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The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store
Posted by
kdawson
on Tue Mar 10, 2009 04:16 AM
from the languishing-on-the-midlist dept.
from the languishing-on-the-midlist dept.
Owen Goss writes "Everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars. The reality is that with the App Store now hosting over 25,000 apps, the competition is fierce. While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money. In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios. The post reflects what is likely the norm for developers just getting into the iPhone development game."
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Appstore apps are too limited (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Appstore apps are too limited (Score:5, Insightful)
No the most telling thing about the Iphone store is that the app iFart has sold an insane amount.
Cater to the lowest common denominator and you got a goldmine. Cater to those that have a brain and you end up poor.
If you can figure out how to text real farts to other people no matter what phone they have, you have found a way to be far richer than bill gates.
Parent
Re:Appstore apps are too limited (Score:4, Interesting)
Not necessarily. My photo editing app, Photo fx [apple.com] (video here [youtube.com]), has been selling over 1000 a day since it was released in January. But it's really just a streamlined version of our high-end Dfx filter software which runs on Avid editing systems, Final Cut Pro, and Photoshop, etc. The iPhone version even uses the exact same optimized C++ code.
Moral of the story - make something people want (and do a credible job at it) and you'll do pretty well.
On the other hand, you are also at the often arbitrary whim of Apple reviewers. My other app, Crack [youtube.com], was rejected because it "simulates failure" of the iPhone screen. Very frustrating.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
I think he's going for 'Funny' karma.
If you're doing the same, you're not doing it right.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple has always been about profit - but then so is every large corporation. But I think the idea behind their lock-in, as opposed to Microsoft's, is that they want to offer a neat, prepackaged, no tech-savvy required unit, that works as advertised and really does live up to "plug-and-play." Not that they are perfect, but controlling hardware and software has put them far closer. While most of us were using Microsoft and having to reboot whenever we disconnected our P/S2 keyboard, Apple was daisy-chaining t
The value of being brutally honest. (Score:5, Insightful)
What I am more interested in, is how many sales he gets after being "brutally honest" and then being posted on slashdot for doing so.
Has step 2 been discovered? (Score:4, Informative)
I thought it was:
2. ???
3. Profit!
But maybe it's
2. Whine about life on Slashdot.
3. Profit!
Anyway, I too look forward to hearing how many Slashdotters will buy something solely because it's linked from here. :)
Parent
Piracy... (Score:5, Interesting)
How Piracy Can Boost iPhone App Sales (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:How Piracy Can Boost iPhone App Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading an article on how piracy boost sales on torrentfreak.com is like reading about the Bush legacy on foxnews.com.
Parent
Very surprised and disappointed (Score:5, Interesting)
that it showed up on pirate sites within five hours. Essentially it shows that the price of software is not a major reason behind piracy. Pirating a five dollar game? I wonder if there is a threshold for pirates? I suspect some do it for the fun of it, the "fame" of being first to do it. Still it blows my mind that people would pirate an iPhone app, let alone a cheap one.
The real problem I see is that he lost among the clutter. There is simply so much shit on the apple store that it is easy to get bored or worse, annoyed, looking through it all. As such if its new it comes up on the list first and that is about the only time outside of reviews like the author noted that an app will get noticed.
Throw in the fact that Apple over sells the game aspect of these units when most people don't associate costs with games on their phones let alone value for anything on the phone short of ring tones (riaa love child I think) or songs. I know on my touch I use a conversion utility, a calculator, a NYTimes reader, and the Apple email program the most; don't get me started on their shitty mail app.
Outside of an ad campaign I don't see how you can stay in the limelight unless you buy reviews on sites, let alone get stories posted to Slashdot. I am not begrudging the author of the game or the submitter, it was truly an interesting read into how it all goes down
Parent
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't think it alters your overall point, but I just wanted to make the point that there's a difference between mass-piracy (which may well be because your original product is too expensive) and one bored guy taking something and sticking it on a torrent site.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There's always going to be people who can't afford something. In the past, sellers, as part of the free market, have had the freedom to set their own price to maximise profits and the commercial viability of their product. Not any more, thanks to piracy!
