11 ms·

My iOS Indie-Game Numbers

325 points by jazzychad 12y ago

asperous 12y ago
Here's yesterday's blog post he was inspired by: http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look-at-unreads-first-year http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look... Here's an infographic with the sales for a much larger indie game [Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP]: http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/ http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/
acconrad 12y ago
This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product itself?
- chime 12y ago
  Not all downloads are equal. There are far too many iOS games to make a profit. Had he spent the same amount of time/effort/budget making a productivity tool that catered to a niche market, he could have easily made a net profit.
  - bsder 12y ago
    Except that productivity apps can and do run afoul of Apple and won't always get approved. Exactly why do I need a zillion apps to mount an SMB share on iOS and do something with <insert specific file type>? Answer: so iOS doesn't grow a decent music program to compete with iTunes. Apple won't approve things that might compete with their own cash cows.
    - chipotle_coyote 12y ago
      Or because the set of people who want to mount an SMB share on iOS to get to their music... ah, while "consists primarily of you" is overly snarky, I think it's safe to say that it's probably vanishingly small. There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud, and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve. tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy stuff.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      Could you cite some of these nonapproved productivity apps please?
- cclogg 12y ago
  I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ). Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.
  - freebs 12y ago
    I wonder what would happen if app games were run like desktop MMORPGs, where there is a monthly fee. That fee could even be paid via a site, also freeing the app of Apple's cut.
    - rstupek 12y ago
      You would never get your app approved by Apple.
      - freebs 12y ago
        How man SaaS companies have monthly fees with free apps? Then, after you login, the features that you have paid for are available. I can think of plenty.
      - pjc50 12y ago
        I don't see why not, if you hide the "monthly" under energy mechanics.
- Zikes 12y ago
  Any one of those games could have (and may yet) reached a critical mass that would lead to profitability, but the market is almost completely unpredictable. Threes was well-designed, simple, and easy to learn, but the moment it hit the market there were a thousand clones (or more like 2048 clones, amirite?). Flappy Bird was a weekend project with "borrowed" artwork and by all rights none of us should even know what it is. There is next to no hope for anyone that doesn't have a massive enough advertising budget to convince people that "hey, all your friends are going to be playing this game, you don't want to miss out." Anything beyond that is blind luck or a truly brilliant/original idea.
- kybernetyk 12y ago
  > focus more on marketing than on the product itself Welcome to the software business.
  - lurcio 12y ago
    Software >publishing< business :-)
- benologist 12y ago
  A prolific programmer isn't what a game needs after it launches.
  - webwright 12y ago
    Or before, apparently. Knowing what the game market wants (and then designing that) is surprisingly hard.
imkevinxu 12y ago
I wonder if there could be a Kickstarter for indie iOS apps (no companies allowed). Seems like an awful lot of time invested to design and build an app without really knowing if it'll be popular or make money. The "pre-funding" model would be able to give indie developers 1) early fan base, 2) early revenue, 3) early validation instead of working in the dark I remember reading how Threes was made and IIRC it was on the order of many many months and redesigns before users saw/heard anything. But they hit the lottery jackpot I guess
- monkey_slap 12y ago
  I think there needs to be more thought and research put into validating that your app idea is worthwhile. There have been traditional means of finding your market and using surveys or engagement to get a good feeling of whether or not people will actually want your product. I make side-project apps all the time, but I'm aware that they are basically just scratching some itch I had. If you go into it expecting to make the big-bucks without doing market research and not having a marketing budget, you're going to have a bad time.
- Pwntastic 12y ago
  Steam Greenlight sort of fits this. You can gauge desirability by how many people specify they would buy your game if it were available. But I'm not sure if you get any actual insight into the numbers.
- comex 12y ago
  You could just use Kickstarter. Giving out rewards apparently is rather difficult thanks to Apple's App Store rules [1], but is doable [2] if you don't mind paying them the usual 30%. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37569.0 http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37569.0 http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/18dclr/question_giving_inapp_redemption_codes_as_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/18dclr/question_giv...
- flurp 12y ago
  Check out Ramen: https://ramen.is https://ramen.is not for iOS apps/games exclusively but with a core focus on software projects.
josu 12y ago
>In the end, I've had to chalk all these apps up to the "hobby" category as it has been a money-losing proposition. This is what Taleb calls an extremistan world, you can't apply a gaussian distribution to this situation. It is difficult to find a mediocre filmmaker that just makes enough money to get by, or a writer, or a painter... You either become fairly succesful or you die without ever being able to "make it". You can't really tell when your next game will become the next Words with friends, Angry Birds, Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. But if it does, you can go from a "hobby" to a full time job even needing to hire a team.
- ChrisClark 12y ago
  Yeah. I made $2,000 my first month on the Android Top New charts, dropped off the charts after the 30 days and it's now about 1 sale every two days. You either get pushed all the way up and make millions, or not much at all.
  - tomjen3 12y ago
    Reskin it and submit as a new game (effectively cloning yourself). If the issue is that not enough people see your game then they won't know it is a clone so who cares?
- zevyoura 12y ago
  This lines up with Gama Sutra's indie salary survey[0] pretty well; 11k average income, 2% >200k. [0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_the_2014_Indie_Salary_Report.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_...
- voronoff 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory is an economic theory for explaining that.
k-mcgrady 12y ago
When you develop a game you're taking a big risk. There are so many ways people can entertain themselves that your game has to be something really special - and even that may not be enough. Secondly, ripping off the letterpress UI (with or without permission) was a bad idea imo. If I saw the screenshots my first thought would be. "this is a letterpress ripoff" and I wouldn't have downloaded it. If you create an app that solves a real problem or solves a problem better than the current solutions you can do okay in the App Store. It's rare to do great but you can do well enough. Games don't solve problems. They add to a growing number of ways to entertain ourselves which includes movies, music, tv, news, the internet - and all these are accessible on a mobile device. P.S. Not trying to sound too negative about games but making money in entertainment is difficult. People have so many options - many of which are free - and they'll take the cheapest one.
- jazzychad 12y ago
  I don't disagree with you, and partly I have always wanted to write a game or two (I've published many other non-game apps, also w/o much financial success), but I wanted to learn about the market... and I did!
  - k-mcgrady 12y ago
    I tried my hand at a simple game once - it was also a disaster. Although it wasn't nearly as polished as yours look.
  - protonfish 12y ago
    Yeah, you beat me there too. The best game I ever made is barely half finished (no matter how much I work I do it seems to stay half finished.) Plus you got a really great article about download numbers out of it.
