I know we have discussed this before but is anyone having success on the app store. Some of the games that I buy from this forum are so polished and good but never make any top lists. Just wanted to know if anyone is making anything decent besides the standouts.
I just launched my first game "Dotter" and I am planning on not making any money on it, I just love doing it. But the idea of not having to keep a full time job would be nice :)
Success in the App Store
(74 posts) (33 voices)-
Posted 1 year ago #
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zenkimoto
MemberYou know, I've been wondering that as well. I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out of this board, but only a few do I ever see make it to the top lists. The prospect of working for myself is very enticing. I have not launched an app yet but I currently working on a project, but my hopes are the same as yours. I wish you the best on your game.
I would love to hear any success/failure stories as well if anyone would care to share. And what you learned from it? :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
I will have no problem sharing all info including downloads/sales for Dotter since it's my first game. I loved hearing form others that provided the same information.
The funny thing is, I launched my first app a while back "Stinkometer" which is a crap entertainment app. I am making roughly $5-$10 a day in ad revenue from it through Ad Mob. I am shocked that anyone even downloaded it to be honest and the majority are from other countries. But I wanted to understand the app store submission process before submitting any games.
I have already learned a ton from initial feedback I received from promo codes given out. It is amazing how different actual users see your game.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Lol! "I am shocked that anyone even downloaded it to be honest"
Posted 1 year ago # -
I have 3 apps in the AppStore , for about 8 months now. They are "iTapster" , "iTapster Lite" and "WMD?". There are a lot of people here in this forum that made some great apps and are doing very well, but perhaps my perspective from the bottom of the pile might help too.
Paid sales for my apps have been dismal, i.e a few per day, some days none. I thought that people just didn't like the apps, or like them only if they're free. So I assume I have work to do to make the apps better.
However, when I put them to free , downloads jump to about 800 per day. For example, when I put my app "WMD?" to free, it goes to the top 50 and sometimes top 25 in the Games/Trivia category in a matter of days in several countries. Then when I issue an update, I compare the number of users downloading the update to the total number of downloads in that period, and I find that about 80% retain the app. But being near the top in a free category has only a slight effect on sales when I switch back to paid.
The downside of having time where the app is free is that most people who like the app and keep it, never rate it. So what you get is for example my "iTapster" app having 56 ratings, average 2.5 stars , but has a core group of about 8,000 users that keep the app and update it. So about 7,775 people like it, and 25 don't, but the rating doesn't reflect that.
I've found that using AdMob was a total waste. I'd wind up with thousands of hits , and no more sales than if I had no ads. I also notice that if you allow hits from outside the US, the hits skyrocket and eat up your account quota. So I suspect that some people displaying ads are using the system to jack up their ad revenue with proxy servers.
The only effective things I've found to do if sales are low are ( and by "effective", I mean things that cause even some small kind of change) :
1) If sales are low , I move to another category and measure downloads over a few days. Try paid and free to see.
2) Toggle the price from super high to low to free with 1 week periods. Sort of like jigging when fishing. I think this works because there are sites that list you when the price drops or is free. But it has to be set at the price long enough for the sites to pick up the change.
3) Issue an update
4) Have some small free apps that mention your paid app. This is sort of like how the TV networks have lead ins to and from their hit shows. Having a Lite version of the app does this too.
5) I use AppFigures to measure/graph the different things I try to see what has an effect and what doesn't. This has actual helped a lot to see cause/effect in a graph form, and without having to download stats every day.
6) When I put an app for free for too long, the rating goes down. So I tend to plan the free cycles for shortly before I'm going to issue an update. Then I set the app back to paid, which stops the casual download rating of 1 star, and the rating gets reset for the new version.Hope that helps.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Following Wayne's example, this is my experience.
I have one game in the App Store, "Mini Taxi", been there since September and it's had 1 update so far.
- Sales are an average of 15-20 a day, depending on the period. The christmas period and the subsequent 2 months saw a doubling (if not more) in sales, with an average of 35-40 (even 60) sales a day.
- I tried making it free for a day, helped me get hundreds of ratings, but as it happens in this case most of the ratings are low and it's now at an average of 2 1/2 or 3 (depends who says so)
- I also use AppFigures to keep track of sales/statistics
- Updates are important I think, I'll be updating soon I hope with a new set of graphics and more content to see if that impacts sales somewhat
- The prospect of being your own boss is sweet :) I actually took the plunge, quit my regular 3d animator job, took all the money I had, moved to a different country (Netherlands) and now "living the dream" of being dirt poor and working from home. Still, it's worth it and you never know that I might break it even.