In a free market, a company has a lot of competitors and its prices are set by its costs, not its profits. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to consider how free various markets are (compare US and UK telecoms, e.g.)
Now, consumers can decide what they think is fair for the seller to have, regardless of the seller's wishes, needs, or financial health. While we're at it, we might as well make it legal (or at least morally A-OK) to run out of a retail joint with a physical object, leaving only the manufacturing costs behind.
"Profit" is a cost of manufacture; as Adam Smith so astutely pointed out, what we call 'profit' should rightly be called 'cost of capital', as it is normally either returned to shareholders who stumped up the capital, re-invested in staying competitive or some combination of the two. I
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to arrogant, self-justifying pirates. To them, paying cost price is extremely simple. Just ignore costs of actually creating the original work, ignore any "profit costs", and there you have it! Free is a perfectly fair price for any digital work!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yah, because !free = too expensive.
Yah, because !free = too expensive.
No, seriously. It's not just the upfront cost, the $1 or $100 even, it's pulling out the credit card (not an issue for app store, but elsewhere), the EULAs, the non-returnability that makes you pissed when you bought the wrong thing, the time spent fighting its DRM, the time wasted in the future not able to fix the bugs on your own. Then consider than you have to try a few apps to find the one you really want.
Free apps don't have most of those hassles. They're all in the D
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you can divide them that way, but it won't explain anything. The fact the very first sale was likely a pirate sale (I say likely, because an enterprising pirate would find someone on the inside to jack that file straight off the server) doesn't have anything to do with being able to afford it, but rather that _being the first to supply a pirate copy_ has value.
You can divide the group into purchased and "woulda-coulda", but the value of
Re: (Score:2)
If it is a true pirate site, e.g. you can actualy download it (not a torrent) then most likely it is about either advertisement hits or installing unwanted software on your machine or both.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Essentially it shows that the price of software is not a major reason behind piracy.
Sometimes - maybe most of the time - not even the desire to use the software is a major reason behind piracy. The people doing most of the downloading are simply hoarding, and most of the stuff that they grab ends up in a stack of DVDs along with hundreds of gigabytes of other stuff that will never see the light of day.
This kind of piracy is economically irrelevant. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:4, Insightful)
Not that you're not right withthat sentiment, but just wanted to point out: five dollars is real expensive as far as iPhone games go, especially simple puzzle ones. The high price tag is probably the primary reason that he's not selling many of these things; I know plenty of devs that successfully sell simple games at the $1 level, and they are able to sell tons of them as long as the product is good (20 or 30 thousand is not unheard of, even if you're not a huge success). A couple hundred purchases means that you made some serious mistakes either in pricing or promotion.
The moment you charge anything for an app, you slash the number of "purchasers" to about 1/10 to 1/100 of what it would have been if it were free; if you go above $1, you're whittling that down much further unless your game has a whole lot of publicity or a brand name to prop sales up. Apart from Galcon, I can't think of many indie games that became even remotely popular for more than maybe $3 a pop.
I think the optimal price for almost every game on the iPhone (that is, every one without a franchise) is probably $1, but I'd really need to see more data to be sure of that.
Parent
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:5, Insightful)
You think setting up bittorrent is easier than clicking buy on the appstore?
Bittorrent is *hard* for non-geeks who think port forwarding is something that boats do. Hell, I've yet to meet a non-geek who even knew what it is.
Parent
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
As the title summary says, "everyone is familiar with the story of the iPhone developer who spends two weeks of spare time making a game that goes on to make them hundreds of thousands of dollars."
The developer writes software to make money, the pirate pirates for whatever reason
The 3 rules of dumb of indie sales (Score:2)
1. The pirates will like your game.
2. Going first page on a website or list, has a direct effect on sales.
3. Dev's buy/play other dev's games/tools. Dev's are cool people to dev for.
Crappy color matching game. (Score:5, Insightful)
What, a company makes YET ANOTHER crappy color matching game, and people are ASTONISHED they don't get rich?
What are they honestly expecting? If all you're going to do is repeat, for the nth time, yet another basic, basic, simple crappy puzzle game, you ARE NOT going to make much cash, or get much recognition.
