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/
Here’s an idea… Get to the front page of slashdot.com and see how sales are affected!
I’d love to see data *After* the slashdot surge.
Plus, I dont think anyone has mentioned that your sales will most likely start accelerating once they gain some momentum. Word of mouth effect, more reviews, slashdot coverage, …
Best of luck!
I can only wish you the best of luck. Did you plan on having to sell 9k copies originally, or did your budget grow? 9k is such a huge number…
I played a review copy, and I enjoyed it very much. That being said, I wouldn’t have dropped five dollars for a relatively obscure title; color-matching is too bloated of a genre. I hope that the lite version helps–it should. A price drop or a significant update could help you out. Look at other five dollar apps: Zen Bound, Sway, etc. Does yours have the same value? The same hype? Hype is pretty important…and value is entirely relative. We all know how brutal the App Store price wars have become.
But Dapple is a great game, and I hope that you have better luck in the future. Thanks for the informative blog post! I think you’ll be seeing another minor traffic bump soon…hopefully.
The most insightful comment I have seen about the app store, is don’t rely on Apple to market it for you! Pretend the App Store is purely a distribution mechanism, and that you are going to have to reach the buyers under your own devices.
Dude,
Congratulations on the game, it looks great, but I feel your pain. My own app FemCal is bumping along with a few sales a day, which is probably about what I expected, but sadly it took longer to build than I thought. I have a lite version for free, and it does about 100x the purchased version.
Post if you get a slashdot bump in sales!
Good Luck!,
Jonathan
To the people who suggest dropping the price to 99 cents – that would mean Owen would have to sell 4-5 times as many copies to make the same revenue. The million dollar question is would sales go up 4 to 5 times? If not, dropping the price translates into less revenue, not a happy scenario.
If there is big money to be made on upgrades, then a bigger installed base is a high priority goal. When upgrade revenue is not in the cards, a higher price point even with fewer copies sold may mean more $$$ in the developer’s pocket at the end of the day.
Just my 2 cents, not knowing his competitors or their price points…..
I’ll be brutally honest, don’t hold it against me I’m a struggling indie developer as well
Interface:
Too many colours, doesn’t “flow” well. The user’s eyes/attention is not drawn to a specific option such as “new game”. A good book to pick up to help with designing interfaces is: Game Interface Design by Brent Fox. Great book and will help you alot, otherwise pay a professional to re-do the title screen and all graphical layouts will increase sales exponentially.
Graphics:
I haven’t seen the game in action/live but from the screenshots the graphics are below average for a puzzle/casual genre. Casual games have so much polish these days it’s crazy! This doesn’t relate to the interface issues, but the actually tile pieces.
Price:
Too high from my view. I don’t have much to work with on this being fairly new to the app store myself. Although from what I have noticed, this price sticks out as a sore thumb.
Those are my three points that stick out, and I don’t mean to sound so harsh as I realize just how much sweat, blood and tears go into each game’s creation.
Congratulations on finishing and releasing a game, it’s honestly one of the hardest tasks a person can do in their life, very few people are capable of it. It’s easy to have an idea and create something, much harder to stick with it and finish it to a level worth paying for! Best of luck in the future.
darkmessiah: Your sense of economics is a bit screwed up. Whether he takes the time to do the work himself is irrelevant; there is opportunity cost: if he did that he could use his own time to do something else that brings in money. Your argument only makes sense inasmuch as you value you own time very lowly, which you seem to do.
[...] This guy got a lot of attention for his brutally honest blog post. Enough so that he managed to get his site slashdotted and and hit up with a ton of comments. [...]
[...] The full article can be seen here. [...]
A colleague of a colleague made an iphone game so you can play shufflepuck on your iphone. Sold it for less than an euro and reported to have 1600 downloads in 3 days. Maybe the $5 is to high for the general iphone public?
@Martin
Maybe I didn’t word it right. It sounds like this might be his first venture into the iPhone business. With that said, I wouldn’t have bet the farm(sports car) on such a basic, over saturated game theme.
Sure I might spend more time than I should on my “hobby” but I’m not going broke doing it either. At this point, I am still $32k richer than this guy.
