The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)
March 9th, 2009
This post was written March 9, 2009.
I will freely admit, I’ve been avoiding writing this article. In fact, as I type this, I’m still not sure that it’s something that I want to do. However, again, I come back to that damn promise I made when I started this whole thing about being open and honest. Curse me and my big mouth! I also stated just over a week ago that I would write up on my numbers, so now I stand (sit typing) before you to reveal “The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)”.
Dapple
If you’ve been reading the blog then you know that I released my first iPhone game, Dapple, to the App Store on Feb 13, 2009. The game sells for $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. and at corresponding prices throughout the world.
Dapple is a colour-matching puzzle game based around the idea of mixing paint colours to make new colours. I feel like the gameplay is innovative and new, but rests on top of a solidly proven genre. Critical reviews seem to support this hypothesis, many calling out the fact that they were expecting “just another match-3 game”, but instead found themselves completely hooked on a game with an innovative gameplay mechanic that works.
Costs
I did a presentation for the 360|iDev conference on creating an iPhone game. If you’ve read it, then you’ve seen my “conclusions” section that had some numbers. Dapple took me about 6 months to make and had a budget of roughly $32,000 USD. That budget includes: paying my contractors, business expenses incurred during the 6 months of development, and paying myself a very small salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).
Royalties
Apple’s deal is this: for every sale, Apple keeps 30% and you get 70%. So for a sale of $4.99, I make $3.50. That’s made in the currency where the app was sold, so I make more money when someone from the U.S. buys my game than someone from Canada. If you’re in Canada, it’s actually cheaper for you to buy the game than for an American, since it only costs your $4.99 Canadian.
If you do the math, you can see that I need to sell about 9,150 units in the U.S. before I break even on Dapple.
Reviews
Again, if you’ve been reading the blog then you’ve seen the excellent reviews the game has been getting. People who play the game tend to really enjoy it. Every review I’ve had so far has been extremely positive. I even managed to get a review from Kotaku, which is a very large gaming blog. It was the Kotaku review that led many people to start asking me about sales numbers, assuming that I must have seen a massive increase in sales.
However, I haven’t had reviews yet from any of the “Big 3″ iPhone review sites (Touch Arcade, 148Apps, and AppVee). Those are the ones that I think might really affect sales.
Sales Data
This is what you’re here for: the numbers. Here’s a graph (done in AppViz) of revenue (the y-axis is dollars, not number of sales) I’ve made world-wide from sales of Dapple since it went live (all funds in Canadian Dollars):
Dapple Revenue Graph
I’ve marked four important data points:
First Sale – This was the first sale of the game, made maybe an hour after the game went live. I suspect this was purchased by an app cracker. Dapple was cracked and uploaded to pirate sites less than 5 hours after it went live. This was the only sale prior to that. So thanks, Mr./Mrs. Cracker, you were my first sale! On the topic of pirating/cracking: I have no idea how many pirated copies of Dapple are being played right now. I don’t track metrics like that, although I should perhaps start.
Launch Day – This was the first day Dapple was on sale. Many of these purchases would have been friends of mine buying the game. Many other sales will have come from my app being in the “New” apps list, as other devs tell me that appearing in any list on the App Store helps sales significantly. By the end of the third day my app wasn’t on the front page of newly released puzzle or family games anymore.
Kotaku Review – This was the day that the Kotaku review went live. The review had about 5,500 views on Kotaku.com (not including RSS readers). I had about 55 people click through to my website. I had about 12 sales that I can attribute to the Kotaku review. So a high profile review like one on Kotaku resulted in a ~0.3% conversion rate. Still, that’s 12 sales I probably wouldn’t have had, otherwise, so hooray!
360iDev Presentation – This was completely unexpected. I had a lot of people come up to me after my presentation and tell me that they had bought a copy of Dapple! I was thrilled that people were so supportive. The iPhone developer community really is an amazing and wonderful group of people. I really appreciate the fact that so many people bought my game. Thank you!
Overall Sales Data
Dapple has sold 131 copies worldwide in the 24 days since it launched. I realise that I’m dealing with a very limited amount of data here, so I’m not going to pretend like I can make any kind of long term projections about how sales will be in a month, six months, or a year. However, what you can see is how far from my goal of 9,150 I remain. So…
What’s Next?
I have some ideas up my sleeve that I’m not ready to talk about yet. Those things will have to wait for another day.
One thing I will mention is this: I submitted Dapple Lite to the App Store for review this morning. With a little luck it should be live by the end of the week. I think that at my $4.99 price-point a lot of people are hesitant to buy the game, even after reading a great review. I’m hoping that the Lite version will show people how great the game is and I hope that they will then buy Dapple. Once Dapple Lite has been available for a few weeks I’ll revisit the numbers and see if I can draw any conclusions about that.
