Roughly how much money does an app/game make in, say, a month? Even if your app was absolute toot and you had no advertising what so ever! just an estimate is fine, e.g hundreds, thousands, nil etc. Just wondering if it's as bad as people say it is. i.e, they're expecting millions in a day!
Looking at the list of games in your sig, it appears that you are removed from the indies by a large margin. Are you actually concerned about how much the average game makes in a day? Indies generally do not expect to make 'millions a day', that is something that you completely made up yourself. While selling thousands a day would be fantastic, I am willing to bet a vast majority would settle on 50 sales a day. For me, I can be perfectly happy with about 15-20 sales a day, and I do not think this is greedy nor unattainable; it is realistic. The app store brings in some 10 million dollars a day. Divide this by 130,000 apps, and the average 'share' for each title should be about $76 a day. Very few developers maintain longterm sales of $75+ (short term is fairly easy to attain). To get into the Top 100, you need to sell at least 1000 a day, and that figure may be slightly more or less now with the changes in the app store. This is assuming the money comes from a single region. More daily sales are required when your sales are scattered amongst a few different countries.
QFT: I guess you do find a few individuals who have read about Pocket God, Doodle Jump, iShoot etc. and think the AppStore is an easy way to big money. Most people with a bit of common sense know that's not how the world works. My personal hope was to make a little bit of extra income after a few titles. Unfortunately (for me) this is still not the case, but that might simply be due to my inability to actually create something people would like to buy. I still hope to see some kind of return eventually but, there's a canyon of degrees between "hope" and "expect".
Can I just point out, I don't think they make millions a day, I said people thought they personaly would, and then complain about it when they don't.
I agree - including the big players who have massive development costs & overheads to factor in even when they're making thousands a day.
what currency? hehe i just did a presentation at the school of economics in stockholm. i gave some basic introduction to how to get started with iphone development and i outlined the gotcha's for entering the market.. of course; there was more than just slides to demonstrate. the event went over very well (i did a similar one before). you can find more information about it and slides to download here: http://nordic.tie.org/TGS/EM/viewevent/viewEventPT?id_event=4253 http://www.mobile1up.com/blog/ (slides) i dont expect to earn millions - however i did do extremely well with my first set of games before i was forced to remove them by Nintendo. since then - i have revamped the games to avoid legal issues and i have also worked on other custom projects. i use the hobby games to build my portfolio so i can offer professional services to people who want to explore the market in more detail.
In realistic terms an indie dev does not make much on sales - but they should because most indie games (the good ones) beat down anything from the publishers. In quality and updates... What most games buying public fall for are the licenses and hype that a major publisher produce. I just wish people can learn from their mistakes... Most of the time a game hyped by a major publisher sells well to begin with but fail at the end but they charged premium prices to begin with and make the cash on release. The indie dev is so shit scared of releasing at a premium price that they loose out on the profit of first sales. I think that any indie dev should do is build up a rep for quality product and sell for the price that it deserves. And this may take two or three games to get established. In the end, say gameloft produce three crap apps at a premium price, and an indie dev produces three top products and builds a good relationship with the buyers with game expansion through updates. In the end, in a fair system, the games buying public should invest in the indie devs because they are getting a better service. In reality this will not happen because people believe the hype of crap and will pay for it. But I hope people have more intelligence than this and see what games are worth investing in. So, to the question, if you believe your game has the right ingredients and compares better than the big publishers, then charge the price on what it is worth. Believe in your own work! For the people who moan about games that are not 99c... Those days will come to an end by the end of 2010. Why? The quality of games is climbing for every week in the app store. The market is splitting into cheap non games and full on games with good quality production. And production costs money, as simple as that. If you want something that gives you 10 mins of pleasure then go for the 99c bracket but if you want something lasting then prepare to pay. That's going to be a big thing running through 2010. And Apple should realize this and promote this and get rid of the dead wood... Because if they do not Microsoft are hot on their heals with windows mobile 7... They have a lot of money that they will throw at this... That's what they did with XBox and bought themselves into the console market. And they are very selective on what they will release. If the market does not move away from the bargain price range then the market will never be taken on a serious note compared to DS or PSP games. Anyway, this is going to be an interesting year in the Apps Stores life... Will crap or quality win? Will people get wise to the publishers ripping the buyers off? Will people support the indies more? Will Microsoft come in with high quality and take some of the market and give Apple a kick up the arse? Who knows...
