Archive for March, 2009
The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)
Monday, 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/
360iDev: 3.5 Days of Awesomeness
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I apologise for the length of this post, but I wanted to get it all out in one post, so as not to forget anything…
I thought I’d take some time and talk in detail about 360|iDev. Overall, let me say this: the conference was fantastic. There were about 200 developers there and there were at least 3 talks running concurrently over 3 days with 5 sessions per day! That’s a lot of great content!
I think the easiest way to do this is a day-by-day breakdown, so here we go!
Day 0 – Sunday, March 1st, 2009
I arrived in San Jose on Sunday afternoon and checked into the hotel. I walked straight over to the eBay Town Hall Conference Center where the conference was being held. Sunday had some “pre-conference” hands-on presentations going on, for those who were able to attend.
Joe Pezzillo from Metafy was giving a great hands-on talk on creating 3 “Hello World” apps in 3 different ways. I arrived about half-way through the session so I just sat at the back and listened. What a great session! Dapple hardly uses any UIKit stuff, so I barely touched Interface Builder when I was working on it. Joe’s session showed me some amazingly powerful stuff you can do in Interface Builder with writing hardly any code! He also showed us some really cool stuff to do with memory management that I didn’t know about before. I was very impressed and knew the conference was going to be great right then.
After Joe’s presentation I ran into Keith Shepherd from Imangi Studios and Noel Llopis from Snappy Touch. We all talk on Twitter and it was really cool to meet these guys in person. Noel and Keith are both awesome and the three of us spent a lot of the conference together, as we had interest in a lot of the same sessions.
Sunday night has a Speaker’s Dinner where us speakers all got to meet each other. Then they opened the party up to everyone and we had drinks and played Rock Band and started meeting other people. I also got to meet Jeff Scott from 148Apps.com, who is a great guy. It was a great way to start the conference. Unfortunately, I was kind of jet lagged, so I wasn’t able to stay up very late that night and went to bed fairly early.
Day 1 – Monday, March 2nd, 2009
I got up really early Monday morning and went for a run with Noel before the conference started. It was great to run in the warm weather and not have to wear a hat or mitts. I kind of hurt my knee, though, so that was the only day I was able to run while I was there.
The first session of the day was two keynotes: one from the lead researcher at eBay (whose name I forget…sorry) and another from Mike Lee. Mike’s presentation, in particular, spoke to me as he discussed the need for the iPhone development community to work together and act as a community.
Next up with Julio Barros’s talk called “iPhone and Android?” He talked mostly about the differences in the way apps are created and distributed. It was a neat talk with a lot of questions and discussions that resulted. It’s clear that a lot of iPhone devs are considering Android as an alternate platform and wanted to know more about it.
There was a break for a delicious lunch, where I got to meet a bunch more people, like: Peter and Mike from ByteClub, Chuck Smith, Collin Donnell, Mark Johnson, and Julian Dolce from Fuel Industries (who are based in Ottawa, Ontario). And after lunch I gave my talk. I was lucky enough to be able to give a presentation on the creation of Dapple, the processes I used, and the lessons I learned. The room was nearly full for my talk and a lot of nice people said that they enjoyed the talk a lot.
Right after my talk I went to see a talk on the Unity Engine. The guy who was supposed to do the talk couldn’t be there so 4 students from a local game design school who are working at eBay gave a talk on Unity instead. They had been building a game in Unity and spoke very well about Unity and their processes.
The final talk of the day that I saw was by Scott Michaels, from a Canadian company based in Vancouver called Atimi. This was the presentation that people talked about for the rest of the show. He gave an in-depth and knowledgeable talk on marketing as it relates to iPhone apps. It was full of useful information and recommendations and I was blown away by it. It really showed me how little I understand about marketing. I started thinking about hiring a freelance marketing consultant at that point.
After that there was dinner, talking to lots of people, beer, and more Rock Band. By the end of the first day I was already convinced that the conference was worth more than the price of admission.
Day 2 – Tues, March 3rd, 2009
Up early again, but this time I met up with an old friend of mine I hadn’t seen in about 15 or 16 years. He lives in San Francisco now and I was nice enough to drive out to San Jose and meet me for breakfast. It was cool to get a chance to meet up with him after all these years. However, as a consequence I missed the first slot of speakers that day.
I arrived in time for the second slot and sat in on Tim Burks’s “Deep Geek Diving into the iPhone OS and Frameworks” session. This was a fascinating talk about how to dig into the underlying core APIs and see what’s available. There’s all kinds of cool stuff that Apple doesn’t allow developers access to, and this was just a look at what’s there that we can’t use yet. It was kind of a tease actually…look at all this cool stuff that’s available! But you can’t ship an app on the App Store if you touch this stuff… Still, a great session.
Lunch time again, more tasty treats. More chatting.
After lunch I attended Noel Llopis’s (Snappy Touch) talk on “Becoming Indie: A Professional Game Developer’s Change to the iPhone”. It was a great talk and I learned a whole bunch of information about iPhone hardware. I wish Noel’s talk could have been twice as long as there was a lot of stuff he talked about that I would have loved to have seen more on. Noel is also a huge proponent of unit testing and talked quite a bit about it in his presentation. It’s definitely something I need to do more of.
Next up with Peter Bakhyryev’s (ByteClub) presentation on “Making Multiplayer iPhone Games: Theory and Practice”. Peter had a great talk, mostly concentration on all the things you need to take into consideration when you’re designing a multiplayer game. This talk sparked dozens of ideas for new games or multiplayer extensions to Dapple in my head. I spent quite a bit of time talking with Peter and Mike at the conference and they’re both great guys. They’re doing some really cool stuff around releasing a multiplayer gaming framework.
