@indie devs

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by bravetarget, Oct 9, 2009.

  1. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    If you are comfortable with answering these questions, please do:

    How many sales/day are you making on your #1 app?
    Did you pay anyone a salary to produce your #1 app?
    And what is the title of your #1 app?
     
  2. lynardo

    lynardo Well-Known Member

    Sep 12, 2009
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    Software developer
    Canada
    #2 lynardo, Oct 9, 2009
    Last edited: Oct 9, 2009
    My sales figure for Chalk Chain:

    (Released Sept/9/2009).

    43 units sold / 30 days @ 99cents
    Right now it's about 0/day :)

    (no feature, no staff favourite etc.)
    No salary paid out :)
     
  3. micah

    micah Well-Known Member

    Aug 24, 2009
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    game developer
    San Francisco
    Sales/day: 15 last couple days (just dropped from around 30/day)
    Don't pay anyone a salary, not even myself ...yet
    Skeleton Key
     
  4. fwish

    fwish Well-Known Member

    better than me:)

    shark's treasure,sals/day: digital number for a long time

    today,1.3 update out, and I drop to 0.99,hope it works, at least for a fews days

    pay for the art work
     
  5. WellSpentYouth

    WellSpentYouth Well-Known Member

    Jan 11, 2009
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    iPhone programmer
    App Tech Studios, USA
    Stick Escape lite has downloaded around 250,000 in the past 1-2 weeks. The full version of Stick Escape sold around 100 yesterday.

    Nope, I had an artist for Stick Escape, but I just paid him for what he did.

    Free would be Stick Escape lite and paid would be Stick Escape.
     
  6. cando

    cando Well-Known Member

    Jun 10, 2009
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    Really Interesting thread.
    To encourage devs for info, I will share the data of Zombie City with you all:

    over 18,000 Downloads
    10,000 for 0.99
    5,500 for 1.99
    2,500 FREE (app was free for a weekend to celebrate a massive promo code request queue)

    Note: the number are rounded. ;)

    We will be launching ep 2 very soon. Its been submitted to the app store :)
     
  7. EFC

    EFC Well-Known Member

    Jul 6, 2009
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    Game Developer
    Cando, well played , i would hope that $15K ish has paid your dev.
    Zombies, ninjas, pirates, monkeys, ragdoll, stickmen, aeroplanes, army all popular.

    Bravetarget Ill go one further and tell you how much it cost to make and how many units i need to sell to make back the money... as thats a far more useful set of figures for any developer imo.

    Krakatoa Jr. has sold avg 1.2 units per day over 6 weeks at 0.99
    did 1100 free for one day in week 5

    I paid $1900 for code and bought 2 - 30 day ads for $300
    factoring in my 6 weeks work at about $4800
    I needed to sell (7000 div by 0.7 ) 10000 units at 0.99 to make back dev

    zombie monkey pirate game next time lol..
    oh.. shit.. someones already done that.
     
  8. nickcaveman

    nickcaveman Well-Known Member

    Jul 8, 2009
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    illustrator and graphic-designer
    bremen/germany
    #8 nickcaveman, Oct 10, 2009
    Last edited: Oct 10, 2009
    the great lambrettinis:

    sales till now: 276 (release end july 2009)

    money spend in this project: zero (i had an iphone, the progger too. the iphone dev license was bought for other projects).

    time spend into development: a lot, but it also was fun and we learned a lot.

    money for ads
    : zero, but again a lot of time, searching websites, which maybe could like the game. but i learned a lot and it was fun again. i don`t think, that we will buy adds in the future. maybe we sell more units of the game, but so we must, because of the costs for the adds. make no sense for me.

    we will further work on the lambrettinis (when i will have time, monday is the BIG deadline for everything, i worked at the last two month) and will make a bigger game for the iphone, but we didn`t think, that we ever will earn enough money with this to live from making apps for the store.
    but we never want to (oh, but it won`t be a problem, if millions of people buy our apps. in the moment, i hate to work).

    oh, btw. our next game will have zombies in it. woooooh, big thing. no, there will be famous movie monsters in it, so maybe there will be zombies, too. but old style zombies. bluefaced. and you couldn`t kill anything in tins game.
     
  9. cando

    cando Well-Known Member

    Jun 10, 2009
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    Oh yeah, we totally paid off the the devs, since we got it developed in India and graphics was done in North America. It was cheap.

    The reason we are doing so well is not Zombies its rather because of the famous controversy that happened. Our game - Zombie School was banned by apple... it was everywhere - ABC News, PC Magazine, Tech Crunch, Digg and more ;)
    Here is a link if you like to read more. - Link
     
  10. bravetarget

    bravetarget Well-Known Member

    Sep 14, 2009
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    That will surely get some heads turning your way!

