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The Realities of Selling On Apple's App Store
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."
http://www.streamingcolour.com.nyud.net/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/
I refer to my post yesterday.
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".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
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. :)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
i don't know about iphone, but such a game comes free with windows mobile :-b
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
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/
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.
Advice: on VPS providers