In Conclusion
I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear. As I said, I was hesitant to post anything about Dapple in a less than stellar light, but at the end of the day, if I were a publicly traded company, I’d have to make this kind of information available anyway. I hope that it might serve to help set realistic expectations for other developers.
I remain convinced that there is money to be made on the App Store, but I suspect we’ll see fewer and fewer stories about people getting suddenly very rich. My hope is that we’ll start seeing more developers putting out quality titles in the hopes of gradually growing a sustainable business.
Owen
[Update: 2009-03-11] – I’ve posted a follow-up to this article here: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/11/the-slashdot-effect/
[Update: 2009-03-13] – Dapple is now On Sale – 40% Off! http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/12/dapple-sale-has-started-40-off/
[Update: 2009-04-27] – A complete follow-up article (a month later) called The Numbers Post: Part 2 can be found here: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/04/27/the-numbers-post-part-2/
Nice post and honest as you said. The market is difficult to figure out, and I think if we knew the secret we’d be rolling in it.
I like the fact you priced your app according to what you think its worth. This also give you room to move with some discounts as well.
The pricing in the store will start to even out over coming months, and the value apps will start to take their place. I also think that the more you have the more you’ll get. It’s about brand and quality awareness for the people in it for the long haul.
The question is can we afford to live poor in the mean time.
Here’s cheers for putting it out there.
Cheers
K
Good post and look into how hard selling, even a great game like Dapple, can be on iTunes. I bet a lot of folks are having similar issues selling their apps on the site. I keep seeing discounted prices all the time in the Games section.
It’ll be interesting to see if the Lite version will result in more sales. I know a lot of folks on our live podcast were very interesting in trying out Dapple Lite before they buy.
I’m just wondering if you’ve considered branching out into Wiiware and Xbox 360 Community Games or Xbox Live Arcade for that matter. I’ve heard those have their unique challenges as well.
Cheers
-Leftybrown of The Married Gamers
I think a lot of the problem is that you missed the “gold rush”. I released most of my apps during that time and got quite a lot of sales, especially for my app Chess Player which I know was much less work than Dapple, but even then people were telling me that I underpriced that app.
Another issue is that you’re entering what looks like a saturated market on the App Store: color match games. Even though it is innovative, it just looks like another one which has that going against you. Yes, people will unfortunately judge an app by its “cover”.
I think in this particular case, a lite version could have huge potential. I’ll be curious to hear how it goes. Also, if you’re interested, I’m willing to share my sales figures with you, but I don’t have the guts to be totally open to everyone like you do on your blog. However, if attendees during my AppViz demo at my lecture were attentive, they would’ve seen it.
Kudos once again for the colorblind mode!!
This is pretty consistent to what I’ve been seeing as well. Shipping an update and getting on the “new” list helps a bit, someone writing about you can help but isn’t a guarantee even when the review is positive.
I agree that for Dapple, releasing a lite version could really boost sales. I’ll be very interested to hear how that plays out, and good luck!
[...] temperatures and also of coding great strategy games (probably not at the same time, though), has posted a very interesting, if not entirely happy post on his blog, where he lays out exactly how much he has made (or, more accurately, not made) [...]
[...] The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) – "I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear." [...]
$4.99 is too expensive for a genre game, no matter how innovative–you are shutting out 99% of the market. $0.99 is more realistic. I think your numbers reflect this. Price low to get volume.
The “Lite” version is a great idea. I’ve only paid for one app for my iTouch ( Appigo’s Todo list), and that was only after using the free Lite version for a couple of days.
I think giving away a free trial is going to really help you. People will download “just another colour match game” on impulse if it is free, find out that it’s more than that and upgrade. You want low barriers to entry to let people get hooked before having to pay out.
Thanks for sharing your experiences with iPhone development. As a shareware developer I have to say my experiences are somewhat similar, however one of my applications has been a steady long-tail earner that continues selling thanks to exposure from Google Adwords. However I am unsure whether that can work with an iPhone application as Apple appears to be the gatekeeper to all buyer traffic.
The best of luck to tweaking the marketing of your game. It is a needed investment that I think most developers under-budget for.
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. I also have an app on the store, and my story is similar to yours. Fortunately, I did dot invest as much time and money as you.
My app has also been cracked, and I keep track of the IDs of the users who downloaded the cracked app. I have not bothered to shut the service for them, although I could, since the app needs frequent updates from a web service that I host.
If I ever bother to make a new app, it will not be as feature rich as my current app, since there seems to be no place for apps priced over the 99c tier.