- protonfish 12y ago
  I think you nailed it. If I stumbled across these I would never download them because I tend to notice something new and unique and these look exactly like more of the same. It makes sense that if you make something similar to 1,000 other games that being successful would be like getting a 999 on a thousand-sided die. Not to imply that it is easy to make something new (and good.) I have been working on a prototype of a game and the first feedback I got was all about how it was different than others games and that's bad. Trying to create something original is definitely swimming against the current.
peapicker 12y ago
I couldn't find 'letters' by searching on 'letters' in the app store... too many other things came up first. By search for your other games, then going to letters I was able to try it. Pretty fun, would be nice if it had some of the 'hip' words used these days, "Selfie" etc (edit, had some stuff in here about would be nice if there was an undo)
- jazzychad 12y ago
  Yes, searching for "Letters" is not great. The irony is that if the app was ranked highly it would show up much higher in the results, so it's a double-edge sword. Regarding "undoing" a letter selection, you can't, and that was intentional. It simplifies the UI (you can however reset the whole word by trying to submit an invalid word), and even if you could undo, the time you would spend doing it would pretty much wreck your score for that round, so overall it's no good. I know this frustrates some people, but after several weeks of playtesting and hearing this complaint, after the first few rounds that complaint quickly vanished, so I stuck with my decision.
  - peapicker 12y ago
    After playing for the last 20 minutes, I agree, undo would get in the way.
dustinlakin 12y ago
Thanks for writing this up, it is always interesting and saddening to getting a deeper look at indie development on the app store. It seems like more simplistic puzzle games like these have potential to completely blow up, but the market is also completely flooded with them. And I have found that it can be difficult to find quality in the genre. I would imagine that games that have heavier focus on art and polish can make a world of difference. It seems it gets attention from blogs/review sites and more probable for Apple to feature them. Regardless, it is frustrating that your hard work that goes into these games didn't get the attention they may have deserved. Keep up the great work and hopefully we hear back from you soon about a monetarily successful game, whether that be in the app store or elsewhere.
diziet 12y ago
User acquisition for mobile is just as important as developing an application. There are companies with larger development teams AND many folks working on user acquisition AND marketing budgets reaching a millions of dollars per month, cross promotions, international reach, etc. As an indie developer, you wear all hats, from development to marketing. It's simply not reliable to launch a title and hope it takes off by itself or hope that sending emails to journalists will be enough on acquisition. If you'd spent hundreds of hours on development - figure out to spend just as much on acquisition. Doing paid acquisition might not work as the CPI (cost per install( for installs is most likely going to be much higher than an untuned app's LTV (lifetime Value). I'd hacked together a 'mobile marketing' checklist before, it might help: https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing
- jonaldomo 12y ago
  This is a great checklist!
incision 12y ago
>'I am not sure how to break into the App Store today except by winning the lottery.' I'm not sure I follow. It's a trio of side-projects, none of which have been available for even a full year yet, entering into a 'total bloodbath' marketplace. Is it typical to expect immediate success and profitability doing this? Traditionally, 'breaking in' is something people might spend years if not decades on and likely without the benefit of employment at a successful start-up during the week. Things take time and persevering for longer than a year while refining and/or generating a fully original title would seem to be a good start.
programminggeek 12y ago
It doesn't matter if it's games or not games. These numbers ring basically true to me. I've done enough apps that the math doesn't work out to me anymore. Simply put, you're selling candy bars, but without the disposable aspect, so your customer LTV on a $1 app is $0.7. If you have a suite of 5 or 10 $1 apps, even if you had a huge cross sell of 5 of those 10 apps, your LTV is 70% of $5... $3.50. In that scenario, to get paid $70,000, you need 20,000 customers to buy 50% of your products each year. Honestly, if you can get 20,000 to buy your app you've either hit a top list or you are so good at marketing that it is nonsensical that you would be selling $1 apps. So yeah, for most developers the app store business isn't much of a business at all. Maybe leveraging it to get interest in desktop or console apps where the per unit price is closer to $20-100 would help. Even then, I don't think you will see or hear many stores about app store millionaires going forward. The money might be there, but it's too diluted to make much of a dent. Might as well buy a lottery ticket, it costs you less time and money with basically the same outcome.
plg 12y ago
the game space is VERY crowded for mobile if I were to think about mobile apps I would aim for some specialty market segment, e.g. doctors, or lawyers, or construction, or weddings, etc. not games. too crowded. too many voices.
randall 12y ago
The thing is I want to know about these fun new games. I feel like discovery is the actual problem. If I had a random app installed on my home screen every day and I could say "more like this" or "this is horrible" I think it'd be cool. But it would have to be passive.
- archagon 12y ago
  That's a pretty good idea — iTunes radio for games. Too bad Apple has to be the one to do it.
- kacy 12y ago
  Apple acquired one in 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine)
  - robterrell 12y ago
    Been expected app discovery to be a solved problem since the acquisition... since the Chomp founders left Apple recently, I would love to hear what happened.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  What do you mean by it would have to be passive? It would come up with a new app everyday but you would still have to indicate if you liked the app or not. Actually I can't believe there aren't already a billion apps doing this - you could make a fucking fortune selling access to your app, compared with the ever growing data on what kinds of apps do well.
  - randall 12y ago
    I don't want to think about the app install process. If I mess with an app, I'd like to register whether I liked it or not.
kwhinnery 12y ago
I would resist the urge to give too much credit to luck and marketing when it comes to indie game success. Notable outliers like Bastion, Sword + Sworcery, and FTL were all stunning executions. The FTL team did almost no marketing, but released a product that spoke directly to the target market of desktop gamers. Passionate people played it, liked it, and told others. It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience. There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I don't think that's the only path.
- jazzychad 12y ago
  Just a slight correction: FTL had a very successful kickstarter which generated tons of marketing and hype before launch - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-tha... Bastion was also published by Warner Brothers so it had some significant weight behind it.
  - kwhinnery 12y ago
    Slight addendum for your slight (and correct) corrections :) Both games had been in self-funded development a long time and had achieved some degree of critical acclaim before Kickstarter and signing on with WB, respectively. I might argue that their previous work had created the conditions for them to earn those victories and reap the benefits. For Bastion, it's probably good to be explicit that WB did not provide them funding. The benefit to Supergiant was access to advertising and speeding their way through the publishing process for Xbox Live Arcade. A significant victory they sought out and earned, to be sure. In the case of FTL, the success of the Kickstarter may have generated some additional buzz because of how much they beat their goal. But the reason they beat their goal was that their game had already been discovered and appreciated (even in its early form) by a community of people passionate about games. Without organized marketing on their part, aside from showing the game to many of their colleagues.
