Results: iOS Game Revenue Survey
September 28th, 2011
10 days ago I launched a survey in the iOS game developer community aimed at gathering revenue data from as many developers as possible. The goal was to get a more realistic view of what the iOS game marketplace actually looks like and share the results with the entire dev community. The reason I felt this was necessary is that we tend to see two kinds of articles written about iOS game revenue: “Developer makes millions on iOS games!” or “Game makes $0 on App Store”. I felt it was important that we get a more realistic look at what the market we’re developing for looks like.
With that in mind, the survey launched on Monday, September 19, 2011 and ran for seven days. 252 developers filled it out! Now, before I get to the actual data, there’s some important disclaimers I need to make, and I want to talk about methodology. Let’s begin…
Methodology
The survey was conducted entirely using the online service SurveyMonkey. The survey consisted of eight questions. Two questions gathered information about the type of developer and the number of people working on their games. The next three questions gathered data about lifetime game releases on the App Store, and revenue those games generated. Finally, the last three questions gathered data on games released within the last 12 months (more on this in the next section on errors and bias).
Requests to take the survey were distributed via the following social networks and web sites:
- Google+
- 148Apps.biz
- TouchArcade forums
- iPhoneDevSDK forums
- cocos2d forums
- Unity forums
The goal was to engage as many active iOS game developers as possible. More on this in the next section on errors and bias.
The survey was closed on Monday, September 26, 2011 at noon, EDT. Survey responses were downloaded at that point, and I’ve been using Numbers (from iWork ’09) for Mac to analyze the data.
It is also worth noting that when I launched the survey, I stated two things:
- The survey would collect no personal data
- The data would only be released in aggregate, no raw data would be released
This is why I’m not releasing the raw data.
Errors and Bias
Disclaimer: I make no claims as to the statistical validity of this data. There is a good chance that the sample population is not representative of all game developers on the App Store. There is a good chance that I introduced measurement bias/error into the data by the way I worded the survey questions. In short: I am not a professional statistician. Do not treat this data as 100% accurate. It is just interesting to look at.
Ok, let’s talk about that disclaimer in a bit more detail.
Sample Population
Because the survey was completely voluntary, and I have no information on the demographics that make up App Store developers, I have no way to determine how representative the data is. Further, because of the way in which I went about gathering the data, the developers who responded are all likely developers actively working on games, and who are actively involved in the development community. Because of this, I would be tempted to guess that the numbers we see here are actually higher than on the App Store over all. However, I have no data to be able to back up that guess.
12 Month Data
One of the things I really wanted data on was a snapshot of what the last 12 months have looked like for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I created to gather this data clearly confused respondents. The intent was that devs enter only revenue from games released within the last 12 months, but many developers provided revenue from the last 12 months for all their games. This made the data I collected for these questions largely useless for the purposes I wanted. Further, most people didn’t understand the instructions and didn’t match the sales revenue to the non-sales revenue in the two questions, making drawing conclusions there impossible, also. You’ll see later on that I did manage to get some basic data from it, but couldn’t do the detailed analysis I had hoped for.
Other
There are, no doubt, other sources of error and bias in the data. The main thing to remember is that these numbers are not 100% accurate, but rather just provide a glimpse into the App Store market for games.
To the data!
Results
The survey was open for exactly seven days and had 252 respondents.
General Questions
The first two questions of the survey were there to get an idea of the kinds of developers responding.
You can see from the results in Figure 1 that only about 1/3 of respondents consider themselves full-time independent game developers. Over half the respondents are part-time indies, hobbyists, or students. (Note: Click the charts to see them full-sized).
Figure 1. Developer Type
When questioned about the number of people (from now on referred to as “developers”) working on their games, half the respondents were working by themselves. I was surprised by the number of respondents who were working for larger companies in the 10+ developers range. However, over 93% of respondents have 5 or fewer developers working on their games. See Figure 2.
Figure 2. Number of Developers
Lifetime Game Releases and Revenue
The next three questions of the survey gathered information about lifetime revenue on the store. The three questions asked for data on:
- The number of games released on the App Store
- The number of months the developer had games on the App Store
- Lifetime revenue for all games on the App Store
Using this data, it’s possible to generate some very interesting results. First, let’s look at all the lifetime revenues reported (see Figure 3). One of the most interesting features of the graph is the clearly exponential curve associated with the revenues. The graph makes it very clear that most developers aren’t making a lot of money selling games on the App Store, while a few are making a lot of money.
I’ve made note of both the arithmetic mean average, and the median average on the chart. This is why the median is so important. The extremely high revenues reported by a small number of developer skew the arithmetic mean significantly. If you looked at that as an average, it would be easy to say “the average game developer has made about $165,000″. However, the median tells a very different story. The median splits the developers in half. This means that 50% of developers have made less than $3,000 lifetime revenue on the App Store, while 50% have made more. The reason that the mean and median are so different is that the computed sample standard deviation is 639,966. A standard deviation that high means that the mean average is not very representative of the data spread. Because of this, I have used median averages everywhere in these results, instead of mean averages.
