Check the game center, the great game swordigo only gets 60 thousand players, and I guess half of them may be hackers. Then the total revenue would be 60 thousand dollar, and some of the money should be take away by apple as a membership fee or something. so what? Only gets no more than 60,000 from making a great game. Is that even enough for swordigo making cost? Maybe that why we have shadowgun last year, but nothing(same quality TPS) more this year from Indev. How many Indevs make no money and then leave the market.
I'd say that's pretty good for a game that came out just last month. Also it was bassicly made by 3 people... I don't think the game cost that much to make considering the hardware in order to create this type of game is done on a computer mostly.. rendering graphics, code and music. Its alot different then a big company like EA. I'd say theyve bEen working On it awhile since the last game they made was Soozis and that came out a few years ago.
Not everybody who plays a game necessarily has a game centre account so those figures aren't an accurate representation of their sales data. Costs are also a lot lower for iOS, tiny licence fees, so they will break even and make a profit much sooner than on big consoles.
All games in GC should be legal, since they need to be purchased through iTunes in order register under your GC account. Since your post on Friday the number has gone up to 70,000, which, at $1.99 a pop (and after Apple's cut), makes for about $100,000 in revenues -- not bad for an indie game that has been out only a couple of weeks.
Just a few Facts: The Game already sold more then 100.000 Units since it got released Worldwide. Taking any Numbers from Game Center for any Statistics won`t work since Game Center doesn`t separate legally obtained Units with those which where claimed through Piracy. The Number of Devices that doesn`t have permanent excess to the Internet and therefor no permanent excess to Game Center is bigger then some of you might even believe it would be if you combine it with those that don´t list their Game Stats with Open Feint/Open Center/Gameloft Live/... Piracy is a smaller Part of the Business some of the bigger Publisher try to make it look like. And no that`s not only true if your IP is strong enough to stand out. Even some shitty Games sell enough Units and I know at least of one Case where a UK Developer sold enough Units that he could afford a Porsche Boxter with his first Game that was one of the first 50000 Appz on the Appstore. And that Game was horrible... Yes you can survive as an Indie Developer if you don`t spent every of your hard earned Dollar for some Project your adviser at your local Bank suggest you to invest some Money in if you don`t try to Clone Angry Birds.
3 people?then how many days thay took to make the game? I can never imagine such a masterpiece---lack of polish but still great---could be accomplished by only a threesome.
100 thousand.great..welll I want to know where to get the info about sales figure too. I like to know it.
Sanuku often works directly with developers to make his videos -- he may have sales figures directly from them. The number of actual sales is not public information as far as I know. (It's not like retail sales.)
oh, I thought the info he got is from some kind of public website. Now I see he is an expert, jeez, I'd been both blind and derelict to be unaware of that.
Actually, they don't have to be. Pirated apps still use Gamecenter even without an official purchase. I can think of two Devs that have really done well on the appstore: Rocketcat and Halfbrick. It is very possible. The main limitation i've noticed is that most games just don't reach the same level of fun and polish that these do. I really don't think it's about "getting lost" in the market...there are just not that many games that stick out above the rest.
Using Swordigo as an example is pretty silly. Clearly premium games can make money. If you look at the top X apps, there are a non-zero number of premium games. The 100k sales for Swordigo seem like a pretty good figure to me, considering it's not the type of game that you'd expect to be able to hold a top spot on the charts for a prolonged period of time. I don't mean this as an insult, as I do like Swordigo, but it's clearly not something like Angry Birds or Tiny Wings which can be enjoyed by anyone, including non-gamers. I really wish Apple did this, as I think it would also reduce some of the cheating, but alas, they don't. If you read the developers sub-forum on TA, you'll see a lot of them mention their games having X sales and 5X Game Center players, with the difference obviously coming from pirating. Of course, for popular games, it might be more like X and 1.1X (I'm just guessing; I don't actually have the numbers), but for games with poor sales, it's not hard to have a few hundred sales and a few thousand pirated copies.
1. You have to sign up for gamecenter in order for them to start tracking games and stuff. I would assume there are lots of people that dont use it. Game Center is pretty much for gamers and for like teens. 2. Most apps aren't made with a lot of people. Anomaly Warzone Earth was made by 1 person, so thats pretty good. A lot of them are indie devs and they usually start on iOS because its the easiest and when there games get popular they move it to other platforms. 3. InfinityBlade II, Batman Arkham City, MC3, Minecraft all have the $5+ price mark but have made a lot of money.
Well that's all it lists in the credits... It's kind of funny it takes so long just showing their 3 names and then it just loops again... I'm sure other people probly helped, just not enough to be mentioned I guEss.?
Where did you get that information? Their team is actually pretty big, compared to the AppStore average I'd estimate at ~2-3 team members. Just scroll through the credits, there's at least a dozen of them. Anyway, yes, developers can still profit from premium games. As was said before - it helps if the game is not an Angry Birds clone or if it actually looks like made by someone who's over 14 yrs old. Generally the quality matters a lot. But has to be present within all the aspects of the game. Nice graphics won't make you money if the gameplay is crappy or the game has tons of bugs.
The App Store being increasingly crowded and the quality bar getting ever higher does make it hard for new premium titles to make money on that model alone. Free to play with ad support and/or IAP is the model a lot of titles are gravitating towards, and one where a game might more easily succeed or die on its merits alone. Though even then you need a lot of downloads in order While PikPok is still going to release premium titles, a much higher percentage of our future titles will be free to play from the outset (ad supported and with IAP) and we are retrofitting our more successful premium titles with IAP. The App Store is a fickle mistress, but with a quality game, the right business model, and a plan you can make money. Just don't toss your game out there into the wild and expect it to do well without promotion or support.