Elizer0x0309 12y ago
I'm surprised nobody is talking about the actual game!? It's really not standing out. Another "Word" type game that barely innovates on the genre. I guess people are so focused on marketing, user acquisition and not .... wait for it.... PRODUCT!
- kpao 12y ago
  This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - joeblau 12y ago
    Yeah, I wrote this game Orb (http://joeblau.com/orb./ http://joeblau.com/orb./) In 3 days for iOS and Android. I didn't put any money into marketing it, but I did promote it. I made my game to test the effectiveness of the Apple Store vs the Play Store vs the Amazon store for an app with minimal publishing. I've definitely learned a lot which I'll probably blog about soon.
sjtgraham 12y ago
The "Letters" numbers shock me, I follow Chad on Twitter, downloaded the game and found it to be very addictive, especially the mechanic of solving the daily word. Chad, I really think there is something there in Letters; it definitely deserves some push.
- jazzychad 12y ago
  Thanks. Yeah, I do too... I'm not sure how to push it. I just need a financier :)
  - adinb 12y ago
    Well, a publisher or submitting to the major mobile gaming sites, like TouchArcade. Speaking of, have you made any threads in the Touch Arcade forums? I've seen several apps get their initial exposure by just posting and asking for feedback.
  - gojomo 12y ago
    As a non-expert reading this thread with some objective distance, the repeated recommendations that stand out are the importance of a distinctive (& searchable) name, and a graphical look/description that fights 'copycat' impressions. (Otherwise, the game never even gets a look from players or reviewers.) So maybe fresh eyes & new language/visual brainstorming would be more relevant than a financier? You've already got one possible alternate name – "The Letters Game" – in your domain/twitter-handle, but I suspect something even more distinctive is possible. You might also tweak the icon and color scheme to convey more novelty compared to the famous category-leaders...
- oo7jeep 12y ago
  I agree - I downloaded and played for at least a couple weeks. Important note: I'm not a gamer and rarely ever get caught up in a game for that amount of time.
james_hague 12y ago
The App Store is EXTREMELY clogged on the low-end. If it's your first game, if you use "puzzle" to describe it, if it's a spin on Tetris or Threes or Snake or match-3 or anything well-known, if someone could clone it in a week...that's the low-end. Not only will you have trouble getting customers to notice you, but you'll also fight just to get any kind of review. What's also happening is that developers (myself included: http://appstore.com/daisypop http://appstore.com/daisypop) think "Wow, I shouldn't have spent so much time on that; I need to make something simpler and more rapidly so I have a better chance of turning a profit." This accelerates the problem.
m3mnoch 12y ago
like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up. a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers. tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art. 1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath" while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank, that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component. you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-playing, average-genre games. if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they can't build amazing games. 2) marketing is everything. no. no it's not. i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented, measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!! come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having issues. come to find out, you need a good game. if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough. you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content to share and they will. that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far. 3) it's a lottery. only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict as an example: awful 2048 grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-03-19&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/... still substantial threes grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-02-06&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/... if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.) that looks like a lottery. if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next minecraft or spelunky. so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise" book. if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet -- to make quality games. you only think you do. don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.
_random_ 12y ago
I will be the negative guy here, down-vote if you will. What kind of profit did you expect? As a game app consumer I only buy the very best (original and/or polished) apps in their respective categories. E.g. Leo's Fortune, FTL, Limbo, Icebreaker, Reaper would be very easy purchases for me. You can see those games had _a lot_ of effort put into. In my subjective, blatant and impolite opinion your apps could be more of the cause of the over-saturation problem rather than victims. Saying that, I have nothing to show myself so far :).
mkirsche 12y ago
I spent 6 month developing a game in my spare time: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-turtles/id892249118?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-turtles/id892249118?ls... 3 weeks after the launch the game sold 6 copies and made 8,95$. I sent out 51 promo codes to various review sites but only 8 of them got redeemed. I can already guess how impossible it is to enter the iOS gaming market.
physcab 12y ago
> This also means that 74 people out of 21,309 (0.3%) paid to unlock internationally compared to 112 out of 5521 (2%) that paid to unlock domestically. I don't know how many of these are DAU (you didn't say), but these numbers are not as bad as they might seem. 1%-5% is about industry average for % spenders in games. Where you need to tune things is figure out who the spenders are and raise your ROI. You state that you spent $700 to get $261 in revenue which is about 37% ROI. Not good, but its a start atleast. Obviously you want to be above 1. What I would do is invest a little in some analytics, figure out who your spenders are and cohort them. Then see if you can reduce your spend, become more targeted in your buying, while also increasing opportunities to earn more revenue. Just my $0.02
blutoot 12y ago
I feel that, in the long run, apps are meant to be user interface to something bigger than being an all-encompassing entity for use cases outside of music, gaming and a few other categories. In other words, the service being accessed through an app will be equally if not more important compared to the app itself. And I just don't see indie devs being able to manage and scale on both fronts equally, yet. Maybe the more infrastructure as a code and web app development get commoditized, the better will be the chances for indies to shine/profit again? Until then, app is just gonna be a fancy (and in many cases the only) endpoint for most sustainable business models.
yeureka 12y ago
Making it on the App store with games is extremely hard. I have 3 friends who each developed a mobile game and made no money, basically the games serve as portfolio for future work. I don't think the quality is the issue with what my friends produced: http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/ http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/ http://gamewhizzes.com/ http://gamewhizzes.com/ http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php Most likely marketing failures. That being said, I am working on one myself and have all the hopes that any indie has.
- m3mnoch 12y ago
  marketing failures? how would you differentiate them with marketing? "yet another color bubble popper!" "yet another side-scrolling shooter where you kill the undead!" "yet another match three with fruit!" i'm not sure i agree with your assessment as to marketing failures. if you said me-too-market-fit, however, i'd say you were on to something. their level of polish is pretty nice, so they should step out of the lottery and make a non-me-too quality game. i bet they would be pretty successful with it. in fact, if they keep with it, i'd put money on it they'll eventually be very successful.