If I could give you one advice: try to limit the size of your app under the 10MB limit (currently it weights 13.1 MB). Otherwise, people will not be able to purchase your app when they only have a mobile connection (3G or EDGE).
Good luck!
If you had done the work yourself, instead of plucking down 35 grand, you would have had 100% profit. It’s not like this is a AAA game. Paying for graphics is about the only thing I would spend money on.
Personally, I would have spent more time doing most of the work myself (no salary), then used the money you saved to pay bloggers for more reviews. Marketing at this point is your only hope, or lowing the price to 2.99 or something.
I think you should have waited a bit longer and released the free and full version at the same time. I’m willing to bet you would have made many more sales this way.
I only say this because I myself have spent 6 month on a project, doing the work myself and never made a dime off one off my program(s)(not iphone related). I figured with the time I put in, I’d never make my money back anyway.
In the end, I still have a job, and my wife didn’t leave me because I didn’t blow our life savings.
Good luck
Brutal Honesty: I haven’t purchased your game, and at $4.99US it’s not going to happen.
And as for the lite version, it’ll just be more rubbish cluttering up the app store. Want more sales: Lower your price.
Not making enough money: Find a new vocation.
Toodles.
I agree with chuck about the “gold rush.” However, I also believe many developers treat it like gambling. They can see the huge number of apps already available, but they see dollar signs dancing in the sky and that everyone would want THEIR game because it is so great. So many young people today dream of creating games and becoming rich off it.
Great article. I’m finding the exact same issue with my newly released game Wordology. I plan to write a similar article next week with my numbers and even detail some of the development process.
I think it’s the rush to $0.99 that’s hurting us all. I priced Wordology at $2.99 in order to be able to make enough to pay my designers etc but so far haven’t made enough to cover the cost of the iPod touch I bought to test on, never mind pay any staff.
Very interesting and informative post. However, your assumption that it is cheaper to buy the game in Canada is a little skewed. If we were spending American dollars this would be true, but alas, we deal in Canadian currency. A buck is still a buck to the Canadian consumer. Sadly, it only translates to .78 for you.
well, that this appeared on slashdot might hrlp, good post!
Now that you’ve been slashdotted, I expect you’ll sell a hundred or two more. Thanks for being so open. It’s important for developers to realize that incredible success in any field is a matter of skill, timing and significant luck. Most good titles simply disappear in a sea of apathy and fierce competition.
Early to bed.
Early to rise.
Advertise! Advertise! Advertise!
Seriously. That’s what is missing. Take the earnings and advertise on the three big iphone review sites. The more you spend the more likely a review will occur.
I would raise the price ~$2 to cover advertising.
I appreciate the write-up. Though, I would think that you have the price going against you. As a previous commenter pointed out, at 4.99 – it just seems like an expensive color-match game. I anxiously await your results after you release your lite version.
-JP
[...] salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) [...]
[...] salary (akin to what I made as a junior front-end programmer when I first started in the industry).Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) [...]
I think this trend is going to be the best thing to happen to developers since the invention of the internet.
Game developers have been raped by companies creating pulp games at huge production costs and very little creativity.
Now it’s time to cut production times/costs to NOTHING and build from a small, good deliverable idea that can be built in weeks by one person.
At that point, if it’s successful selling enough copies to keep the guy going, he improves it and maybe hires a few contractors.
No more large up-front design on a piece of crap that you can’t identify as crap until you take it home and unwrap it.
Now you have reviews and recommendations, and I personally won’t buy a game without an excellent free demo.
There is no longer room for companies hiring dozens of programmers and CEOs won’t be getting rich off the work of others without a good deal of talent and creativity of their own.
I just can’t wait for the same thing to happen to the other entertainment industries–music, TV and movies. It’s happening slowly, but it’s happening.
Interesting. I think that perhaps the price was a tad too high for a game. I love games, but I also know their longevity is quite short. I would pay no more than $2 for a game I knew I would tire of within a month.
Also, I am learning another lesson here: if you can’t develop an app/game by yourself, then you probably won’t break even. Hiring others really hurt your bottom line!
Thanks for sharing!
I echo the feeling, my first game, Codewords, hasn’t been a barnburner either. But at least I can do all the work myself, so the cost is lower. My next game is a completely different target audience, so we’ll see how it goes.
I was similarly gutted when my first game (Roll Trio) was pirated inside of a couple of hours. However, given how you need to jailbreak the device to play pirated stuff I really don’t think you will lose many sales to piracy. I kind of view it as karma for my high school Amiga days too *cough*!
