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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.
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.
1. The pirates will like your game.
2. Going first page on a website or list, has a direct effect on sales.
3. Dev's buy/play other dev's games/tools. Dev's are cool people to dev for.
-Woof woof woof!
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.
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?
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.
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 think he's going for 'Funny' karma.
If you're doing the same, you're not doing it right.
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.
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
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!"? :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Match 1000 boobies to 1000 faces app.
I doubt apple would approve of this app.
Easy to code, but an effort to put together the media.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
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.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Great post by Jeff Tunnel: Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing
One, Learn Origami with Origami Mastery, has done OK, staying stable at about 30 copies a day for the first two weeks, then dropping down to about 5-10 per day, many on foreign sites. This was my first app, and so I had no expectations. I was disappointed it didn't sell a billion copies, but I didn't really expect it to, as it had lots of competition. I sell it for 99cents here: http://www.origamimastery.com/ However, the second app really disappointed me. I thought I had a eureka moment, because while there were a billion iFart aps, there was nothing juvenile like iBooger or iSnot. I figured if iFart can make a lot, so can something called iSnot. So I made this great little app, very small, doing all my own design and splitting the profits 75-25 with the developer (normally a bad idea but a good one in hindsight) and developed it in less than a week. We had no direct competitors... It's a funny app whereby you pick a face, hold the phone up to your face facing away and a line of dangling snot, using the accelerometer, comes out, and well, you get the picture. It's funny. Stupid. Guaranteed to make a million bucks like iFart, right? Wrong. Its done worse than my Origami app. Sold maybe 10 a day or less for the past two weeks. I spent money to get it reviewed, and then asked my friends to download and review it, and also randomly bought people drinks at bars to download and review it the first day. I think its a very very funny and clever app: www.isnotapp.com However, the key to success appears to be HEAVY marketing beforehand. The iFart guy, Joel Comm, is an Internet Marketer by trade. That means he has mailing lists and twitter followers in the hundreds of thousands. He knows what he is doing. His competitors do not. There are other things you can do, which I will be doing, like releasing updates to keep yourself at the top of the daily top sellers. In the case of Dapple, one look at the screenshot of the game and the price of the app told me everything I needed to know. The game looks NO BETTER than a 99 cent app. He should have sold it at 99cents. That is his first mistake. Drop it down and his volume will increase dramatically. But he will still never make his 35 grand back. All in all I spent about 1000$ on my development. 325$ for the first apps development costs, 500$ for a mac mini for myself to help with development, and 99$ for applying to the app store as a developer. I will probably make my 1 grand back in a two-three months if all goes well. And that's with a genius app like iSnot doing poorly.
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
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.