  - yeureka 12y ago
    I hope you are right - that a fun new gameplay with an adequate level of polish is enough for moderate success. I guess that deep down I also believe the same and that is what makes me keep on going to finish my side project.
    - skeoh 12y ago
      Are you comfortable sharing any details on your side project? Stuff like this interests me.
      - yeureka 12y ago
        It's a game I have been working on for some time. The gameplay is simple and easy to copy and that is why I have been reluctant to show it to too many people. I hope to finish it in the next 6 months but It could take longer depending on how much spare time I have for it. I am planning on showing it to the HN crowd first - the support is always pretty good here.
funtober 12y ago
My friend and I kicked around putting some effort into building an app a few years back when people started publishing the "how to make money on the app store" posts. So thank you for posting this. My suggestion is to find a website with an established niche (outside of the traditional app review websites) and audience who will promote your product ... and build something for that audience. For example, my website has a ton of traffic in September and October. It's new though, so we are still working out monetization. There's a couple games in the market that would appeal to my visitors. I could probably give one a significant bump. And not one of them has ever contacted me about a review, provided a promo code, etc ... let alone a revenue share. I didn't spend much time looking at Letters, but maybe it would do well on the blog of a english teacher?
prawn 12y ago
Hi Chad, are you still playing all of your games yourself? I wonder if they are "sticky" enough? Bit hard to tell from the screen captures - they don't really stand out to me in the screenshots. But I like word games so will check out Letters! While you got the OK for the Letterpress UI from the creator, I wonder if anyone else who's unaware of that would notice and think you're a clone and ignore you? I released my first ever iOS game* last week and it's a word game like yours. Not sure if we (two man team) just got lucky, but overnight we hit millionth game played and we've hit #1 word game in 30 countries at one point or another. People are playing about 3-5 games per second at any given point of the day which amazes me. The game took us four months to make - a month on the core mechanic and the rest polishing. I have a pipeline of game ideas I think are very good so definitely intend to make more. * Our game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8
- m3mnoch 12y ago
  yes -- hexiled is a great example of a quality game done right with very little (need for) marketing. i'm cheering for you! go, man, go!
- ronyeh 12y ago
  Hexiled looks great! The graphics definitely stand out (especially the space theme). I'll play it tonight. Best of luck. I do think the OP's apps look a little too much like Letterpress. If I had seen them in the App Store, I would have dismissed them as a ripoff and have never given them a chance... Also, the font in the Letters app doesn't look as professional as Hexiled, Letterpress, or SpellTower. Even in the app icon, the letter L's font weight varies, and the 2 feels italicized in a weird way. See: http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg
  - prawn 12y ago
    It's funny you should say that as the font in Hexiled ended up being the very, very default Arial Black and the icons are almost entirely based off Font Awesome. I paid a lot of attention though to consistency where possible (colours, use of caps, "voice" of the game, etc) but there's a lot of room for improvement. Thanks so much for the encouragement. We've had a great experience launching the game. I'm on Twitter at @isaacforman if you have any feedback about Hexiled.
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apptoss 12y ago
My iOS Indie-Nongame Numbers First published app (an educational niche): $1,832 in first three months. $1,360 in past 30 days. Second published app (a semi-educational game-related app): $49 in first three months. $6 in past 30 days. Third published app (an educational niche): $360 in first three months. $385 in past 30 days. I now have over a dozen apps. Three of those earn less than $100 a month and I've all but abandoned them. Four more also earn less than $100 a month but are part of suite of clones that address different niches. Together, the suite earns over $200 a month now. My top 4 apps earn more like $100, $300, $400, and $1400 a month now. Over the past year, those iOS apps earned me just over $40,000. Not enough to live on alone but it's not a bad start.
- afro88 12y ago
  I would be interested in more information regarding your marketing for these apps, if you would be open to writing about it
  - apptoss 12y ago
    I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales. The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps" list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run ads for any other apps except mine.)
    - afro88 12y ago
      Nice, thanks for the summary
- klassobanieras 12y ago
  My iPad comic-reader numbers Average rating: 4.9 stars $3 paid upfront: $2750 (first 11 months) Free with one-time $3 IAP: $1560 (past 3 months) Currently averaging around $15 per day from IAPs. Details: http://chunkyreader.tumblr.com/post/93410425677/sales http://chunkyreader.tumblr.com/post/93410425677/sales
jbverschoor 12y ago
Same for us.. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-thoth/id397757153?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-thoth/i... This one had promotion through free app of the day. Lifetime revenue was around $700. Paid around $400 in ads https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-free/id577099837?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-free/id5770998... Spent ca $1500 on ads, made $20 revenue.
- lukeholder 12y ago
  maybe link to the english version of the app store page for the one you spent $1500 on ads for.
cix 12y ago
Some people may say that we are in a Idiocracy, seeing games like Flappy bird become trend setters while AAA titles are getting barely any downloads. Mobile game developers need to understand the platform is more important than the game. In that you develop what is best for the platform and demographic. Not what you perceive as being high quality and pour millions of dollars and R&D. The more you make the mobile game look like a job, regardless how difficult it was to make, it will not be enjoyed because of such complexity. Although for simple Apps that have little ways to differ from the crowd, then marketing with some quirky difference to it seems to be the most effective.
passfree 12y ago
$0.99 for an App is not sustainable pricing unless your product is mass-marketed in order to make up the numbers. My company have several products in iOS and Mac App Stores and none of them are near this price. In fact, one of our products (Websecurify for iOS) is $16 which you may say is an expensive app for iOS but this is a more realistic pricing. I doubt we would have achieved any effect if we had priced it $0.99. Btw, the next version of our app will probably cost twice as much because even $16 is barely sustainable. I think it is time for iOS developers get their strategy checked up. I know a lot of people want to get their app/game to a lot of people but unless you have evidence that you app is reaching millions of people, it is not going to work.
gojomo 12y ago
I hate in-game ads. But if paired with an in-game ad-buyout option, they do tend to remind me that, if I'm going to be playing the game repeatedly, I should do the buy-out. So even if ads earn a negligible amount... are they ever worth trying as a mechanism to boost in-game purchases?
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Aldo_MX 12y ago
Thanks for sharing your numbers, they were an eye opener for me, and now I'll need to plan a better strategy...
hipjiveguy 12y ago
I think you'd have more success if you twist your games a wee bit, and try and turn them educational. That way you'd be able to put them in the educational category, where this guy who has similar word styles games as yours, is doing very well: http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-education-apps-market.html?hn%209/9 http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-educatio... Also, I couldn't find your contact info on your blog - is it there somewhere? You'd want press to be able to find it if so....

