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."
Piracy... (Score:5, Interesting)
How Piracy Can Boost iPhone App Sales (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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
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 $0.99 app and offer an upgrade path (I'm not an iphone dev so I'm not sure what restrictions there are for doing stuff like that)
Disclaimer: I don't have an iTouch or iPhone; just know a dozen guys who do.
Re:Very surprised and disappointed (Score:3, Interesting)
Essentially it shows that the price of software is not a major reason behind piracy.
Sometimes - maybe most of the time - not even the desire to use the software is a major reason behind piracy. The people doing most of the downloading are simply hoarding, and most of the stuff that they grab ends up in a stack of DVDs along with hundreds of gigabytes of other stuff that will never see the light of day.
This kind of piracy is economically irrelevant. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Re:Costs (Score:1, Interesting)
For comparison's sake, Braid cost 180,000$ and took 3 years of development, exactly 6x as Dapple.
- Is Dapple 1/6 as good as Braid? I wonder... subjective as these things are, I'm gonna hazard that a color-matching puzzle isn't 1/6 as original as Braid was.
- Did the dev spent at least 1/6 as much effort promoting his game as Jonathan Blow? Whatever you may think of him, he made damn sure everybody knew about Braid.
- At $15, perhaps 1.5x as much as the average XBLA game, Braid was criticized for being too expensive. Dapple goes for roughly 5x the average iPhone game, so...
Finally, I'm working on an iPhone game myself, on my spare time but with a full-time paid programmer. The 32,000$ budget sounds crazy expensive to me, as does the development time. The quality and fun factor of my game will be for others to judge, but I can at least say that it is far more unique than Dapple, is probably more complex a program than it, and has much better graphics than pretty much any puzzle on the iPhone. And I'll be pricing it on the $1-$2 range.
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.
Re:Appstore apps are too limited (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 their USB keyboard and mouse.
Yes, it has limited us geek types over the years, but they have given over to Intel and dual boot with Windows, so I think they are moving in the right direction.
Back on topic, the link in the article doesn't work...
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).
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.
Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
I have two apps on the iPhone store. (Score:2, Interesting)
Real problem (Score:1, Interesting)
I think the real problem is all the garbage in the APP store. I think apple should charge a monthly fee as well for apps to be in there ($50 a month?), that way teenagers aren't going to put the garbage games in there for eternity. Only serious developers will that actually have apps that sell.
Re:article text (Score:2, Interesting)
Budgeting for over 1000 sales on a simple puzzle game running on a single platform is fantasy land.
I would have to agree with you there. However, I like fantasy land. I have a new truck, a suite of offices, employees, and time to sit and goof off on Slashdot because of my frequent trips there. I launched my company with a product I built myself. The friend who helped me launch was hoping to buy 12 pack of beer off of what I paid him for managing the website & shopping cart stuff. Turned out he got to buy lots and lots of beer. FYI) I did it all without Obama's stimulus package, government loans, or Angel investors. Further, if we had a good economy back in 2002, I wouldn't have done any of it. We need our ups and downs. We need everyone to take risks on their own Dapples. When it works, hire people whose Dapples didn't sell so well.