The last talk of the day was Jonathan Saggau’s (TouchEngine) presentation on “Connecting iPhone to Google’s App Engine”. I made a bit of a mistake here and assumed this would be much higher-level than it was. The started his talk assuming that everyone knew what “The Cloud” and how Google’s App Engine worked, and so most of the presentation was kind of over my head. It wasn’t until later that I realised the talk was a 300-level talk, meaning it was an advanced topic. Oops. I’m sure it would have been cool if I’d already known how to use App Engine.
Dinner, more beer, more networking. Met some more people. Back at the hotel I ended up in the lobby with a bunch of people talking about iPhone stuff. It turns out I was talking to one of the guys who first jailbroke the iPhone, as well as the guy who wrote Cydia (saurik). They were really interesting to talk to because they have a very different perspective on things.
Day 3 – Wed, March 4th, 2009
Another early day…got up to make it to the keynote presentations. This time by Eric Litman from Medialets and a guy (whose name I forget, sorry) from AdMob. They both talked about analytics software and advertising in apps. They were neat talks. The AdMob guy talked a lot about monetizing apps by ad-enabling them, which I have no interest in, but he also talked about how I could run ads in other apps. That’s something I might look into at some point.
Next up was Sean Christmann’s presentation on “Powerful Visuals with Quartz 2D”. I didn’t know much about Quartz 2D, so this was a really neat presentation for me. I learned a lot about how it works and now I want an excuse to play around with them.
Final lunch break.
After lunch I went to Danton Chin’s “Managing and Optimizing Memory Usage”. I had hoped that this talk would be a little more in-depth, but a lot of it covered the same kind of stuff I’d written up in my Leaks Tutorial. I think it would have been a great presentation if I didn’t already know how to use Instruments to track down memory leaks. However, I did learn some things about using the Static Analysis to find mem problems at compile time.
Next I popped into a talk being given by Jeff LaMarche and another guy whose name I forget (sorry) on Open GL and the iPhone accelerometer. The accelerometer stuff was quite neat, but the OpenGL discussion kind of got side-tracked by people asking a lot of questions about how it works. OpenGL is difficult to learn in an hour. It was still a good presentation, though.
Finally, the last presentation of the show I went to was Dom Sagolla‘s “Why a Dollar?” presentation. His was about why his company only releases $0.99 apps and about the process he uses to create these apps. It was interesting to hear his point of view and to see how he does it.
With that, the conference was over! There were a bunch of us who weren’t flying out until the next day so we headed out to a Mexican restaurant for drinks and food. The conference organizers, Tom Ortega and John Wilker, were there too, so it was cool to get to hang out with them a bit. I also spent some time talking with one of the guys, Azeem Ansar, from PinchMedia, which was cool, as well as Mark Thomas, who had flown all the way from the UK for the conference.
After that, I went back to my hotel, exhausted from all the excitement and brain activity. I was up bright and early yesterday morning (4:30am) to get on a plane back to Ontario (via Chicago of course). Today has been kind of a wash. I’m having trouble concentrating as my brain tries to sort through all the amazing things I’ve learned this week and all the things I want to do in the future!
If you weren’t able to make it to 360|iDev this time, I highly recommend it. They’re talking about doing another one in 6 months, but possibly further East. When tickets go on sale, get in early!
Owen
Some New Dapple Reviews
Friday, March 6th, 2009
I apologise for the number of posts today, but there’s been a lot going on over the last week and I haven’t had any time to post about any of it.
Dapple got a couple of new reviews while I was at 360iDev.
Two new reviews this week:
- krapps (www.krapps.com) – “we are thrilled to announce that Dapple is 100% anti-KRAPPS Certified!” – krapps is a cool website that mostly reviews the apps that you shouldn’t get. However, they’ve started reviewing quality titles under the “anit-Krapps” banner and Dapple was honoured to appear there.
- Dapple: It’s One Colorful Gem (www.theappera.com) – “the intergration of color mixing basics and beautiful presentation make Dapple a definite must have.”
I continue to be pleased with Dapple’s critical reception. All of the reviews so far have been extremely positive.
Owen
My 360iDev Presentation
Friday, March 6th, 2009
At 360iDev, earlier this week, I gave a presentation on the Creation of an iPhone Game. I’ve just exported it as a PDF and placed a zipped version on my website. If you weren’t able to make it to 360iDev but want to read the presentation, you can find it here:
Just save it locally somewhere, unzip, and enjoy! I’ve included my presenters notes in the slides, since many of the slides wouldn’t make a lot of sense without “hearing” what I had to say about them.
I will post a detailed account of 360iDev (aka: the best damn iPhone developer conference around!) as soon as I find some time. That will hopefully be later today or sometime over the weekend.
And yes, I know I said I’d post some sales data when I got back from California, so that will probably happen early next week once I get settled in back here and have some time to analyse the data.
Owen
A Distinct Lack of Blogs
Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
You’ll notice that I have not been blogging. I really, really want to share all the incredible things I’ve been learning about at 360iDev. (I actually typed that as #360iDev first…I’ve been using Twitter way too much). My mind is overflowing with information and I’m completely exhausted by the end of each day. Suffice it to say that I’m enjoying myself immensely. I feel like I’m learning new things constantly. I’ve met so many great iPhone developers here. It’s so cool to meet people I’ve only spoken with on the internet and find out that they’re really cool people in real life.
I will try to post in more detail when I’m back in Canada, but right now I’m just too damn tired. Must zzzzzz now…good night.
Owen