I wouldn't be able to survive on iPhone development alone, not at the rate that my only game is selling anyway, but there's always hope for the future, Paper Bridge, a physics bridge construction game with box2d is very nearly ready for release :)Posted 1 year ago # -
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How does it work when you make a steady amount like, say $10 or $20 a day? What I mean is, how is that possible? At those levels of downloads, you can't possibly be in the top 100 of any list, so how are 10 to 20 people per day finding your app?
It's encouraging, to me, that you can make any amount, even a small amount, while not being on any top 100 list.
@PatrickC, I guess I'm looking at your post, specifically, and wondering how people are finding Mini Taxi? Do you think it's through search terms/keywords? Genius?
Posted 1 year ago # -
Mini Taxi is such a great game. I love it, would have never found it without this forum.
Posted 1 year ago # -
@alien_ken
I've thought about that, I think it's the word "taxi" in the title and perhaps a good use of keywords?
The game is normally in position 80 as average, although in the past week it's dropped below the 100 mark, this is in the racing games category.@reedjsmith
thanks I'm glad you like it, I've been thinking of updating it with improved graphics/steering/physics/etc but it would require a certain amount of work and not sure it would justify any possible increase in sales.Posted 1 year ago # -
Since there appears to be a great interest of what life in the app store is like, I've written a blog entry about life in the app store with my app AutoWiFi.
You'll find it here:
http://blog.subzero.eu/2010/03/over-a-years-of-experience-in-the-app-store/
Hope its of use, its pretty detailed ;)
Posted 1 year ago # -
@hactar great writeup on your experiences! I haven't reased my first app yet so I have all of this to look forward to.
What do people think about courting the mobile game publishers like Chillingo just to name one that makes a point of saying that they work with Idie developers?
Have any people here found sales increases due to integrating Open Feint in their app?
Posted 1 year ago # -
I have only a game: AbstractWar 2.0
I won 80 euros (100 dollars) in 3 days. but no website has made a review yet.
what do you think?Posted 1 year ago # -
@hactar, Great insight into the whole process!
Like @hactor we didn't get into this to make 'easy money', for me personally its being able to decide what I build and not having to justify it to a committee of people who look at things from a 'commercial perspective'. A financial return simply mean I could work on these during the daytime instead of squeezing them in at... 1.40am
So the correlation for me is sales = sleep :)
Posted 1 year ago # -
Well... I'm still programming because it is something I like. I am writing my first cocos2d game right now, but I have another 6 non-cocos2d games in the app store. The total number of sales is disappointing, and I don't know why. I think my games are well advertised, try to look for "RRdaS Game Factory", "RRdaS", "Escaping Jail" or "Enhanced iSimon" in Google, you will find me. I also appear in many sites specialized in iPhone applications. None of this helped me to increase the sales.
Only well known companies (EA, Nanco, etc.) can keep their games in the top for a long time. This is the reality.
But, please, don't feel yourself dis-encouraged by my words. As I said, I'm still programming :)
RRdaS
Posted 1 year ago # -
Well, I did iPhone development for myself whole past year. One game was lucky to be introduced by apple. All in all, from like 10-15 apps there (payed and free versions) I made about $3000 on app store and $1500 from advertising for the whole year. If it was my only income I would be dead already :)
Then in December 2009 I decided to develop for 3rd parties a little. And I made about $5000 in January 2010. So for now I paused developing for myself, put everything in 3rd parties and waiting for some good idea to make something for myself again...
Wish you luck everybody
Posted 1 year ago # -
This is good stuff.... I got started wanting to do a game but have yet to have an original thought :/ so I've made several Utilities and am earning around $35 - $40 per day on three / four apps. The best one from a profit / time point of view is where I had the idea at 3:00 AM, wrote the app from 5:00 am until around 12:00 noon and had it submitted to Apple by 1:00 PM. Was in the store before I got around to adding it to my web site... It's crazy stuff...
Me personally though I do not change prices, right or wrong I just haven't done it. Now I've also got several lame a$$ apps that overall have earned about $3.48 :-D but so it goes... I also have zero ads.
Re: price changes: Once I find an app I'm interested in I check Appshopper.com and if it has any prices changes I'll wait it out for as much as a couple of months, yup just to save a buck or two. <- I guess that's why I don't change the price.
:-)
CGOh and crmagicxxx - you're "working for the man"... you sell out... nah, just bustin' yah. :-)
Posted 1 year ago # -
It is amazing the passion we all have for making apps. Like everyone else, I don't care if I make any money but it would be nice. We are living in an amazing time in technology and we are embracing it. Where else can you do whatever you want and deliver it to consumers quickly and cheaply in a buck rogers, star trek mini computer called the iphone. Just amazing. Remember when the PC was born geeks like us got together for fun to show it off. That is what we are doing now and it will only lead to success as developing mobile apps becomes an essential skill for developers/programmers.
