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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."
I got my iPhone a little while after the 3G was released and I haven't found any of the appstore applications to be all that interesting. The only third party application from the appstore I use on a regular basis is Flashlight (which is free). The applications I use semi-regularly are SFNetNews, Palringo and Units (also all free). I can't recall a paid app that I bothered to use for more than a week. On the other hand I use Winterboard, Terminal (and the CLI apps that go with it such as OpenSSH), AdBlock and Reminder quite regularly (granted AdBlock and Reminder are passive applications); all from Cydia. Perhaps if the restrictions on what Appstore applications could do were loosened appstore developers could create really useful applications. Imagine the profit that could be made from an application that provided much needed functionality, such as a "mark all mail as read" button.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's worth pointing out the difference between someone throwing it on a torrent site and having a significant number of people downloading it. If I make an app and sell it for $1, sure, someone will probably stick it on the piratebay. But I'd argue that the percentage of the overall usebase that will pirate it from that rather than pay $1 to have it installed easily will be quite low.
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.
There is nothing interesting going on at my blog
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!"? :-)
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Reading an article on how piracy boost sales on torrentfreak.com is like reading about the Bush legacy on foxnews.com.
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.
Better known as 318230.
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.
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.
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...
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...
I couldn't agree more! When you see really amazing games on the iPhone like Zen Bound for $5, how can this developer expect to get $5 for a silly color matching game? If there weren't a ton of others like this for free or $0.99 I could understand, but that is not the case! The dev needs a dose of reality and then needs to drop the price.
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.
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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.
A lot of iPhone devs are charging $120+/hr for development. He says he did contract some work out but he is a programmer so it's hard to say whether this was the huge cost or not. Even still this game at least looks really really simple to make on the face of it. If you had the artwork done already you could put this together in a matter of a few weeks if you focused on it and don't just do it in your spare time.
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.