The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store 223
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."
Anonymous Coward (Score:1, Informative)
and it seems slashdotted now. does anyone have a mirror? :)
article text (Score:1, Informative)
March 9th, 2009
I will freely admit, I've been avoiding writing this article. In fact, as I type this, I'm still not sure that it's something that I want to do. However, again, I come back to that damn promise I made when I started this whole thing about being open and honest. Curse me and my big mouth! I also stated just over a week ago that I would write up on my numbers, so now I stand (sit typing) before you to reveal "The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)".
Dapple
If you've been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting "just another match-3 game", but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you've read it, then you've seen my "conclusions" section that had some numbers. 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).
Royalties
Apple's deal is this: for every sale, Apple keeps 30% and you get 70%. So for a sale of $4.99, I make $3.50. That's made in the currency where the app was sold, so I make more money when someone from the U.S. buys my game than someone from Canada. If you're in Canada, it's actually cheaper for you to buy the game than for an American, since it only costs your $4.99 Canadian.
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.
Reviews
Again, if you've been reading the blog then you've seen the excellent reviews the game has been getting. People who play the game tend to really enjoy it. Every review I've had so far has been extremely positive. I even managed to get a review from Kotaku, which is a very large gaming blog. It was the Kotaku review that led many people to start asking me about sales numbers, assuming that I must have seen a massive increase in sales.
However, I haven't had reviews yet from any of the "Big 3" iPhone review sites (Touch Arcade, 148Apps, and AppVee). Those are the ones that I think might really affect sales.
Sales Data
This is what you're here for: the numbers. Here's a graph (done in AppViz) of revenue (the y-axis is dollars, not number of sales) I've made world-wide from sales of Dapple since it went live (all funds in Canadian Dollars):
Dapple Revenue Graph
Dapple Revenue Graph
I've marked four important data points:
First Sale - This was the first sale of the game, made maybe an hour after the game went live. I suspect this was purchased by an app cracker. Dapple was cracked and uploaded to pirate sites less than 5 hours after it went live. This was the only sale prior to that. So thanks, Mr./Mrs. Cracker, you were my first sale! On the topic of pirating/cracking: I have no idea how many pirated copies of Dapple are being played right now. I don't track metrics like that, although I should perhaps start.
Launch Day - This was the first day Dapple was on sale. Many of these purchases would have been friends of mine buying the game. Many other sales will have come from my app being in the "New" apps list, as other devs tell me that appearing in any list on the App Store helps sales significantly. By the end of the third day my app wasn't on the front page of newly relea
Re:Anonymous Coward (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.streamingcolour.com.nyud.net/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/ [nyud.net]
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".
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.
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. :)
Re:No surprise (Score:3, Informative)
i don't know about iphone, but such a game comes free with windows mobile :-b
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:1, Informative)
Lol you're kidding right...?!!!!
Ok, just in case you're not. The seed is a small file that connects the torrent client (often called the port) to the leech. If the leech isn't forwarded (or available) then that can slow your download.
P.S. please don't call other people morons; those in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
Re:Costs (Score:2, Informative)
He paid contractors to create the graphics and sounds. Seems reasonable for a programmer to pay for help in those areas:
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/01/02/im-baaaack/ [streamingcolour.com]
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.