The iOS Game Revenue Survey
September 19th, 2011
EDIT: If you’re looking for the results, head on over to the Results Blog Post.
EDIT: The survey is now closed! Thank you to those who participated. The results will be posted on this blog in the next few days, as soon as I can get them written up.
iOS Game Development Survey at SurveyMonkey
(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8BZFHRX)
Hello everyone! It has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologize. But, as fall approaches, I wanted to kick things off with something that I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while: an iOS game developer revenue survey.
There are a lot of articles out there about this developer making a lot of money, or that developer not making any money on the App Store. Articles often throw around estimates of revenue averages on the App Store. The problem is, we really don’t have a lot of reliable data. As independent game developers, we don’t have the resources to hire large consulting firms to do very expensive market analysis for us.
So, what I thought I’d do is run an iOS game developer revenue survey. It’s 8 questions long and asks you about the revenue your iOS games have generated. The focus is on games released in the past 12 months so that we can get an idea of what the market looks like right now. The survey gathers no personal information, and all data will be released in aggregate.
The goal is to get an idea of what the App Store economy looks like for games. The term “average” (or mean) gets thrown around a lot, but if you’re an iOS developer, you know that average is almost meaningless, because the massive hits on the App Store distort the mean. What is more important is the median, or what the middle game in the pack is making. I am hoping that, if enough people take the survey, we can start to get an idea of what that median is.
I’m planning to leave the survey up for 1 week (until Monday, September 26, 2011). At that point, I will make some fancy charts and post the survey results right back here on this blog.
So, what are you waiting for? If you’re an iOS game developer, please take the survey and help the iOS game development community:
iOS Game Development Survey at SurveyMonkey
(http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/8BZFHRX)
Please spread the word on twitter, facebook, your own blog, or any other way you can! We need as many iOS game developers as possible to take the survey.
Thanks!
Owen
[...] Head on over to Owen’s blog for more details or to contact him directly. [...]
Great initiative! I hope you get the amount of responses you need so you can share some meaningful data with us!
Regards!
Survey completed.
This is a great idea, but I think that you should leave the survey up more time, maybe 1 month. Spread the word on communities like cocos2d-iphone forums, I’m sure you will get a lot of useful data from the developers.
Also, you should modify the survey to add interesting questions about marketing, example:
“How many money have you spent on marketing and advertising?”
Marketing and advertising is a key factor.
Regards.
I totally agree with Dani.
Added my datapoint as a hobbyist. Only one game for the iPhone, and it was pulled after a few short months when EA/The Tetris Company got their short-and-curlies in a bunch. :/ Can still play the game, just not on the iPhone ~ erif.org/code/fallingup/
I agree with adding a question about how much money you invested. A lot of us have spent 5+ months jobless while we develop our games, and forfeit about 20k worth of salary for a game that has a chance of returning under 1 k in revenue
Thanks for the feedback, everyone! And thanks to everyone who has filled out the survey so far! To address a few of the specific comments:
@Dani – I chose a week because I figured if someone didn’t fill it out within a week, they probably wouldn’t in a month either. Nothing like a deadline to motivate people.
So far the survey has been posted to: twitter, this blog, 148Apps.biz, TouchArcade forums, iPhoneDevSDK forums, cocos2d forums, and Unity forums. If there are other places anyone can think to post it, please do help spread the word.
@Dani, @Gui – There are a lot of questions I would have liked to have added. The original draft of the survey was much more detailed and longer than what I ended up with. However, after talking with people who had run surveys before, I decided that the best way to get the most people answering was to keep the survey as concise as possible, while gathering the data I thought was most important. So I decided to focus the survey on games released and revenue, with a focus on the past 12 months. The goal being to get an idea of what the App Store market looks like right now. It would be great to get data on money spent, marketing budgets, but I was worried I’d be losing a lot of potential respondents. I hope that makes sense.
Owen
Brilliant idea — it’s a wonder (and a crime!) that nobody’s done this already. Of course, you could argue that it’s a crime Apple doesn’t provide this information in some form. We really shouldn’t have to scrape and scrounge for basic market information like this…
Oh, and while I’m looking forward to those fancy charts, is there any chance you’d be willing to release the raw data, suitably anonymised? Could be useful for further analysis.
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