I will eventually get around to making a game for the iPhone, and my first step will be to make a free game. is my “sense of economics is a bit screwed up” still?
I’m also realistic, only a AAA publish could pull off something like this. And guess what those AAA publishers do, they advertise; inside other games they make and outside.
Make the app $.99 and I’ll buy it.
Personally I don’t think you should drop your pants on price; I think you are right to charge $5 for your game. Java games for mobile phones have been at the €3-5 range for the last 5 years and are universally much, MUCH shitter than what’s available for iPhone.
As someone above said, it doesn’t matter if it’s $5 or $10 once you have some way of people evaluating whether they want to buy it (a free version should help with that). That’s one of the problems with the app store right now, there should be a ‘try’ button next to every buy button.
drop your price man, that’s obvious. 5$ for a simple color matching puzzle is too expansive. i prefer to buy the amazing Edge or Rolando for this price. supply and demand my friend
$4.99 is extremely overpriced for ANY match-3 game.
$32K on an iPhone game is INSANE.
$32K on a match-3 game is INSANE.
6 months and you had help/contractors? C’mon! You’re not making the next Quake.
Hone your skills. You should’ve been able to make this app in a month and done all the graphics and other resource creation yourself to boot. Don’t know how? Learn it.
This market is tough so you have to be doubly so.
Good reviews mean absolutely nothing because they are only from people who have already purchased the app. Revenue will come from numbers. And if a majority of people don’t think that style of game is worth $4.99, then they won’t buy it. As good as the reviews are I will never pay $4.99 for this style of app because there are much bigger productions selling for $4.99. Hell Zen Bound is $4.99 and that game kills yours graphics and gameplay wise. It “feels” like it should be $4.99 (or more). So comparing what I see there with your game, and I don’t think yours is worth it. I’m sure you skip out on TONS of perspective sales because lots of people aren’t willing to pay $5 for this type of app.
Drop the price and you will be making less per sale, but make up for it in quantity. I would even buy your game at $1 or even $2. No way I am paying $5 comparing your game with others in the same price range.
Nice – you don’t accept my comments?
[...] [As an aside, if you are more interested in the iPhone app store then you might like to read about Dapple] [...]
First, you are to be commended for sharing this with the community. I’m sure it wasn’t easy but this info is helpful for others who are considering development of an iPhone app.
I would like to point out two things that struck me about your story:
(1) Where’s the marketing?
Many programmers don’t see the value in marketing because they don’t understand what marketing is. Simply put, marketing is the process of creating demand for your product. Your iDev presentation was great marketing, but now your job is to market the hell out of your product. (And you thought that developing software was hard.)
If you want to sell more product you need to find a way (or many ways) to (1) inform people about your product (2) make them want to part with $5 to get it.
Have you asked all of your friends to spread the word? Have you posted videos of your game to youtube?
(2) Your graph
This might be a minor point, but I found your graph to be a bit misleading. Since the Y axis represents dollars and the X axis represents time, the line should always move up, unless you somehow find yourself refunding money. As drawn it looks like you eventually lost all of the money earned during the initial revenue spike.
Finally, don’t lose any sleep over the app crackers. I know lots of people with iPhone, including housewives, executives and programmers. None of the people have jailbroken their iPhones and none of them use cracked software. The warez crowd are a small fringe of the market. Focus your efforts on marketing to the masses and don’t lose any sleep over the crackers.
–
Matt
P.S. Nice game… I am going to send a link about it to my wife, who has an iPhone and love games. That’s marketing in action!
So you spent $32,000 on development… and nothing on advertising?
And $4.99 for an app people can’t try out with a lite model?
The problem is people expect the AppStore to do all of their marketing. The AppStore is like PayPal. You need to treat it like the checkout counter, and don’t rely on being found within iTunes.
I’m spending $1,000/month in advertising, on Google, YouTube, Facebook, and a dozen-plus iPhone-related web sites. And participating in forums and giving out promo codes, and $10 iTunes giftcards to users who submit videos, etc.
And my app is $0.99. And it made the Top 100 (#33 actually). Top 100 lists are based on UNIT sales not dollars, so if you can get in to that, inertia will keep you there. $5 is too much to get traction when there are so many cheap and free games.