Why is that a story? Just because it's an 'Apple's App Store' thing?
Release a crappy color matching puzzle game onto the web at large, and they'll probably do worse.
Gets right down to the most basic of basics: if you're not going to put the effort in, don't expect to get rewarded.
In terms of the story - make yet another crappy duplicate of yet another crappy puzzle game, become yet another crappy also-ran.
Re:Crappy color matching game. (Score:5, Insightful)
While the parent poster has clearly had too much coffee, the overall point made is valid. There are so many colour/pattern matching games available it's no surprise that this one failed to make an impact. It must be disappointing for the author, but he has to be honest with himself as to whether the game is actually any good and if there's any space in market for it at the chosen price point.
Obviously it would have been better if these questions had been asked and researched before spending six months and thirty-two grand on development; but what's done is done.
Parent
Re:Crappy color matching game. (Score:5, Interesting)
I know the guy who wrote Countdown, and he said that on release there was only 1 other app that did anything close, which had been submitted to the app store just days before his. My friend did it better, so his app sells more than the other guy's.
Contrasting this to games, which are a dime a dozen on the app store. While Dapple does appear to be better, what makes it warrant a $5 price, other than your development costs? What makes me, as the consumer, want to spend $4.99? I could buy 5 $0.99 games and play those for an hour or two each rather than buy a game for $4.99 and get 6 hours out of it.
The Dapple Lite idea is great, especially if you market it as either a free demo or a $0.99 app and offer an upgrade path (I'm not an iphone dev so I'm not sure what restrictions there are for doing stuff like that)
Disclaimer: I don't have an iTouch or iPhone; just know a dozen guys who do.
Parent
Re:Crappy color matching game. (Score:4, Funny)
I must add that after writing my own Crappy color matching game for the iPhone over 2 weekends, the costs of the application seems extremely high. At this rate the contractor he hired must have been Halliburton.
Parent
Re:Crappy color matching game. (Score:4, Interesting)
Agreed. I love my new iPod Touch and I'm desperate to find some good games for it, but so far, only Zen Bound has been worth more than 5 minutes of my time. Honestly folks, colour-matching games are not "good". Games you can play for free online through Flash applets are not worth paying for. The iPhone platform needs DS-calibre games.
What we really need is a new version of Civilization, Master of Orion, or Sim City (and not the aging Sim City 2000 port that is currently available).
Parent
unles the game has boobies. (Score:3, Funny)
Match 1000 boobies to 1000 faces app.
I doubt apple would approve of this app.
Easy to code, but an effort to put together the media.
Costs (Score:5, Interesting)
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD
6 months? 32,000?
What happened to people making games like this in their spare time for fun and maybe getting ad revenue on their website. What kind of a person earning a living (ie. exlcuding rich children, who as far as I can tell make up a substantial portion of the iPhone userbase btw) would pay for this type of entertainment?
Re:Costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems a bit unlikely, but he says he paid contractors to do it.. that tells me he's not a programmer - a phone based puzzle game doesn't require multiple developers (and I'd love to know how they stretched development time to 6 months). So the project is paying at least two people, one of whom isn't actually doing any coding - effectively deadweight - and it goes on for far too long... and they wonder why it fails to make a profit. This isn't unique to the appstore, the world of business is full of ideas that failed in the same way. Hell, I've worked on a few...
Parent
Color me shocked (Score:5, Insightful)
And how is that different from what happens IRL (or, as the cool cats are calling it now, AFK)? You enter a market, develop a product and compete with hundreds or thousands of similar offers. A couple will succeed, some will get by and most will flunk and disappear in its own mediocrity (averageness, ordinariness as a consequence of being average and not outstanding).
That is not the "[r]ealities of Selling On Apple's App Store", that's the reality of selling. People will copy your idea and sell. People will copy your product look and feel. The toughest ones will survive, the rest won't, but maybe will make enough money to keep the viability of their business choice. Or not. At all.
How is this different to any other market? (Score:5, Insightful)
The iPhone software market, like it or hate it, is like any other market. There is competition and only a few are successful. It's no different to the Windows software market or the Mac software market in this this.