What is also telling is that if you were in the 75th percentile, you would have made about $30,000 on the App Store. This means that only 25% of developers have made more than $30,000 lifetime total revenue selling games on the App Store. Conversely, we can see that 25% of developers have made less than $200.
Figure 3. Lifetime Revenue - All Respondents
I wanted to take that revenue data and plot a distribution curve from it. However, the range of data was so large that I couldn’t plot it on a linear scale. This was the case for many of the graphs you’ll see. Like Figure 4, I have made note whenever one of the axes is using a logarithmic scale instead of a linear scale. By breaking the revenue down into buckets (each one 10x greater than the last), I was able to get a better distribution graph (see Figure 4). From this, we can clearly see that nearly 25% of developers have made between $1,000 and $10,000 on the App Store. What is particularly impressive is that 4% of respondents (10 respondents) had made over $1,000,000 on the App Store!
Note on Figure 4: You’ll notice duplicate values between buckets (i.e. 1-10, 10-100, etc). This was done only for the labels so the chart was easier to read. The data is actually divided into (10n)-(10n+1 – 1) buckets (i.e. 1-9, 10-99, etc).
Figure 4. Lifetime Revenue Distribution (Note: Logarithmic scale on x-axis)
That 4% of respondents got me wondering about the idea of where the revenue was going on the App Store. So next I took a look at what percentage of the total revenue reported was reported by what percentage of respondents (similar to a distribution of wealth chart you might see for a country’s population). See Figure 5. What is fascinating to me is that the top 20% of developers are earning 97% of the revenue on the App Store, with the top 1% earning over 1/3 of the revenue on the App Store. The bottom 80% of game developers are earning only 3% of the revenue.
Figure 5. Distribution of Revenue
Next, I wanted to start comparing lifetime revenue to the other data the respondents had provided. To start, I wanted to see how revenue compared to developer type. Figure 6 shows a graph of median lifetime revenue, divided by developer type. It is no surprise to me that full-time indies, and representatives for iOS game dev companies reported the highest revenue. Note that revenue in Figure 6 is charted on a logarithmic scale, so the median earnings of a full-time indie developer are reported to be 30x greater than those reported by part-time indies. This does not mean that going full-time indie will guarantee you 30x the revenue, these are just the numbers that have been reported.
Figure 6. Median Revenue by Developer Type (Note: Logarithmic scale on y-axis)
Next I wanted to see if developers who worked with more people earned more revenue than those working alone. Figure 7 clearly shows this is the case. Note that the revenue for companies with 10+ employees may not accurately reflect a good median, because there were so few responses in these categories. However, it’s clear that individuals have earned the least lifetime revenue, on average.
Figure 7. Median Revenue by Number of Developers (Note: Logarithmic scale on y-axis)
But then I started to wonder if it was just because larger groups might be able to release more games, meaning their total revenue would be higher. So, I broke the revenue down, dividing it by the number of games released, and by the number of months the developer had had apps on the store. The result is a chart of median per-game, per-month, lifetime revenue by the number of developers who worked on the games. You’ll see in Figure 7b that the curve looks almost identical to Figure 7′s. The conclusion that I draw from this is that, in general, larger groups of developers are able to create games that earn more money. Wagering a guess, this is perhaps because they are able to create games that are larger in scope, more technically interesting, and more polished, because they have more people to work on the game and provide input into its improvement.
Figure 7b. Median Per-Game, Per-Month, Rev by Number of Developers (Note: Logarithmic scale on y-axis)
Finally, a friend was curious whether or not releasing more games meant that a developer ended up improving over time. To attempt to answer that question, I divided each respondent’s lifetime revenue by the number of games they had released on the App Store, then graphed the median distribution curve by the number of games released. The results can be seen in Figure 8. What is really interesting to me is that developers do seem to generate more revenue over time (on average). This should be encouraging if you really want to make games, but your first game was a flop. Fear not! 50% of developers who have only released one game made under $500 on that game. However, the more games developers had released, the more per-game average revenue they seem to generate. This seems to validate the old adage: practice makes better than doing something once. Wait…that’s not quite right…
Figure 8. Median Per-Game Revenue by Number of Games Released
12-Month Releases and Revenue
The final three questions of the survey were supposed to deal with revenue generated by apps released within the last 12 months. However, since many respondents provided the last 12 months of revenue from all their games, I can’t draw the same conclusions that I would have liked. However, what I have done is graph the revenue for each individual game reported.