I’m working on a (free) e-book that will offer tips on app marketing. Contact me for some free advice.
http://www.NoTieSoftware.com
32k is insane to spend on what appears to be a simple game. Did you just buy into all the hype on the iPhone store and think you could sell 9000 units so easily?
[...] he posted a detailed post on the sales figures from his first iPhone game: [...]
[...] the goldrush already over? Over at Streaming Colour Studios, Owen wrote a nice post about the revenues he made with Dapper (a color matching game with a twist) during his first month [...]
[...] site, good gameplay videos, and so forth, it hasn’t sold too well. So Owen’s written The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) where he reveals how it has sold so far and what effect a review on Kotaku [...]
Hi Everyone:
Thanks for taking the time to comment on my post. I appreciate your thoughts and feedback. I don’t have time to respond to each comment individually, but I have written up a bit of a response post, which can be found here:
http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/11/the-slashdot-effect/
Cheers,
Owen
[...] month revenues of just $535.19, in spite of good reviews for his product, Canadian game developer Owen Goss wrings his hands a little—the first sale went to crackers (See also: Crackulous: One click iPhone [...]
I read this article and I’m in the exact same boat. My iPhone/iPod touch game “Whack Attack! Games” is just suffering big time. The game is very polished, lot’s of fun and has “three” different games in it. I was hoping that since it’s a multi-game suite that it’ll catch on, but regretfully no. I think it’s just hard to compete with $0.99 3D car racing games and the multitude of free games out there in the marketplace.
I also haven’t thrown in the towel yet either, but the situation is quite discouraging. By the way, if you’ve purchased my game, please write reviews of it on the iTunes store.
So, I really appreciate the “Brutal Honesty” element, and it inspired me to purchase the game. The first I’ve ever paid $5.00 – consider it payment for your outstanding and informative blog post – Even on an iPhone packed full of Apps, I would have never considered paying $5.00 for a color matching game – $1.99 would be considered expensive, $0.99 would probably move traffic.
My thoughts:
Amazing quality. From the sound, to the graphics, to the background to all the nice little finishing touches (warning me that I’m about to overwrite a game, popup hints, the nice paintbrush hint tip) – you really got your money’s worth. It’s _amazing_ what you can get for $32K
I don’t have much else to add other than you should hopefully get some ycombinator sales (you got a posting on their front page as well) – your “Brutal Honesty” approach is quite simply brilliant marketing – well done.
[...] was surprised to see such a quick followup to Owen’s original post at Streaming Colour Studios regarding his brutally honest sales numbers and figures and the [...]
Also put the data on how much you made after this blog post went live and after it got appeared on Hacker News front page
Thank you so much for posting this. I have friends who are convinced that they can make a killing developing iPhone apps. The press just wants to cover iFart, Ocarina, and that Scorched Earth clone. It’s fun to talk about the insta-millionaires, but they may as well have just won the lottery.
I know exactly where you’re coming from and that it’s not about whining or complaining. You’re doing this to present a true picture of what real App Store app numbers look like. So, don’t listen to all the haters. You’ve done a good thing here, and we appreciate it.
People can afford iPhones?
[...] numbers – along with a chart – can be found on the developer’s blog. After that post went up it was linked on Slashdot, which led to this follow-up [...]
I will buy your app. I know how much time goes into making one, and the hassle of dealing with itunesconnect!
And, as much as it pains me to say this, and it really is painful to say, perhaps $4.99 is too much. Fieldrunners is $4.99, and that allows you to shot things, and I think the landscape of the game world is that people pay to shoot, and pay much less if you don’t give them a “weapon”.
Note: I just now downloaded the app via my phone, but the App Store (that you get via your phone) does not show the reviews. Reviews are critical to getting others to buy your app. I will be sure to write one, too.
$5 is WAY too much. This is a competitive market with lots of lemons, people are really shy about paying too much.
I would price at $1, then increase slowly as you get a sense of what the market will bear. Nobody blinks at $1. In fact, I think most people would rather by a $1 game than a free one, the implication being free is not likely to be any good. Everybody blinks at $5. I would be very surprised if you don’t get more than 5x sales by selling at $1.
