What position would your game need to be to make roughly $100 per day? either through paid download or IAP's? any ideas?
North America is still the biggest market so I'd focus on that. Being in the top 100 is pretty much a guaranteed 100 bucks daily average. Monday through Wednesday are slow and Thursday through Sunday are pretty good. Halfbrick just said they made more through 10% of free download and IAPs than through 1 million paid 99 cent downloads. Frankly, it really bummed me out but for better or worse my next game (if I make it) is set up for IAPs. My current one isn't and I'm not artificially shoehorning one in.
Unfortunately I think there's so many free to download games, that devs are being pushed into going the freemium model way whether they like it or not. Personally my instincts are freemium, my interest is in people playing the game first and foremost, everything else comes 2nd but obviously you do have to design the game from the ground up with IAPS's in mind.
The freemium model is generally about giving people a poor but cheap experience. It's the same reason McDonald's is so popular. Many developers, especially super small teams of 1-3, are usually forced into crowded genres like runners/puzzle/ etc. because it's within their experience level and production budget. Unfortunately I think the big companies will consistantly outspend any small dev in that category. I think the iOS market will evolve where the big guys run the high monetization freemium market and good, innovative developers carve out a niche because they are willing to take a risk and have the skillset to make something new. We'll see though...
You don't have to give people a poor or watered down taste with freemium though... look it as more of a trial. You need to make it great and show the user why they should buy the rest of your game. I for one am all for freemium because I'm confident gamers will like my game. I feel like I can get more users to want to pay up for more of the game if they actually get to play the game than if they're just looking at screen shots or reviews.
i'd hope that small teams will still venture out further beyond the runners/puzzle type genre. The market for game genres is so fragmented these days, that any niche game, when designed really well can make it.
I was in spot 145 (paid) in the entertainment category making $85 per day, so I expect spot 120 or so should make $100. Spot 70 grossing free app in a category in US makes about $400 per day
Sorry bit of a silly question because that means we ought to know what kind of earning your game can deliver which is impossible to know only you know that. You could earn a lot just getting 1000 downloads or you could earn nothing getting 1 million if people hate it and don't click on any ads or something. Ranking has nothing to do with that.
I've found that everything I've released kind of peaks and then drops right down, and you get a new peak with each update released, so if you want to make a certain amount per day you should probably get a handful of games under your belt, say you have 5 games bringing in $20 a day each that's you sorted, and you could regularly update each of them to stop them from dropping off the radar.
That's the thing though isn't it, quantity Vs quality, the approach I'm going to try to go for is to release 1-2 high quailty games this year, and some quicker to produce fun arcade games as well.
I think freemium is phasing out just as fast as it came in. It was a rational decision for most that never lasted. Also, for $100/day, I think u;d need to be somewhere between top 100 and 150 overall games.
Sub categories don't matter really, it's where you rank overall. To try and answer the original question, I estimate (very roughly) that around 1000 rank overall will get you around $100 a day. That number changes as more people use iDevices. Two years ago a rank of 1000 would give different results. I just got this number from looking at past sales days of my own game, so uh...whatever
The numbers I noted for between $100 to $200: US: rank 1000 - 500 France: rank 100 - 50 UK: rank 200 - 100 Germany: rank 120 - 80 Canada: rank 80 - 40 For a 0.99 paid app
Freemium for me still seems the way to go, the only problem with that though of course is how much the bot farms are distorting the picture.
I've read that a top 50 paid spot can earn as much as $3k per day, but freemium depends on SOOOOO many more factors that it's too difficult to say. Just having IAP's is not enough, people have to want/need to buy them without feeling ripped off not having whatever the IAP's bring. There is a lot of sales psychology involved.