325 points by jazzychad 12y ago

Here's yesterday's blog post he was inspired by: http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look-at-unreads-first-year http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look... Here's an infographic with the sales for a much larger indie game [Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP]: http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/ http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/

acconrad 12y ago

This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product itself?

chime 12y ago
Not all downloads are equal. There are far too many iOS games to make a profit. Had he spent the same amount of time/effort/budget making a productivity tool that catered to a niche market, he could have easily made a net profit.
- bsder 12y ago
  Except that productivity apps can and do run afoul of Apple and won't always get approved. Exactly why do I need a zillion apps to mount an SMB share on iOS and do something with <insert specific file type>? Answer: so iOS doesn't grow a decent music program to compete with iTunes. Apple won't approve things that might compete with their own cash cows.
  - chipotle_coyote 12y ago
    Or because the set of people who want to mount an SMB share on iOS to get to their music... ah, while "consists primarily of you" is overly snarky, I think it's safe to say that it's probably vanishingly small. There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud, and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve. tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy stuff.
  - pjc50 12y ago
    Could you cite some of these nonapproved productivity apps please?
cclogg 12y ago
I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ). Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.
- freebs 12y ago
  I wonder what would happen if app games were run like desktop MMORPGs, where there is a monthly fee. That fee could even be paid via a site, also freeing the app of Apple's cut.
  - rstupek 12y ago
    You would never get your app approved by Apple.
    - freebs 12y ago
      How man SaaS companies have monthly fees with free apps? Then, after you login, the features that you have paid for are available. I can think of plenty.
    - pjc50 12y ago
      I don't see why not, if you hide the "monthly" under energy mechanics.
Zikes 12y ago
Any one of those games could have (and may yet) reached a critical mass that would lead to profitability, but the market is almost completely unpredictable. Threes was well-designed, simple, and easy to learn, but the moment it hit the market there were a thousand clones (or more like 2048 clones, amirite?). Flappy Bird was a weekend project with "borrowed" artwork and by all rights none of us should even know what it is. There is next to no hope for anyone that doesn't have a massive enough advertising budget to convince people that "hey, all your friends are going to be playing this game, you don't want to miss out." Anything beyond that is blind luck or a truly brilliant/original idea.
kybernetyk 12y ago
> focus more on marketing than on the product itself Welcome to the software business.
- lurcio 12y ago
  Software >publishing< business :-)
benologist 12y ago
A prolific programmer isn't what a game needs after it launches.
- webwright 12y ago
  Or before, apparently. Knowing what the game market wants (and then designing that) is surprisingly hard.

imkevinxu 12y ago

I wonder if there could be a Kickstarter for indie iOS apps (no companies allowed). Seems like an awful lot of time invested to design and build an app without really knowing if it'll be popular or make money. The "pre-funding" model would be able to give indie developers 1) early fan base, 2) early revenue, 3) early validation instead of working in the dark I remember reading how Threes was made and IIRC it was on the order of many many months and redesigns before users saw/heard anything. But they hit the lottery jackpot I guess

monkey_slap 12y ago
I think there needs to be more thought and research put into validating that your app idea is worthwhile. There have been traditional means of finding your market and using surveys or engagement to get a good feeling of whether or not people will actually want your product. I make side-project apps all the time, but I'm aware that they are basically just scratching some itch I had. If you go into it expecting to make the big-bucks without doing market research and not having a marketing budget, you're going to have a bad time.
Pwntastic 12y ago
Steam Greenlight sort of fits this. You can gauge desirability by how many people specify they would buy your game if it were available. But I'm not sure if you get any actual insight into the numbers.
comex 12y ago
You could just use Kickstarter. Giving out rewards apparently is rather difficult thanks to Apple's App Store rules [1], but is doable [2] if you don't mind paying them the usual 30%. http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37569.0 http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37569.0 http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/18dclr/question_giving_inapp_redemption_codes_as_a/ http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/18dclr/question_giv...
flurp 12y ago
Check out Ramen: https://ramen.is https://ramen.is not for iOS apps/games exclusively but with a core focus on software projects.

josu 12y ago

>In the end, I've had to chalk all these apps up to the "hobby" category as it has been a money-losing proposition. This is what Taleb calls an extremistan world, you can't apply a gaussian distribution to this situation. It is difficult to find a mediocre filmmaker that just makes enough money to get by, or a writer, or a painter... You either become fairly succesful or you die without ever being able to "make it". You can't really tell when your next game will become the next Words with friends, Angry Birds, Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. But if it does, you can go from a "hobby" to a full time job even needing to hire a team.

ChrisClark 12y ago
Yeah. I made $2,000 my first month on the Android Top New charts, dropped off the charts after the 30 days and it's now about 1 sale every two days. You either get pushed all the way up and make millions, or not much at all.
- tomjen3 12y ago
  Reskin it and submit as a new game (effectively cloning yourself). If the issue is that not enough people see your game then they won't know it is a clone so who cares?
zevyoura 12y ago
This lines up with Gama Sutra's indie salary survey[0] pretty well; 11k average income, 2% >200k. [0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_the_2014_Indie_Salary_Report.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_...
voronoff 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory is an economic theory for explaining that.

k-mcgrady 12y ago

When you develop a game you're taking a big risk. There are so many ways people can entertain themselves that your game has to be something really special - and even that may not be enough. Secondly, ripping off the letterpress UI (with or without permission) was a bad idea imo. If I saw the screenshots my first thought would be. "this is a letterpress ripoff" and I wouldn't have downloaded it. If you create an app that solves a real problem or solves a problem better than the current solutions you can do okay in the App Store. It's rare to do great but you can do well enough. Games don't solve problems. They add to a growing number of ways to entertain ourselves which includes movies, music, tv, news, the internet - and all these are accessible on a mobile device. P.S. Not trying to sound too negative about games but making money in entertainment is difficult. People have so many options - many of which are free - and they'll take the cheapest one.

jazzychad 12y ago
I don't disagree with you, and partly I have always wanted to write a game or two (I've published many other non-game apps, also w/o much financial success), but I wanted to learn about the market... and I did!
- k-mcgrady 12y ago
  I tried my hand at a simple game once - it was also a disaster. Although it wasn't nearly as polished as yours look.
- protonfish 12y ago
  Yeah, you beat me there too. The best game I ever made is barely half finished (no matter how much I work I do it seems to stay half finished.) Plus you got a really great article about download numbers out of it.
protonfish 12y ago
I think you nailed it. If I stumbled across these I would never download them because I tend to notice something new and unique and these look exactly like more of the same. It makes sense that if you make something similar to 1,000 other games that being successful would be like getting a 999 on a thousand-sided die. Not to imply that it is easy to make something new (and good.) I have been working on a prototype of a game and the first feedback I got was all about how it was different than others games and that's bad. Trying to create something original is definitely swimming against the current.