P.S. to my note above:
If you drop the game to $1 I will buy it and if I like it push a couple other friends to buy it.
1. Viral – in game email to others with highscores that will motivate friends to compete and share their love of the game.
2. Build more great games, I am more likely to buy your second game if i enjoyed your first game.
3. Have a limited time sale to build a base. State the period of time and build some momentum.
4. This blog post was probably the best piece of marketing you have done so far… continue
5. Good luck!!!
there’s no lite version so it’s not surprising that no one wants to shell out $5 to see if your game is any good. i would create a lite version and drop the price to $1.
[...] third parties involved. Now, i’m beginning to take what i wrote even more seriously following a post from an iPhone game developer about how he’d made $535 on an investment (including his time) [...]
Just to say thanks for releasing this information, I’m sure it wasn’t an easy decision. I am debating whether or not to start developing for the iPhone, so I would be interested to see how this keeps developing.
Keep your chin up,
Paul
“So, that’s how it all connect” -Skeeter on Bedtime Stories.
So, you’re actually making a marketing by posting this post. Congratulation, it works!
[...] info | Streaming Colour « Google Voice Deja un [...]
Some have found another way to make a lot of money with this reward for ideveloppers :
http://www.app-store-vet.com
Good reality check.
The opportunity that many Developers are missing is the VALUE, and BENEFIT that an app can bring. I am not a developer, just a fresh business school grad, but I can tell you that games are a saturated and limited area of the iphones potential. Back in college i was exposed to the iphone months before the public announcement of the new product. In the Marketing of Technology course i took we had conference calls with the VP of Marketing @ Apple. Thats when i got my mind thinking about the possibilities this innovation can bring.
Watching the product announcement, launch, and growth has been priceless. I think the numbers are channeled at games for now. Any idea that can bring value to 10,000 people who have something in common could easily step out from the masses and deliver real benefits to their users. Cover the costs and the rest is luck.
Features are nice but Benefits SELL.
let me know if you could bring to life a few marketing/product concepts i thought up in college.
Go get em. thank you for the insight.
Thanks for writing this up. My app sales for Pachinko Puzzle by the way were pretty similar – slightly higher because of timing (November), but nonetheless similar. I would guess most apps fall into this category, and will end up with total revenue of $1k-3k . I still get a few downloads a day, but then I did it purely for the accomplishment and fun of it. I’m working on a second game, perhaps I’ll hit the iPhone lottery one of these times – 1 in 25,000 is actually pretty good odds for a lottery… I think the key message though is you’ll either need a number of applications under your belt to sustain a reasonable income or to do it as a hobby. Try different price points, and be reasonable about it – I started mine at $2.99, then $1.99, and now $.99. Definitely worth trying a free version, but it has to be done right – in my case, I was getting lots of free downloads and not much change in actual sales…
[...] sviluppatore di un gioco per iPhone chiamato Dapple ha pubblicamente rivelato le sue vendite sul blog.Dalle sue parole si evince che la corsa all’oro degli sviluppatori probabilmente è finita e [...]
[...] From there, went to Owen Goss’s session about the creation of an iPhone game. Also a good talk, but it was all about the development process, concept, art, user testing, etc. No code. Owen, by the way, is the one who posted the “brutally honest” post about how much he invested in his iPhone game, and how much he made back: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/03/09/the-numbers-post-aka-brutal-honesty/ [...]
Go read that:
http://blog.omnigroup.com/2009/02/27/omnifocus-news-latest-mac-updates-gtd-summit-and-50000-sales-on-the-iphone/
That’s 50 000 X 20$ before apple cut.
There is maybe something to learn there!
[...] onto the news! The developer of Dapple, an iPhone game which took 6 months and US$32,000 to make, has put up iTunes store stats for his game. In the first month of sales, he’s generated US$550 of revenue. Ouch. On the other hand we have [...]
I will give any game a chance for maximum price of $2.99.
$4.99 is above my automatic buy limit.
Drop the price to $2 or $3 even and you will get better sales me thinks. Its not selling now, what is there to lose?
Sorry to hear that it has been such an epic fail
Good luck!