Perceived value (Score:2)
I don't have an iPhone, but from the description and reviews, Dapple looks like a dinky little fun time-killer app. There are loads of such games, at least on other mobile platforms, and looks like on iPhone too, quite a few of them great fun, and many very cheap. Meanwhile for PC I just bought Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete on Steam for £2.99 (about $4.20) - a great edition of one of the greatest games of it's type ever. So I'd say the guy's $5 valuation is way out of whack. Dinky little
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
turfing (Score:5, Informative)
I refer to my post yesterday [slashdot.org].
Seems it's more than a day, it's a week. This is paid-for-bashing at its worst.
Seriously:
In a blog post I take a hard look at the first 24 days of sales data for the first game, Dapple, from Streaming Colour Studios
You take a "hard look" at one game. And a game, to boot. You might have noticed that the "games" category is by far the largest, thus the fiercest market.
A friend of mine is an iPhone game developer. He's got three games and four or so small apps in the app store. He's not a millionaire, but from what I hear there's a steady stream of good income. That's seven times the data points of TFA, and still I wouldn't dare to claim that as "the norm".
surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's true that a few select apps are making developers rich, the reality is that most apps don't make a lot of money.
What a surprise. Not so different from the real world, is it? Where every now and then, some idea goes big and makes someone rich, and for every one such lucky guy, there's a thousand whose ideas never work out.
What's even the story here? "Some products sell real well, most sell average"? Why not take it further? "Bell curve distribution confirmed for the 4,000th time!"? :-)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds more like a power law than a gaussian. In other words, a few games are making most of the money, and then there's a lot of games making the rest of the money (long tail)
Just the beginning, folks (Score:5, Informative)
The important thing to take away from this writeup is the fact that, after the author gave a presentation about his game in front of a crowd, he instantly made a handful of sales.
Anyone relying on (or griping about) their position in the App Store listings as an unfair arbiter of their sales needs to account for that simple phenomenon. There is a world outside the app store; a world that must be reached.
Compare it to other media forms: What sells movies? The position of their name on the marquee? No. TV trailers, signage, radio spots, web ads, product tie-ins...
What sells books? Their relative position on the shelf? Not usually. Interviews, book tours, reviews, a good name...
Without real advertising, iPhone devs are beholden to blind chance when they post their app in the store. The only reason a handful of them have become rich is because they are/were pioneers exploring a shiny new UI and form factor. These rags-to-riches stories will fade away, and the usual approach, of advertising in and around established channels, will reassert itself.
Also keep in mind that this is a PLATFORM, and it will move and expand, leaving obsolescence in its wake. Like any good platform game, you need to run and jump to keep up.
No surprise (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow, a color matching game. How incredibly groundbreaking. And it's only selling for five times the minimum application price. Sorry, but the value isn't there for a game of this simplicity. I've got two games under development, both immensely more complex than this, that I will sell for at most half the price.
So my appraisal:
1) Clone of a clone of a clone of the color matching / bubble popping games that can be written in less than a week. No surprise people aren't jumping up and down with excitement, or going out and buying iPhones so they can play this game.
2) Price is way, way too high for this game.
I do thank the author for his concise summary of sales though.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Although I wish you good luck with your two games, I don't think so directly correlating complexity and success is wise. Plenty of junk applications sell very well, and I'd argue that was more about p
Re:No surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
The more complex the app, the more time and money it takes to bring it to market; which means the more money you need to make to break even, let alone start to make a profit. This is always going to tempt you to overvalue your app and turn potential buyers away because it's too expensive; which in turn adds to your woes. By comparison a simple, novel app which is quick to develop can turn a profit much quicker, at a cheaper price tag, which may bring in additional casual buyers.
All creative people have the problem of being too close to the subject to see it the way others do. If you've had the idea for something, spend weeks mulling over the details, working out how to bring it to life, then months of hard work actually turning it into something you have an emotional attachment to it. People who come across the final product don't have that attachment; all they have is another product on a shelf trying to attract their wallets. What you may see as novel, buyers may see as yet another clone with the twist so subtle that they don't see it, to don't give it a try to get a chance to see it. What you may find fun and addictive may bore people because it lacks something you can't see because you're too attached to it. Others can have a quick game of something and dismiss it as "meh", while you spent months of work on it. This is something all creative people have to accept as just part of the job. One man's trash is another man's treasure. You have to hook people REALLY fast to get them to stay with your product long enough to even start to appreciate it. If the screenshots look like a clone of an old idea with the twist not explained in a way that grabs them it'll often be skipped over.....specially if you charge too much for it.