Anyway, if you want more sales and don’t mind losing your dignity you can always do like bootant and spam a new “update” of your game every single day! I live for the moment those guys are banned form the appstore, I really do.
Definitely agree that the price is a bit too high. Drop to three dollars, and I would expect that you’ll sell more units. However – here are some other ideas…
Regarding the cracking – One developer already figured out a way to validate “actual” buyers (via their UID). Why doesn’t Apple do this for you? It’s an app that supports “full window” browsing.
Another idea is to add advertisement syndication and give the app away.
Good luck, and thanks for the great post!
-Jim
Very nice post and very informative. I’ve been working on an app to compliment my website, halocharts.com, but after reading your post it may have to take a seat for a while. I’d be interested in your numbers in a day or two since your blog made the front page of slashdot. Thanks for the insight!
Dude, I’m sorry to have to tell you, but $5 for a colour matching game is about $5 too much given that I can find ~20 versions of this game to play, right now and online, right now using a simple Google search.
From what I’ve seen reading countless reviews in apps while I explored the competition is that there is very strong customer reaction against anything that isn’t $0.99. This is a very hard problem for us to solve. It’s too bad Apple didn’t make the minimum price $2.99.
I think a lite version is realistically your only way to get the message out to the masses that your game is worth $4.99. Sure you could get a review on Appvee, Touch Arcade or wherever else, but still the number of people that see that is very small compared to your potential market. More people will see your lite version while browsing than will see your review.
Great post.
The game looks a little like http://www.naturalchemist.com/
If you had a PC version, I would have bought it as soon as I started reading this post because it looks like the kind of game I’d enjoy. I checked the Games link, but you have just the iPhone version. So sad (for me).
Sorry to say dude, but go get a real job. Continue to program your games for fun, and Im sure you will see lot of ppl downloading. I just created a little very simple open source game for windows, linux and Sony PSP. The game is really really simple, my first experience with SDL and C++. The result? In about 1 month I got 2.000 downloads, and lots of reviews around the globe (in sites from usa, brazil, spain, germany and many other countrys). I got zero money from it, but that was not the point anyway. Good luck with your career.
[...] http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/ [...]
I wrote a post on my blog that might help you: “11 Ways to Market Your iPhone and iPod Touch App”. You’re definitely doing the right thing by offering a “lite version”. We are moving towards the same strategy. Even a great review on a major blog will not create sustainable sales for you. Share your story, share what you’re about. Your blog post is probably helping your earnings as we speak (or write that is)…Selling yourself will help your app sell, too!
All excellent points. The main problem I see with the App Store right now is that it needs more filters now that there are so many applications available. To display the top 25 out of a list of 25000 apps is only 0.1% of the content. That’s true with new titles too. As soon as there are more than 25 apps introduced on a given day, you’re off the “new” list before you even get exposure.
I think the long-term solution lies in following the “personalized suggestions” work done by Amazon and Netflix, which only Apple can do, but would help upsell other products. When you view an app’s details it should have a “Others who bought this also liked these…” section at the bottom of the details page. They should make your “home” page when you launch the app store their suggestions based on cumulative suggestions from other products you’ve already bought, not just the featured list the way they do today. Apple already has the “Genius” for music they just need to extend it to the App Store.
Until Apple fixes this huge problem in the App Store (that almost everyone’s apps get lost in the sea of other apps) the only solution is to advertise outside the App Store. The good news is that unlike other application stores (i.e. Handango or Microsoft Market) sales resulting from your advertising always net you the same amount since they all have to go through the App Store. Google Adwords is probably the cheapest, fastest way to get started, and is especially good because you can put a cap on your monthly spending.
I can only assume that submitting a story about the “real story” of an iPhone developer to slashdot was part of your plan all along. If so, I applaud you. If not, way to be flexible. If I had an iPhone I might buy your app just as a reward for your ingenuity. Please post a follow up analyzing how getting slashdotted affected your sales. Also, make sure that gets posted to slashdot too, for maximum effect.
My last comment seemed to disappear. I’ve been posting the sales stats for my own app on my blog (do a search for Sudoku Grab). There’s two weeks worth so fat and I’ll be adding another week of data this coming weekend.
So far sales have been pretty much what I was expected – ie not very high.
$4.99 is a very high price point given that most games are only 99cents. You can try and buck the market – but you’re going to need something pretty special to do so.
I can only tell you how I look for games, and from that perspective, your game chances look bleak.
I’ll rate each category out of 5, with 5 being best, 1 worst.