peapicker 12y ago

I couldn't find 'letters' by searching on 'letters' in the app store... too many other things came up first. By search for your other games, then going to letters I was able to try it. Pretty fun, would be nice if it had some of the 'hip' words used these days, "Selfie" etc (edit, had some stuff in here about would be nice if there was an undo)

jazzychad 12y ago
Yes, searching for "Letters" is not great. The irony is that if the app was ranked highly it would show up much higher in the results, so it's a double-edge sword. Regarding "undoing" a letter selection, you can't, and that was intentional. It simplifies the UI (you can however reset the whole word by trying to submit an invalid word), and even if you could undo, the time you would spend doing it would pretty much wreck your score for that round, so overall it's no good. I know this frustrates some people, but after several weeks of playtesting and hearing this complaint, after the first few rounds that complaint quickly vanished, so I stuck with my decision.
- peapicker 12y ago
  After playing for the last 20 minutes, I agree, undo would get in the way.

dustinlakin 12y ago

Thanks for writing this up, it is always interesting and saddening to getting a deeper look at indie development on the app store. It seems like more simplistic puzzle games like these have potential to completely blow up, but the market is also completely flooded with them. And I have found that it can be difficult to find quality in the genre. I would imagine that games that have heavier focus on art and polish can make a world of difference. It seems it gets attention from blogs/review sites and more probable for Apple to feature them. Regardless, it is frustrating that your hard work that goes into these games didn't get the attention they may have deserved. Keep up the great work and hopefully we hear back from you soon about a monetarily successful game, whether that be in the app store or elsewhere.

diziet 12y ago

User acquisition for mobile is just as important as developing an application. There are companies with larger development teams AND many folks working on user acquisition AND marketing budgets reaching a millions of dollars per month, cross promotions, international reach, etc. As an indie developer, you wear all hats, from development to marketing. It's simply not reliable to launch a title and hope it takes off by itself or hope that sending emails to journalists will be enough on acquisition. If you'd spent hundreds of hours on development - figure out to spend just as much on acquisition. Doing paid acquisition might not work as the CPI (cost per install( for installs is most likely going to be much higher than an untuned app's LTV (lifetime Value). I'd hacked together a 'mobile marketing' checklist before, it might help: https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing

jonaldomo 12y ago
This is a great checklist!

incision 12y ago

>'I am not sure how to break into the App Store today except by winning the lottery.' I'm not sure I follow. It's a trio of side-projects, none of which have been available for even a full year yet, entering into a 'total bloodbath' marketplace. Is it typical to expect immediate success and profitability doing this? Traditionally, 'breaking in' is something people might spend years if not decades on and likely without the benefit of employment at a successful start-up during the week. Things take time and persevering for longer than a year while refining and/or generating a fully original title would seem to be a good start.

programminggeek 12y ago

It doesn't matter if it's games or not games. These numbers ring basically true to me. I've done enough apps that the math doesn't work out to me anymore. Simply put, you're selling candy bars, but without the disposable aspect, so your customer LTV on a $1 app is $0.7. If you have a suite of 5 or 10 $1 apps, even if you had a huge cross sell of 5 of those 10 apps, your LTV is 70% of $5... $3.50. In that scenario, to get paid $70,000, you need 20,000 customers to buy 50% of your products each year. Honestly, if you can get 20,000 to buy your app you've either hit a top list or you are so good at marketing that it is nonsensical that you would be selling $1 apps. So yeah, for most developers the app store business isn't much of a business at all. Maybe leveraging it to get interest in desktop or console apps where the per unit price is closer to $20-100 would help. Even then, I don't think you will see or hear many stores about app store millionaires going forward. The money might be there, but it's too diluted to make much of a dent. Might as well buy a lottery ticket, it costs you less time and money with basically the same outcome.

plg 12y ago

the game space is VERY crowded for mobile if I were to think about mobile apps I would aim for some specialty market segment, e.g. doctors, or lawyers, or construction, or weddings, etc. not games. too crowded. too many voices.

randall 12y ago

The thing is I want to know about these fun new games. I feel like discovery is the actual problem. If I had a random app installed on my home screen every day and I could say "more like this" or "this is horrible" I think it'd be cool. But it would have to be passive.

archagon 12y ago
That's a pretty good idea — iTunes radio for games. Too bad Apple has to be the one to do it.
kacy 12y ago
Apple acquired one in 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine)
- robterrell 12y ago
  Been expected app discovery to be a solved problem since the acquisition... since the Chomp founders left Apple recently, I would love to hear what happened.
tomjen3 12y ago
What do you mean by it would have to be passive? It would come up with a new app everyday but you would still have to indicate if you liked the app or not. Actually I can't believe there aren't already a billion apps doing this - you could make a fucking fortune selling access to your app, compared with the ever growing data on what kinds of apps do well.
- randall 12y ago
  I don't want to think about the app install process. If I mess with an app, I'd like to register whether I liked it or not.

kwhinnery 12y ago

I would resist the urge to give too much credit to luck and marketing when it comes to indie game success. Notable outliers like Bastion, Sword + Sworcery, and FTL were all stunning executions. The FTL team did almost no marketing, but released a product that spoke directly to the target market of desktop gamers. Passionate people played it, liked it, and told others. It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience. There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I don't think that's the only path.

jazzychad 12y ago
Just a slight correction: FTL had a very successful kickstarter which generated tons of marketing and hype before launch - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-tha... Bastion was also published by Warner Brothers so it had some significant weight behind it.
- kwhinnery 12y ago
  Slight addendum for your slight (and correct) corrections :) Both games had been in self-funded development a long time and had achieved some degree of critical acclaim before Kickstarter and signing on with WB, respectively. I might argue that their previous work had created the conditions for them to earn those victories and reap the benefits. For Bastion, it's probably good to be explicit that WB did not provide them funding. The benefit to Supergiant was access to advertising and speeding their way through the publishing process for Xbox Live Arcade. A significant victory they sought out and earned, to be sure. In the case of FTL, the success of the Kickstarter may have generated some additional buzz because of how much they beat their goal. But the reason they beat their goal was that their game had already been discovered and appreciated (even in its early form) by a community of people passionate about games. Without organized marketing on their part, aside from showing the game to many of their colleagues.