Figure 9 shows the individual game revenues over the last 12 month period. It is a graph of 382 games that reported non-zero sales revenue (including IAP). You can see that the curve follows a very similar line to the lifetime revenue chart, in that it’s exponential. Again, we can see that the difference between mean and median is significant, telling us that the high earners on the right distort the mean average.
What’s important to note in Figure 9 is that the median game earned $1,100 in the last 12 months. This means 50% of the games earned less, and 50% earned more. 25% of games earned less than $140, while conversely, 25% earned more than $10,675.
Figure 9. Per-Game, Non-Zero Sales Revenue - Past 12 Months
And finally, Figure 10 shows the non-sales revenue generated by the 85 games that reported non-zero revenue. The non-sales revenue was to account for all revenue generated from a game aside from sales (e.g. ads, affiliate links, merchandise, etc). Figure 10 is graphed on the same y-axis as Figure 9. You can clearly see that the top end is much lower than for sales. However, in the middle of the graph, games that reported non-sales revenue, reported slightly higher earnings on the non-sales side of things.
What this means is that there is clearly some good revenue to be made through things like ads, affiliate links, and other non-sales sources of revenue, and there are clearly some games doing this very well.
Figure 10. Per-Game, Non-Zero, Non-Sales Revenue - Past 12 Months
Conclusions
Phew! Did you make it all the way through? Good. This is a lot of data to process, so thanks for following along. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get more useful data out of the 12 month questions. I clearly needed to word the questions differently.
Hopefully these results have provided some insight into the games market on the App Store. I hope that it can be used to help set expectations for new and experienced developers alike. It is clear that there is a lot of money to be made in games on the App Store. However, as the data shows, it’s not easy, but the more games you make, the better you’ll get. Common sense, I suppose…but sometimes it’s nice to have the data to back it up.
Thank you so much to the 252 people who participated in the survey for sharing this data with the rest of the community. We all appreciate it greatly.
Now you’ve been reading this for much too long. Get back to work on your next game!
Owen
Thanks for doing this Owen! These results will definitely come in handy.
Also glad to see it seems like hard work and persistence will eventually pay off
Great Article, Owen!
I’m so glad that you organized this. It’s very good to be able to (even if just slightly) confirm some of the suspicions and hearsay about the platform.
Looking at some of the stats makes me very motivated. I think one of my favorite stats is that if you do better than average (median) you have potential to have great success! Something for us all to aspire to.
Also, being a full-time developer, seeing figure 6 also gave me strong motivation!
Thanks!
Thanks for doing someone I only dreamed about tackling. Also, as a developer coming from a market research background, I really appreciate that you took the time to briefly cover methodology, errors and biases – under appreciated cornerstones of ethical research.
Hi,
I participated in this survey and between my data and the results presented I can definitely see some huge differences. I am a one man band, student, and the data doesn’t represent my data point at all.
So what I’d like to see is the distribution of revenue for single developers that are students. Highest, lowest, median, mean.
And I’d like to see it for part-time-devs as well, since I for one couldn’t quite decide whether I was one or the other and chose student in the end.
In the end these are only statistics, but of course it would paint a more realistic picture if we could see not only the mean values per “category” but also the extremes etc. Only if you can find the time and enthusiasm, of course.
Thanks for listening.
Useful data to think and study in the coming days. Thanks for the work, Owen!
The 12 months revenue question is problematic. I’ve answered it correctly, but the only title I’ve released within the last 12 months was just out for a week at this time. The discrepancy of life time sales and last years sales was extreme due to this (40:1).
I really appreciate the info; sort of disheartening that so many aren’t making much, but very interesting about the correlation between making more games and overall revenue.
I wonder how much of this is due to cross-promotion, etc, vs increasing skill at selling games in the App Store.
Great work!
Nice info indeed Owen, thanks… and really validating I think for a lot of us who are simply die-hards that refuse to give up.
Thanks for the great article. It’s really encouraging to see that if I develop more games, the probabilities of making more revenue is higher.
Thank you for taking the time to do this.
[...] Colour provides graphs and analysis of iOS game developer revenue in this post. According to these numbers, we’re doing well if each of our games makes more than $770 in [...]
Excellent info and write-up! I don’t know if it was included in the survey, but did you record any information on app prices?
As someone moving into the mobile market I’ve been trying to figuring out a price point with a long-ish tail. Having an idea of the correlations between app price and lifetime gains could be very helpful (with bonus points for how many developers worked on the app).
Wow, amazing. Great data, thanks.
Looks like a team size of 3-9 is the sweet spot for indie development.
Awesome work. Thanks for collecting and sharing this information!
Did the survey include questions about price points for the apps? I’m curious if any of these developers had a free-to-play/pay-to-play model, or were just ad supported, or some combination of things.
