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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229607 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229607

• caconym_ 10y ago
  Combined with the 8% value from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229499 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13229499, that (according to my early morning math) comes in at something like (very roughly) $25M "gross revenue" (apologies if that's not the right term). That's just for whichever four days they set the records for. A fair bit of money, but for a company like Nintendo I could see development costs already getting up there, to say nothing of advertising, ongoing maintenance, and so on. Maybe they really will lose money on it. Mobile games are hard. For a game with this pricing model i.e. you pay up front, you get a high quality game, you play it (Monument Valley might be a similar example), even with really good market saturation (which is how I'd describe what SMR has accomplished but, again, I'm not an expert), $25M is great. To make a few comparisons based on probably-wrong numbers I found on Google for some excellent games, Tiny Wings made about $5M and the fairly well-known Monument Valley did about $15M. Those developers doubtless kept costs down by limiting their staff and project scope and relying on word-of-mouth/viral/whatever marketing. As I see it, any other approach with the straight-up pricing model is simply not going to make you any money 99% of the time. The people really making money on mobile games have set up Skinner boxes where "whales" can drop thousands of dollars a year in "micro"transactions. Maybe this is all bullshit; I'm just fascinated by the idea that you can release a relatively simple game, break download records on the app store with 8% of those downloads getting you $8-10 per (making some dumb assumptions about Apple's cut), and still lose money.