales, how does one explain the continued onslaught of new IOS games being published?

I think it's just human nature to believe you'll be one of the lucky ones - if gambling and lotteries are any indication There's also a shit ton of shovelware and straight up scams that add to the noise, but there are a lot of folks that just like making games

Also, until very recently the jackpot stories got far more coverage. There seems to be a lot of general Apple & iOS bashing these days, so developer sob stories are apparently in vogue now. Gasketball, Outwitters & a perhaps pre-mature Punch Quest article come to mind.

[Zevious Zoquis]

those are some discouraging numbers there. I'm not too surprised though becuase I've played quite a few games that were really fun and yet only had a few hundred people on the leaderboards. I mean even if it only spent a couple months in development I'd really think the devs of a good game deserve to see 15 or 20 grand in take-home at least...