Posted 1 year ago # -
I found this guy's experiences helpful to me when I was first looking into this kind of thing. Some of this data is a bit dated, but it still gives you an idea of how things can go. He has done this with 2 separate apps now. These are about the sales numbers:
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/04/27/the-numbers-post-part-2/And these are closer to development tips:
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/04/14/how-to-make-dapple-in-6-months/
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2010/01/06/postmortem-monkeys-in-space/Posted 1 year ago # -
Although I have more than 10 apps in the App Store now, Sniper Strike is the first game that I can truly call my own. It's based on the game engine from Lone Wolf, but I ended up rewriting almost all of it.
It was approved on Dec 23rd, but that was 1 day too late to be on the new release list. So I really didn't make much money over the x-mas break. However, it did get on the iTunes New&Noteworthy games section which provided a much needed bump in sales.
While on N&N, it never broke into the top 100 arcade or action. Being on N&N by itself didn't create any sustainable momentum. If any of my future titles ever end up being on the list again, I'll try to capitalize on it.
This genre is very crowded now, but I'm still happy how it turned out. I'm going take all code and knowledge to the next project and make it even better.
Posted 1 year ago # -
Two apps under my belt: iLetDown and Teragati. I have not yet passed the $150 threshold for payment from Apple.
iLetDown was a test run to learn about the App Store. It was mid-May 2009, and I was sitting in the labor & delivery room with my wife, a few hours away from having our baby daughter. She remarked that hearing other babies cry in other rooms caused her to have contractions. I turned that into two ideas: one an app that simply emitted screaming baby noises, which soon-to-be dads could buy to feel like they were helping in the birthing process, and the other an app that helped with breastfeeding through a similar biological process. Of course when a new baby is born, the whole world stops, so it wasn't until about six weeks later that I was able to spend an evening putting together iLetDown. It was approved in a couple days and has been on the App Store since then at $1.99. I am utterly shocked that it sells at all, but it does sell about one copy every two weeks. A couple weeks ago I made it free for a few days, and got over a thousand downloads.... and a few days later a bunch of one-star ratings to balance out the five-star ratings I'd built up over many months. It's now priced at $1.99 once again. I find it hard to believe that there were 1,000 breastfeeding moms waiting for iLetDown to drop from $1.99 to free, so I am certain that I captured the ooh-it's-free-download-it-now-no-matter-what-it-is bottomfeeder crowd, and when 999 of them discovered it was a narrow-niche healthcare product, they immediately uninstalled it with a "I'm a 22-year-old male with no need for a breastfeeding app, so it gets one star" rating. Let that be a lesson to those of you considering the free-for-a-day experiment.
Teragati was the sort of simple, casual game I'd wanted to write for the last year (in my defense for taking so long, I was going through chemotherapy and could barely walk, and for a while I thought I was going to die, so iPhone games weren't high on my list of priorities). I had scribbled a bunch of game ideas in my notebook since early 2009, and in January when I finally got my strength back, I picked the simplest of the bunch (a spaceship flying through an asteroid field) and went with it. I started coding January 12 and submitted on February 10.
We were approved Monday evening, February 15, but I didn't see the mail until 5 a.m. the next day. My wife and I emailed all our friends and family, and we created a Teragati fan page on Facebook, and that was good for 47 sales on the first day. The next day we appeared in the App Store for the first time (not sure whether that's an App Store bug, but new releases were lagging by one day), and sales for the second day were about half (22). Since the app was not discoverable on the first day, I attribute all 47 sales to our own spamming of our friends and family, and since we didn't do any additional publicity on the second day, I attribute the 22 sales entirely to the App Store's new-releases listing.
Since then, sales have halved just about every day. These days we'll get from 0-3 sales/day. Our reviews have been great, and my Flurry stats show that 51% of users are still playing the game, with an average session length of 11 minutes. My online score server shows that people are getting better at the game, too, which shows that they're learning (rather than just absent-mindedly killing time with it). I know the game doesn't have the production values of a "big" game, but for what it was meant to be -- a fun way to spend a couple minutes -- it turned out the way I wanted it to. I do have nagging fears about 25 times a day that "uh, maybe the reason it's not selling is that it sucks?" but the stats suggest otherwise. I'm happy that a pretty large percentage of people who buy it are playing it and enjoying it, even if they seem not to be spreading the word to their friends.