Elizer0x0309 12y ago

I'm surprised nobody is talking about the actual game!? It's really not standing out. Another "Word" type game that barely innovates on the genre. I guess people are so focused on marketing, user acquisition and not .... wait for it.... PRODUCT!

kpao 12y ago
This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- joeblau 12y ago
  Yeah, I wrote this game Orb (http://joeblau.com/orb./ http://joeblau.com/orb./) In 3 days for iOS and Android. I didn't put any money into marketing it, but I did promote it. I made my game to test the effectiveness of the Apple Store vs the Play Store vs the Amazon store for an app with minimal publishing. I've definitely learned a lot which I'll probably blog about soon.

sjtgraham 12y ago

The "Letters" numbers shock me, I follow Chad on Twitter, downloaded the game and found it to be very addictive, especially the mechanic of solving the daily word. Chad, I really think there is something there in Letters; it definitely deserves some push.

jazzychad 12y ago
Thanks. Yeah, I do too... I'm not sure how to push it. I just need a financier :)
- adinb 12y ago
  Well, a publisher or submitting to the major mobile gaming sites, like TouchArcade. Speaking of, have you made any threads in the Touch Arcade forums? I've seen several apps get their initial exposure by just posting and asking for feedback.
- gojomo 12y ago
  As a non-expert reading this thread with some objective distance, the repeated recommendations that stand out are the importance of a distinctive (& searchable) name, and a graphical look/description that fights 'copycat' impressions. (Otherwise, the game never even gets a look from players or reviewers.) So maybe fresh eyes & new language/visual brainstorming would be more relevant than a financier? You've already got one possible alternate name – "The Letters Game" – in your domain/twitter-handle, but I suspect something even more distinctive is possible. You might also tweak the icon and color scheme to convey more novelty compared to the famous category-leaders...
oo7jeep 12y ago
I agree - I downloaded and played for at least a couple weeks. Important note: I'm not a gamer and rarely ever get caught up in a game for that amount of time.

james_hague 12y ago

The App Store is EXTREMELY clogged on the low-end. If it's your first game, if you use "puzzle" to describe it, if it's a spin on Tetris or Threes or Snake or match-3 or anything well-known, if someone could clone it in a week...that's the low-end. Not only will you have trouble getting customers to notice you, but you'll also fight just to get any kind of review. What's also happening is that developers (myself included: http://appstore.com/daisypop http://appstore.com/daisypop) think "Wow, I shouldn't have spent so much time on that; I need to make something simpler and more rapidly so I have a better chance of turning a profit." This accelerates the problem.

m3mnoch 12y ago

like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up. a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers. tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art. 1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath" while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank, that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component. you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-playing, average-genre games. if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional. just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they can't build amazing games. 2) marketing is everything. no. no it's not. i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented, measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!! come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having issues. come to find out, you need a good game. if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough. you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content to share and they will. that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far. 3) it's a lottery. only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict as an example: awful 2048 grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-03-19&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/... still substantial threes grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-02-06&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/... if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.) that looks like a lottery. if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next minecraft or spelunky. so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise" book. if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet -- to make quality games. you only think you do. don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.

_random_ 12y ago

I will be the negative guy here, down-vote if you will. What kind of profit did you expect? As a game app consumer I only buy the very best (original and/or polished) apps in their respective categories. E.g. Leo's Fortune, FTL, Limbo, Icebreaker, Reaper would be very easy purchases for me. You can see those games had _a lot_ of effort put into. In my subjective, blatant and impolite opinion your apps could be more of the cause of the over-saturation problem rather than victims. Saying that, I have nothing to show myself so far :).

mkirsche 12y ago

I spent 6 month developing a game in my spare time: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-turtles/id892249118?ls=1&mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-turtles/id892249118?ls... 3 weeks after the launch the game sold 6 copies and made 8,95$. I sent out 51 promo codes to various review sites but only 8 of them got redeemed. I can already guess how impossible it is to enter the iOS gaming market.

physcab 12y ago

> This also means that 74 people out of 21,309 (0.3%) paid to unlock internationally compared to 112 out of 5521 (2%) that paid to unlock domestically. I don't know how many of these are DAU (you didn't say), but these numbers are not as bad as they might seem. 1%-5% is about industry average for % spenders in games. Where you need to tune things is figure out who the spenders are and raise your ROI. You state that you spent $700 to get $261 in revenue which is about 37% ROI. Not good, but its a start atleast. Obviously you want to be above 1. What I would do is invest a little in some analytics, figure out who your spenders are and cohort them. Then see if you can reduce your spend, become more targeted in your buying, while also increasing opportunities to earn more revenue. Just my $0.02

blutoot 12y ago

I feel that, in the long run, apps are meant to be user interface to something bigger than being an all-encompassing entity for use cases outside of music, gaming and a few other categories. In other words, the service being accessed through an app will be equally if not more important compared to the app itself. And I just don't see indie devs being able to manage and scale on both fronts equally, yet. Maybe the more infrastructure as a code and web app development get commoditized, the better will be the chances for indies to shine/profit again? Until then, app is just gonna be a fancy (and in many cases the only) endpoint for most sustainable business models.

yeureka 12y ago

Making it on the App store with games is extremely hard. I have 3 friends who each developed a mobile game and made no money, basically the games serve as portfolio for future work. I don't think the quality is the issue with what my friends produced: http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/ http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/ http://gamewhizzes.com/ http://gamewhizzes.com/ http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php Most likely marketing failures. That being said, I am working on one myself and have all the hopes that any indie has.

m3mnoch 12y ago
marketing failures? how would you differentiate them with marketing? "yet another color bubble popper!" "yet another side-scrolling shooter where you kill the undead!" "yet another match three with fruit!" i'm not sure i agree with your assessment as to marketing failures. if you said me-too-market-fit, however, i'd say you were on to something. their level of polish is pretty nice, so they should step out of the lottery and make a non-me-too quality game. i bet they would be pretty successful with it. in fact, if they keep with it, i'd put money on it they'll eventually be very successful.
- yeureka 12y ago
  I hope you are right - that a fun new gameplay with an adequate level of polish is enough for moderate success. I guess that deep down I also believe the same and that is what makes me keep on going to finish my side project.
  - skeoh 12y ago
    Are you comfortable sharing any details on your side project? Stuff like this interests me.
    - yeureka 12y ago
      It's a game I have been working on for some time. The gameplay is simple and easy to copy and that is why I have been reluctant to show it to too many people. I hope to finish it in the next 6 months but It could take longer depending on how much spare time I have for it. I am planning on showing it to the HN crowd first - the support is always pretty good here.

