Selling an iPhone game: The sales figures in detail. Paul Johnson is the co-founder and managing Director at Rubicon Development. He’s give us his insights in the sales figures for Rubicon’s latest title, Great Little War Game, currently available on iOS. This post originally appeared on indiegamer.com and is reproduced with permission. Great L ittle War Game has been out on sale now for about three months. We just passed a milestone income from Apple of $150,000 Development costs were about $100,000 so we’re already in profit which is kinda cool for our first serious outing into genuine indieland. Getting the right pricing model We’ve tried pricing all over the place. These are hardly Angry Birds numbers but I’m pretty happy with them.
The effect of chart position and reviews An interesting observation is that being outside of the top charts has not affected our sales in a noticeable way – chart position doesn’t seem to reinforce itself with positive feedback, and I’d go so far to say that charting is actually irrelevant to sales. iPhone App Sales, Exposed. This guest post was written by Alex Ahlund, the former CEO of AppVee and AndroidApps, which was recently acquired by mobile app directory Appolicious.
He is currently an advisor to Appolicious. One of the most commonly asked questions we get from both developers and industry outsiders is: how much money can I make developing apps? It’s a hard question to answer. So we decided to conduct a survey. We asked for sale sdata from 124 developers that market applications ranging in price from 99 cents to $79.99.
There are many different metrics that must be taken into account – just because product X sold well does not mean product Y will. The following financial information is pulled from 96 developers who provided in-depth sales data and pricing metrics. The average total number of units sold was 101,024 copies within an average period of 261 days. Market success still top-heavy Being featured by Apple is the greatest contributor to spiking sales. Making A Living (Barely) On The iPhone App Store (aka The Numbers Post) The App Store is a very hit-driven environment. A few apps sell a large amount of units, and the great majority sell next to nothing. That’s somewhat similar to the music industry, except that the audience for music is much larger, so both the big hits and the small players get more sales. We’ve drooled over the numbers chart toppers sold, we’ve seen sales reports of very successful games, and we’ve also seen what happens when apps languish at the bottom.
I want to share the sales data for Flower Garden. Not just the raw data, but a bit of the story behind it, my thoughts, struggles, and why things happened the way they did. The first thing that you’ll notice is that Flower Garden is a strange in-between app. The Full Monty I know that if I put it off, you’re just going to skip to the end to see the sales plot, so let’s get that out of the way. The vertical axis is daily profit in US $ (after Apple’s 30% cut). How many hours of work does Flower Garden represent? Launch Mother’s Day. Analysis: Narrative Exoskeletons & Game Dev Story. [In this analysis, Tom Armitage looks at Kairosoft's iPhone cult hit Game Dev Story, examining the narrative reasons why game creators and players alike are transfixed by the Japanese-created 'build your own game studio' title.]
As I played Kairosoft's Game Dev Story on my morning commute, the images that formed in my head fell into two categories. The first were little more than a high-resolution version of what what was playing out on screen - staff coming to work in a tiny development studio, hacking away at a series of passably average puzzle games, sometimes turning up to work in just their underwear.
The second weren't on the screen at all. They were visions of the rest of the world that studio existed in: previews in tatty 16-bit era magazines of their forthcoming titles; interviews with the talented producer who only wore his briefs in the studio; kids swapping Game Kid cartridges in the playground. But where's the story? Sometimes, the companies we invent ring true.
Designing engagement: The secret of Game Dev Story. There are many possible reasons for a game being compulsive. Player personality type, motivation driven by a game genre or licence and social influence all affect the desire to continue to play. Of course, another possible reason is that the game has been designed to be as compulsive as possible. On one hand we could say that the game has been engineered to be as compulsive as possible, but this sounds malicious, almost as if it’s fighting against the players’ free will. On the other, we could argue that the game has been crafted to be addictive, this sounds much more positive and in alignment with an optimal player experience. Either way, games are created with the intention of being as good as possible, and one way in which to create an addictive game, is to design an engaging game loop. The game loop is a sequence of events which the player must repeat, with the hopeful aim of experiencing entertaining gameplay. Five rules for smarter game loops But how does this work in practice?