Some of the advertising I've tried:
- AdMob. The fastest $50 I have ever spent in my whole life. Hundreds of clicks in a few minutes, ZERO conversions.
- Facebook. Less expensive, more effective. I have been meaning as an experiment to try advertising the fan page, rather than the game itself, with the reasoning that people on Facebook are looking for people and communities rather than buying things, so I might have more success easing people into the Teragati way of life, and then hoping they'll pay their dollar when they see how much fun other people are having.
- Google AdWords. I had much too small a budget to know whether this succeeded, but I paid for about two clicks a day and don't believe I got any conversions from that.
- Making a YouTube video. This is a little like our company's blog: it's not advertising, but it's good to have out there when you want to put together a package to send someone.
- Review requests. I've been making these very slowly and very carefully, because I know you get only one shot with each of them, and I'm trying to learn from mistakes and improve on each successive request. So far I've gotten one response, and we're in a good dialogue that I hope culminates in a published review.
- In-person marketing. I carry lots of $1 bills in my wallet and regularly offer people a dollar to install the game if they promise to tell a friend if they like it. Since I pick up my kids at school, I see lots of parents waiting around with iPhones, so it's a target-rich environment. Most people happily buy the game but refuse the dollar, but some people do take it.
- Participating in this forum. That's obviously a form of advertising, though I'll warn you not to expect fellow cocos2d developers to give you the benefit of the doubt when they review your game, and I'll leave it at that!
- Developing the game at my local hackerspace (Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California). I'd hoped that by meeting people in person while working there, I'd get early feedback and some word-of-mouth buzz. I did get some outstanding beta feedback, and probably a sale or two, but it hasn't yet had any network effects.
- Promo codes on forums. This achieves absolutely nothing. In fact, all you get (as far as I can tell) is reviews by people who would pay $0.00 for your game but wouldn't pay $0.99. That is not a good gene pool of potential reviewers.
- Switching over to OpenFeint. I did this in my latest update. I committed the sins of gluttony and pride in writing my own scoring server (I love working on server-side stuff), but I didn't appreciate the cross-promotion services that OF provides. That's been out only for a few days so we'll see whether it has any effect.All this, and I've taken in around $75 in about two and a half weeks. I didn't expect this game to be a hit, but I had honestly hoped that the $99 I'd paid to Apple for the developer program would bring effortless App Store promotion worth more than what I paid (and to be fair, the $99 is for a year's membership, and it looks like I will bring in more than $99 by February 2011). I suppose this is what they mean when they say the App Store has been a victim of its own success: yeah, it's collectively moving a tremendous amount of money from iPhone owners to iPhone developers, but the long tail has gotten very, very, very long.
Next steps:
- Continue to update the game in response to my small but vocal community of fans. But I can't work for free, and I can't work for $0.25/hour, so at some point soon that'll have to stop, unless the game starts paying more.
- Continue working with reviewers and learning what works. Hope to hit the lottery with a good, published review.
- Move on to the next game in furtherance of my goal of publishing 3 or 4 games this year. The hard part is deciding when to stop using Teragati as a learning experience, and when to take that experience and do something new and better with it. If I write Teragati The Sequel and it performs only as well as Teragati Classic, I have nobody to blame but myself for not learning from my mistakes. But if I learn from Teragati and the next game is Anti-Teragati, perhaps it'll do better.
As a side point, when I'm feeling discouraged, I take a look at the Doodle Jump review that I am pretty sure kicked off the whole Doodle Jump craze. Look it up on the web. It's a good review, but it starts out dismal: (paraphrasing) "So anyway we found this game called Doodle Jump in our review queue. It's a ripoff of such-and-such other game..." blah blah blah, but the reviewer then goes on to say that they added a few cute tweaks that make the game fun, and in the end it's worth 99 cents. The lesson I take from this is that even Doodle Jump started out as just another ordinary iPhone game, sitting in some reviewer's inbox, and once the right people played it a few times, it went on to fame and fortune. I figure that if Doodle Jump can hit it big, then maybe Teragati can someday make its development costs back.
I doubt I sound like it from this post, but I am having fun. I'm grateful to be alive after what happened last year, and other than spending time with my family I can't imagine a more exciting way to spend my time here on Earth than being an indie game developer. It's harder than I'd feared, but just as exhilarating as I'd dreamed.
Posted 1 year ago # -
eoin
MemberBy the way, I really think that the iPad will be a winner for some people who get in early and realise that the iPad demands desktop type apps, or better quality, and the copying of the iPhone UI will never work.
So could cocos2d be used for a normal application ( i.e. a twitter app) , or at least some animation technology.
Personally I think it could. That could be an idea.
Posted 1 year ago #
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