I think 2010 proved to be a year of increasing quality in the app store. Sure, there are the "crapps" that will somehow eek their way into the top lists either by shady marketing or pure luck, but for the most part the games that are selling well are making money for a reason. A big indicator of this is the fact that Microsoft didn't even chip the paint on Apple's dominance in mobile gaming. Also, the idea that games in the 99c bracket only provide 10 mins of pleasure has been busted and the industry is evolving. 2010 was a key year, and 2011 is shaping up to be another.
I have a question?How much do you think tiny wings made?I'm just curious because i think it can't get better than that for an indie developer!
I can only speculate, but it must be well into the six figures and climbing fast. Tiny Wings is a great example of a 99c game that seems simple, but provides just the right amount of entertainment to keep coming back to time and time again. Large dev studios can pump out massive games with massive budgets, but unless it's simple, fun and you can easily play in very small time increments, I don't think they will ever get widespread adoption on the iPhone. The (near) future is game like Tiny Wings.
The real answer developers hate to hear is its a matter of luck. There are alot of good games but you have to have an element of luck to really sell. A feature by apple will give you a tremedous boost toward your goal of making solid money.
Very well put. For iphone/Mobile, It's simple, fun casual games that tend to dominate. When people want an in -depth experience- they look to consoles and pc. when they need a quick fix of fun while they are waiting somewhere- A mobile game is the perfect solution. It's convenient but allows them to break away from it easily enough when they need to.
Luck is in there- but just like with anything in life- you can increase your chances of *luck by planning and positioning yourself in the best manner possible to receive it. A friend of mine created Battlenoidz - a game for iphone/ipad. He was featured by apple in 22 countries for 2 weeks just after launch. He had some good success from being featured, but his sales dropped to nearly nothing after being featured was over. He has a "no spend on marketing" policy and therefore didn't leverage that momentum he had. You need to attack from multiple angles to win. A great concept, Good execution and a solid marketing strategy will position you for success.
so true. you really need to do all you can to increase your odds, if making money (and continuing to do this) is a goal. it does surprise me the amount of people who have a "no spending on marketing" policy, which continues to this day, since that really is just as important as anything else in a product's development. I mean - all the real competition is certainly spending money to market their stuff, don't be fooled.. and the usual warning of "spending $$ and spending it wisely" are two different things, of course
well one can safely assume most devs here are indie devs with very limited funding.. throwing 1k into "marketing" can be pretty useless because that little "fart" it creates will not be heard in the huge flock of developers mooing for attention.. for a small indie the only chance is to create something of quality that will catch the interest of either apple or one of the bigger review websites.. instead of "wannabee" marketing i rather say spend your extra cash into polishing your app.. hire an pro artist to clean up some of the mess you did. let a gui designer take a look at your app, or get a musician to make some tracks for your game which has no music yet or used out of the can sfx.. etc. key point is to aim for something you can achieve and not for some marketing voodoo you have no clue about.. i can gurantee that most of the "marketing" adventures indie jump onto will fade away quickly with no impact on their sales... when you look at your app and think its pretty cool and looks finish the truth is rather it can be optimized tenfolds.. so rather invest into making a better app than into wonky stuff called "marketing". if your "marketing" consist of the same stuff every other indie is capable of doing.. then how effective can this be..? twitter & facebook is something everyone is doing nowerdays so the noise is as big as everywhere. maybe people should invest into 2 tons of four-leaved shamrocks
