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Read carefully, the author explains it very well. Basically, 90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks, which happens only and only if your app hits to top

by ruslan 17y ago

Read carefully, the author explains it very well. Basically, 90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks, which happens only and only if your app hits to top 100 (which is 99.95% less probable for an average developer). After that sales slow down to virtually zero (1-2 sales a week). PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here.

cakesy 17y ago
That has not been my experience, but it may be different for games. But still, he seems to ignore that more people will buy it at $0.99 rather than $2.99. And this will raise its ranking.
gojomo 17y ago
The App Store is only 17 months old; it's premature to say what the long term patterns will be with so little data, and while marketing strategies and Apple's own presentation of "top seller" lists keeps changing. Old PS2 games still sell, 10 years after the platform was introduced. A good, simple game for the iPhone platform may still be sellable, in some format, in 2019. And the installed base of compatible devices could be 20x larger. PS. There was an invention hundreds of years ago that addresses exactly the need for paying current costs while waiting for long-term profitable projects to pan out. It's called 'finance'. Considering only 2-month windows of costs and revenues as if we were talking about subsistence farmers is a rookie myopia.
patio11 17y ago
90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks That is probably a conservative estimate on the AppStore (and people ask me why I won't develop for it). By way of comparison, roughly .3% of my sales to date were within 6 weeks of release. If you consider the release of my web version to also count, then about that bumps up to about 5%.
thwarted 17y ago
PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here. If this is their main concern, then why are they spending their time on such a low payout time consuming endeavor? "Not enough people are buying my iPhone app fast enough for long enough" isn't something a mortgage lender or a hungry kid wants to hear.
AdamAtomic 17y ago
Just a reminder, lots of things in that article are simplified quite a bit for the sake of putting together a coherent argument. The app store, in our experience, has an AWFULLY long tail. But our games have also been pretty successful - I would say the more complete statement is that you will do 50% of your lifetime revenue in the first 2 months, but it will take at least a year or so to earn the other half. That's not insubstantial by any means, but it also means that that revenue isn't terribly useful for building your next project (this is again a simplification, as the situation changes when you have more than one app bringing in that stream, etc etc). So yea, I didn't mean for it to sound quite so dramatic, like the app store doesn't have any tail at all, because that's not really true. But for getting a read on your product's success and earning some useful revenue for the next project, those first 2 months in my experience are key.

by ruslan 17y ago

cakesy 17y ago

That has not been my experience, but it may be different for games. But still, he seems to ignore that more people will buy it at $0.99 rather than $2.99. And this will raise its ranking.

gojomo 17y ago

The App Store is only 17 months old; it's premature to say what the long term patterns will be with so little data, and while marketing strategies and Apple's own presentation of "top seller" lists keeps changing. Old PS2 games still sell, 10 years after the platform was introduced. A good, simple game for the iPhone platform may still be sellable, in some format, in 2019. And the installed base of compatible devices could be 20x larger. PS. There was an invention hundreds of years ago that addresses exactly the need for paying current costs while waiting for long-term profitable projects to pan out. It's called 'finance'. Considering only 2-month windows of costs and revenues as if we were talking about subsistence farmers is a rookie myopia.

patio11 17y ago

90% of app sales are made during first 6 weeks That is probably a conservative estimate on the AppStore (and people ask me why I won't develop for it). By way of comparison, roughly .3% of my sales to date were within 6 weeks of release. If you consider the release of my web version to also count, then about that bumps up to about 5%.

thwarted 17y ago

PS. Developers want to eat, support their families, pay their mortgages, etc. so patience is not an option here. If this is their main concern, then why are they spending their time on such a low payout time consuming endeavor? "Not enough people are buying my iPhone app fast enough for long enough" isn't something a mortgage lender or a hungry kid wants to hear.

AdamAtomic 17y ago

Just a reminder, lots of things in that article are simplified quite a bit for the sake of putting together a coherent argument. The app store, in our experience, has an AWFULLY long tail. But our games have also been pretty successful - I would say the more complete statement is that you will do 50% of your lifetime revenue in the first 2 months, but it will take at least a year or so to earn the other half. That's not insubstantial by any means, but it also means that that revenue isn't terribly useful for building your next project (this is again a simplification, as the situation changes when you have more than one app bringing in that stream, etc etc). So yea, I didn't mean for it to sound quite so dramatic, like the app store doesn't have any tail at all, because that's not really true. But for getting a read on your product's success and earning some useful revenue for the next project, those first 2 months in my experience are key.