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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."
5 hours after the first sale, it appeared on the warez sites. Man that's got to suck. It's a shame the thieving cunts don't realise that with most of the App Store stuff they pirate that it's usually only a one man band behind it.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
There was an interesting article on TorrentFreak a while back; How Piracy Can Boost iPhone App Sales, may be worth a read.
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?
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
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I would be forced to agree as well. To sell well in the app store you have to first find what it doesn't have a lot of, and then make it better.
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.