    Now, if there was only a way to trigger that intentionally....hmmmm
     
  11. championsoftware

    championsoftware Well-Known Member

    Feb 9, 2009
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    #11 championsoftware, Oct 13, 2009
    Last edited: Oct 13, 2009
    I'm glad to see people are willing to share numbers. My number one App is Lie Detector Having sold 75,000+ copies. About 15,000 at $2.99 and the rest at $0.99. There wasn't really any dev cost as I just coded it(I didn't even have an iPhone at the time so I just used the simulator). That being said it did reach #7 Top Paid Entertainment so that helped a lot.

    My new game Stunt Driver(http://www.championsoft.com/stuntdriver) on the other hand cost $10,000 to develop and just hit the store 2 days ago at $2.99. It is currenlty #50 Top Paid Racing, but we are hoping we can get it to climb the ladder.
     
  12. Slin

    Slin Active Member

    Aug 9, 2009
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    Going to school...
    Eutin, Germany
    Vampires!: 18 units sold within two weeks, no costs.
    The in my opinion better game, iAtoms is selling even worse. I think mostly due to its bad artwork.
     
  13. bigbearstudios

    bigbearstudios Well-Known Member

    Oct 9, 2009
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    Games Developers
    Middlesbrough
    All the big bear studios titles are as follows

    Speed Squares - 10/12 sales a week
    Attack of the psycho killer robots - 2/3 sales a week
    Heuphex - lucky if it gets 1 sale a week

    We have a team of 4(2 programmers and 2 artists) non get paid.

    Our top selling app is Speed Squares
     
  14. brof

    brof Well-Known Member

    Jan 14, 2009
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    Software Architect
    Stuttgart, Germany
    Avoid Hitting Piano - 1 sold/per Week at 99cent
    no developer to pay.

    It is an arthouse project, so I don't expect to get rich anyway. very niche. but I like it to have my game in my pocket.

    cheers,
     
  15. nickcaveman

    nickcaveman Well-Known Member

    Jul 8, 2009
    185
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    illustrator and graphic-designer
    bremen/germany
    ^^ that`s the BEST reason for making an iphone game.

    prost,
    maura
     
  16. spacerage

    spacerage Well-Known Member

    Oct 21, 2008
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    Dodgeball gets around 15- 20 / day
    AI Wars 1 maybe / day
    Amazeing 5 - 10 / day
    Toy Copter 60 / day (but still in first few days)

    But my #1 app is still the first app a did Bible app in the reference section, which at one point was ranked 3rd. That still sells around 40 / day, after being live for over a year.

    All in all, strange results as I'd almost expect the sales to be reversed what they are.. makes me wonder if I'm heading in the right direction sometimes :eek:
     
  17. Picticon

    Picticon Member

    Nov 19, 2008
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    Besiegement, which is a year-old game. These are daily averages for the past few weeks:

    9/6 : 18
    9/13 : 45 * (was added to games front page when the iTunes store was overhauled)
    9/20 : 88 *
    9/27 : 95 *
    10/04: 92 *
    10/11: 38 * (fell off early in the week)

    * These periods had Besiegement on the front page of games, under "Best Tower Defense Games".

    My costs only included my Mac, development licenses, website hosting and domain registration. I either used free sounds and graphics, or made my own (and it shows!)
     
  18. cando

    cando Well-Known Member

    Jun 10, 2009
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    If you dont mind mentioning, how much did u made in total? It will be very helpful if you could share this info with us :) (you can also PM me ;))
     
  19. My games Charmed and Charmed Lite have roughly the following stats:

    Charmed Lite
    2,300 free downloads

    Charmed
    200 total sales @ $0.99
    600 total sales @ $2.99
    10-15 sales/day average now

    Not including hardware and software costs, I spent about $600 on sound effects, and about $500 on advertising. My artist, musician (www.paulhardcastle.com), and I are all in it for a share of the profits.

    I've had several mentions on sites like toucharcade.com, appmodo.com, iphonefootprint.com, mobilegamefaqs.com and theportablegamer.com, and I have a video from the dailyappshow.com that is on the video sites but will not air on the actual dailyappshow.com page until Oct 27.

    Some interesting notes:

    • Charmed was accidentally in the Casino category for two days and it rose to #8 game in that category in Canada on that day. When I saw that it was #8 I thought WOW...I must have sold tons! It sold 6 total copies in Canada that day. :confused:

    • I made it to about #25 (can't recall exactly) in the Canadian Board Games category briefly, and that day I sold 10 copies in Canada. That means thousands of other games were doing WORSE than that. Not a pretty picture.

    • The ads have not really performed well, and the day after one ad went live my sales dropped to 2 for the day. When the ad stopped running, my sales jumped up again. :eek:

    • Positive reviews have made little difference to the sales from what I can see. It was MUCH more important that Charmed was in the new releases section in iTunes for a while.
    I'm in the process of adding OpenFeint support and a few new bells and whistles to Charmed. We'll see how that goes.
     
  20. quietmime

    quietmime Member

    Oct 17, 2009
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    Tracking iTunes charts location?

    How are you tracking your app's locations in various charts? Are you just loading up the pages and counting how far up or down you are? Or is there some tool to know where your app sits in the sales placement?
     

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