1) Look at free games (1)
This is brutally true, and you are addressing it. Why spend any time reviewing a game if I can’t play the free version first? The good news is that if I get more then 30 minutes of play, or come back to it more then 3-5 times, then I buy the real version, and here’s the important part, ALMOST REGARDLESS OF COST OF FULL PRODUCT. After all, I don’t really care about $5 vs $10. I care about TIME! If it’s worth wasting my time playing, it’s worth a couple of lattes to have it.
2) Look for new games that stand out (3)
I look at technology (tilt/camera/other), genre (I am into new things more then most), configuration, and quality. To be honest, game play is rarely enhanced by “quality”, and very often glossed over with spiffy graphics and nice music. And this part you can’t do a lot about (though maybe technology and play-style options are a relatively low cost investment to snag a buyer like me?)
3) Read reviews (5)
Your reviews are excellent, and it most be frustrating, but reviews really have little sway over decisions, though their greatest strength is that sometimes they can help reduce fears (like amount of game play), but rarely can reviews entice you to play a game after your primary filters have evaluated it.
I know you have worked hard, and as a programmer watching this market and debating product ideas, I figured you’d appreciate my 5 minutes of thought and feedback.
Good luck, and thanks for the honesty. I appreciate it more then more words can convey.
Christopher
Convert it to a PC game and talk with Valve about getting it put on Steam. Lots of need for fun casual games there.
I would like to make an iphone app, but now given your sales, the reality is that the income does not even justify buying a phone to test the app on. At 13 MB the app is enormous. In South Africa the price for bandwidth without a contract is $0.2/MB ie just downloading it would already be $2.6 . Your blog is indicative of the realities of the market, the only time you got sales, was when there was advertising. If you can release updates every day, and have kept it on the charts, you would conceivably have 150 sales a day. What is the feasibility of linking in to a server to do authentication (thus offering free play for a limited time), with a debit / micro credit type transaction generated by a wireless application subscriber after the demo is finished? Cellular phones are essentially tools for communication, and I would think a multiplayer game would naturally do better than a single player game. Thanks for your honest feedback re app success, it is very depressing to admit that what one created is not successful.
I have long suspected there was a rockstar model in iphone apps. Ie, a few rockstars make a fortune, but most people in the business don’t. However, the rockstars get all the press and so few realize how hard it is to make the business work.
A few suggestions–
I don’t know how big the app is…but if you could squeeze it in under 10 megs that must help a lot. I just tried to buy it but I failed since I don’t have wifi where I am.
Lite version–works for a lot of people. You should try it.
Your frankness in writing this article is appreciated. I, too, think a free version to try first would encourage sales.
By the way, the light grey text on this page may look pretty in terms of colour but seriously affects the readability of the article.
Lower to .99 or give away for free.
The game may be too complex for the target audience of players.
Auto hint mode?
Needs more Graphic WOWS??
Any way to get multiple combination when new blocks down for progressive points?
[...] Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty). [...]
Thanks for the article.
Hope you keep up with this work, and make enough money to live from it.
I have no idea regarding price sensitivity or competition. But here are a few creative thoughts how to boost sales.
* Create some sort of news letter around the game. (Facebook group?)
* Make/Sponsor a competition. Have people play against each other on time and/or high score. Create news around the game, that has potential to be picked up by blogs, etc.
* Involve users with a wish list of improvements, etc. (Facebook group?)
* Give away some games through charity, etc.
* Advertise – commercially and just through word of mouse.
* Make variants of the game that are designed for events, such as easter egg color matching (or graduation hats, or …). Sell those as 99c versions.
Just my five minutes brain storming for you.
I’m interested in seeing what your Slashdot bump is… Perhaps you’ll give us an update on that in the coming weeks.
Owen,
Thanks for posting. I released Jiggle Balls on Feb 23rd. My graph looks very similar to yours. I’ve sold 422 units at 99 cents a piece. I’ve made $275 (enough to pay for the iPod Touch I bought). I’ve released 1 update and another forth-coming this week. Each update spikes the sales a little bit. I am putting out a lite version next week, so we’ll see what that does.
Thanks for sharing.
doug
funkyvisions.com
Make Dapple $.99 and I’ll buy a copy today. I feel your problem is that you are overpriced. I know $4.99 seems cheap but you have to remember that iPhone apps are disposable entertainment. If there is plenty of competition selling at $.99 then so should you.
At least you don’t suffer the problem of many other developers – boring crappy apps. I think you can succeed if you lower the price and market your app right.
If you lower your price let me know. I’ll buy it today at $.99.
[...] been a few signs lately that the app store gold rush may be ending. More spefically, there is an awesome post from Owen Goss that just got picked up by Slashdot. The fact that a sweet game like his is not picking up steam [...]
[...] Dapple scenario seems to be more the norm and is what I am experiencing with Jiggle Balls. However, my [...]