funtober 12y ago

My friend and I kicked around putting some effort into building an app a few years back when people started publishing the "how to make money on the app store" posts. So thank you for posting this. My suggestion is to find a website with an established niche (outside of the traditional app review websites) and audience who will promote your product ... and build something for that audience. For example, my website has a ton of traffic in September and October. It's new though, so we are still working out monetization. There's a couple games in the market that would appeal to my visitors. I could probably give one a significant bump. And not one of them has ever contacted me about a review, provided a promo code, etc ... let alone a revenue share. I didn't spend much time looking at Letters, but maybe it would do well on the blog of a english teacher?

prawn 12y ago

Hi Chad, are you still playing all of your games yourself? I wonder if they are "sticky" enough? Bit hard to tell from the screen captures - they don't really stand out to me in the screenshots. But I like word games so will check out Letters! While you got the OK for the Letterpress UI from the creator, I wonder if anyone else who's unaware of that would notice and think you're a clone and ignore you? I released my first ever iOS game* last week and it's a word game like yours. Not sure if we (two man team) just got lucky, but overnight we hit millionth game played and we've hit #1 word game in 30 countries at one point or another. People are playing about 3-5 games per second at any given point of the day which amazes me. The game took us four months to make - a month on the core mechanic and the rest polishing. I have a pipeline of game ideas I think are very good so definitely intend to make more. * Our game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8

m3mnoch 12y ago
yes -- hexiled is a great example of a quality game done right with very little (need for) marketing. i'm cheering for you! go, man, go!
ronyeh 12y ago
Hexiled looks great! The graphics definitely stand out (especially the space theme). I'll play it tonight. Best of luck. I do think the OP's apps look a little too much like Letterpress. If I had seen them in the App Store, I would have dismissed them as a ripoff and have never given them a chance... Also, the font in the Letters app doesn't look as professional as Hexiled, Letterpress, or SpellTower. Even in the app icon, the letter L's font weight varies, and the 2 feels italicized in a weird way. See: http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg
- prawn 12y ago
  It's funny you should say that as the font in Hexiled ended up being the very, very default Arial Black and the icons are almost entirely based off Font Awesome. I paid a lot of attention though to consistency where possible (colours, use of caps, "voice" of the game, etc) but there's a lot of room for improvement. Thanks so much for the encouragement. We've had a great experience launching the game. I'm on Twitter at @isaacforman if you have any feedback about Hexiled.

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apptoss 12y ago

My iOS Indie-Nongame Numbers First published app (an educational niche): $1,832 in first three months. $1,360 in past 30 days. Second published app (a semi-educational game-related app): $49 in first three months. $6 in past 30 days. Third published app (an educational niche): $360 in first three months. $385 in past 30 days. I now have over a dozen apps. Three of those earn less than $100 a month and I've all but abandoned them. Four more also earn less than $100 a month but are part of suite of clones that address different niches. Together, the suite earns over $200 a month now. My top 4 apps earn more like $100, $300, $400, and $1400 a month now. Over the past year, those iOS apps earned me just over $40,000. Not enough to live on alone but it's not a bad start.

afro88 12y ago
I would be interested in more information regarding your marketing for these apps, if you would be open to writing about it
- apptoss 12y ago
  I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales. The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps" list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run ads for any other apps except mine.)
  - afro88 12y ago
    Nice, thanks for the summary
klassobanieras 12y ago
My iPad comic-reader numbers Average rating: 4.9 stars $3 paid upfront: $2750 (first 11 months) Free with one-time $3 IAP: $1560 (past 3 months) Currently averaging around $15 per day from IAPs. Details: http://chunkyreader.tumblr.com/post/93410425677/sales http://chunkyreader.tumblr.com/post/93410425677/sales

jbverschoor 12y ago

Same for us.. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-thoth/id397757153?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-thoth/i... This one had promotion through free app of the day. Lifetime revenue was around $700. Paid around $400 in ads https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-free/id577099837?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-free/id5770998... Spent ca $1500 on ads, made $20 revenue.

lukeholder 12y ago
maybe link to the english version of the app store page for the one you spent $1500 on ads for.

cix 12y ago

Some people may say that we are in a Idiocracy, seeing games like Flappy bird become trend setters while AAA titles are getting barely any downloads. Mobile game developers need to understand the platform is more important than the game. In that you develop what is best for the platform and demographic. Not what you perceive as being high quality and pour millions of dollars and R&D. The more you make the mobile game look like a job, regardless how difficult it was to make, it will not be enjoyed because of such complexity. Although for simple Apps that have little ways to differ from the crowd, then marketing with some quirky difference to it seems to be the most effective.

passfree 12y ago

$0.99 for an App is not sustainable pricing unless your product is mass-marketed in order to make up the numbers. My company have several products in iOS and Mac App Stores and none of them are near this price. In fact, one of our products (Websecurify for iOS) is $16 which you may say is an expensive app for iOS but this is a more realistic pricing. I doubt we would have achieved any effect if we had priced it $0.99. Btw, the next version of our app will probably cost twice as much because even $16 is barely sustainable. I think it is time for iOS developers get their strategy checked up. I know a lot of people want to get their app/game to a lot of people but unless you have evidence that you app is reaching millions of people, it is not going to work.

gojomo 12y ago

I hate in-game ads. But if paired with an in-game ad-buyout option, they do tend to remind me that, if I'm going to be playing the game repeatedly, I should do the buy-out. So even if ads earn a negligible amount... are they ever worth trying as a mechanism to boost in-game purchases?

deleted 12y ago

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Aldo_MX 12y ago

Thanks for sharing your numbers, they were an eye opener for me, and now I'll need to plan a better strategy...

hipjiveguy 12y ago

I think you'd have more success if you twist your games a wee bit, and try and turn them educational. That way you'd be able to put them in the educational category, where this guy who has similar word styles games as yours, is doing very well: http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-education-apps-market.html?hn%209/9 http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-educatio... Also, I couldn't find your contact info on your blog - is it there somewhere? You'd want press to be able to find it if so....