I wonder how many developers only plan on making one game and sticking their entire career on it. The music and movie industry seem hell bent on legalizing that model with extensions to copyright laws. I'd imagine that most developers would release a game, then start working on another; unless their creativity does not match their coding abilities and they only have one good idea in them and have just released it....and wondering why the masses ain't bringing down the App Store servers with sales requests. I'd imagine (like any other creative career) that it's a cumulative sales of many titles which makes their living. Games you made 3 years ago may still sell a few copies a month in addition to the 3 or 4 others released since. Does an author stop getting paid royalties on a book after they release a new book? Of course not, it may not be a best seller but they still get paid for each sale.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
i don't know about iphone, but such a game comes free with windows mobile :-b
No surprise it failed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure why this is a shocker to anyone, lets look at the list:
If you notice, the one thing thats missing from that list when compared to your typical slashdot list is the 'Profit!' line.
Textbook Case of Small Business Failure (Score:5, Informative)
The biggest lesson learned in all of this is to not spend $32,000 developing an iPhone game.
Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
That's nuts. What did he think - he's launching an entire business around an iPhone color-matching game??? What is this "paying myself a small salary" nonsense? What "business expenses"?
For this sort of thing, you do most of the dev work yourself or you partner with someone. You keep your day job and the only "business expenses" you should have are a domain somewhere.
His costs are insane for this kind of project. They should be a tenth of what he incurred. Even at that, he'd have to sell 1,000 units or so to break even. And saying "to break even" speaks volumes about his business naivete. It's not about breaking even. You could have taken that $32,000, put it in the bank at 5%, and made $800 in six months. Instead, you made less than that and now you don't have the $32,000 any more.. He's not comparing opportunity costs.
Honestly, I would not invest much hard money in such a venture - perhaps if I was doing iPhone dev during the day, I'd work on something on the side at night, or if I had a friend/partner who wanted to team up.
Re:Textbook Case of Small Business Failure (Score:4, Insightful)
I do wonder if this guy even knew Objective-C before starting this project. If he spent 6 months full time on this I could see that possibly he was first learning Objective-C and then working on the application. If he spent 6 months full time on this without any day job to get in the way I have to wonder what the hell he was doing all day long.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.streamingcolour.com.nyud.net/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/ [nyud.net]
Re: (Score:2)
Re:article text (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do the math, you can see that I need to sell about 9,150 units in the U.S. before I break even on Dapple.
Then he should have done the maths before spending time developing the app, and either not bothered or worked out a way to reduce costs. Only a few apps get wildly successful and make everyone rich. Budgeting for over 1000 sales on a simple puzzle game running on a single platform is fantasy land.
Parent
Re:Need feedback for LexLook! (Score:4, Insightful)
Look, the appstore is the market, not the advertising channel. Having a market available has simplified the process of getting your app to the user, and made it easier for users to find apps, but that is it. Compared to what things used to be like with Windows Mobile Apps and Symbian, it's a lot easier for me as a user to find what i am looking for, and the process of purchasing is a dream compared to anything in the past for any computing platform I have had.
But!
I still have to find out about your app. Which means YOU still have to market it. That isn't Apples job. I rarely rely on the whats hot tabs in the app store. I use references from other web sites, from searches, and from reviews. If you aren't out there doing your best to make sure someone else actually sees and talks about you app, then you have no reason to bitch.
Uless you consider bitching part of your marketing as the article poster seems to do. I am sure it might work, but considering the fact that he overpriced his app, and also seemed to overspend on something that couldn't reasonably recoup the cash makes me more likely to not by his game.
And you Mr. Xenodium, despite getting some points for highjacking a thread to sell your app, lose points for not even linking to it in you initial post. If all of the whiney app developers are as incompetent in marketing as you two, it's amazing they have managed any sales at all...
Parent