Plus, Mark’s point of his game only being out for a week at the time of the survey is worth noting, and would be interesting if included into the shared statistics somehow.
Again, thanks for this! It is indeed really helpful for the industry as a whole when developers can help other developers clear the fog of what’s really going on in the market.
Great post, thank you for some great stats! Very helpful, and very encouraging
Very interesting. Would also be very interested in seeing something like this for Android, any plans for that?
Hey,
First, thank you for the survey results.
That near 10% is what I thought it would be for developers making 100K – 1M. Given app store legends haven’t been around for longer than 2.5 years (right?), 10% of game developers earn a significant amount of income, given they’re not sharing too much of it.
[...] interesting iOS Game Revenue Survey from Streaming Colour Studios. I haven’t looked into how representative the survey is, but the results seem plausibe. Share [...]
I’d recommend you seperate out statistics from any product which is backed by a strong brand name as this could seriously skew any graphs /analysis done – making it far less relevant to people in practical usage.
Just wanted to thank you for the work you put on this Owen. You are an invaluable asset for the whole community
Seeing those last couple graphs is really motivating!
Amazing article! This is immensely useful for planning and budgeting, and is something I’ve been looking for for months.
One thing I would like to see, is a correlation between budget and profit’s? ie, maybe all the part-timers doing in with no art budget at all? Would be nice to see what sort of correlation there is between investment and return.
Also, it might be insteresting to get a better indication of profit margins. A 10-person company is likely spending upwards of 500k / year in salaries.
[...] EDIT: If you’re looking for the results, head on over to the Results Blog Post. [...]
I think the way the data has been broken down makes it not as useful as it could of been.
I’d like to see the groups broken down individually rather than clumped together.
Nice article, thanks.
[...] 97% of Revenue’By Gary Ng on September 29th, 2011 0Canadian iOS developer Owen Goss, from Streaming Colour Studios (based out of Guelph, Ontario) recently created a survey designed specifically for iOS developers. [...]
Owen, great work on this. It gives some great insight and backs up a lot of assumptions that people make about developing games for the app store.
Like some others have asked for, it would be great to get info on budgets and the ways developers actually sell their games (price points, premium, freemium, paid/free etc).
I think this could be the first in a great long line of very informative surveys conducted on game development. Even perhaps with other platforms some day?
[...] [...]
[...] Results: iOS Game Revenue Survey « Streaming Colour Studios. No [...]
[...] Meer info: Streaming Color [...]
Thank you very much for your hard work.
I think you have done an admirable job on this.
I would also like to mention that I have enjoyed reading some of your other well presented posts
Keep up the good work
Absolutely, I agree with the conclusions, it becomes harder and harder for developers to get visibility. We can help by selecting the best apps inside http://www.freeappmagic.com/ and bit.ly/FreeAppMagic and give Indie developers visibility to over 300,000 users every day. Happy to help.
Thank you very much. Good job!
Owen,
Thanks a lot for sharing this very interesting data! My startup done a lot of research mostly focused on the top companies & games and how they are handing gamer acquisition, engagement and monetization ( available via blog.appington.com ). It was great to see your take in how the money is/was made by all the different type of devs.
cheers,
@ristoh
I wonder at what we are looking at ? The cause or the consequence ? For example, are you really getting that much better the more game you release or is it just that you released more game because you were successful. If your first game does not meet your expectation then it’s probable that you won’t work on another one.
The same can be said about team sizes. Is it really that big team makes big profits or that, once you have made great profits you start to employ other people ?
Great survey, write-up and discussion, thank you!
Curious if this reflects on the early PC/Mac game days – either small (one) number of developers or small companies, and over time it becomes less individual independents.
Or, will the nature of the handheld market keep the balance as it is now?
[...] Results: iOS Game Revenue Survey [...]
As someone who is just now getting into this business on a low budget, let me sincerely thank you Owen for putting this together. This helps tremendously as I make hard choices in determining how to allocate my resources going forward. It is very hard to find data like is on the web. I can’t thank you enough, really.
Thanks for sharing this very useful information!
Dude, THANKS A lot for doing such a good study, Congratulations, Hope you can make more on the future. Email me And I can help you to have more people to answer the questions.
Cheers.
[...] at the right price and become the next Angry Birds. Don’t get your hopes up too high, though. Results of a survey out this week show that the top 20% of developers are earning 97% of the revenue on the Apple App [...]
Hello!
Very nice INFO man!
My congrats on doing this for all of us sure!
Regards,
Rodrigo.
[...] developers filled in a survey about what their apps were making on the iTunes App Store. You can read all of the details, but bascially, few apps are making most of the money. Only 25 [...]
[...] Ask an average person how much developers are making selling apps on the App Store and they will likely tell you “a lot” and, in a sense, they wouldn’t be wrong. However those of us closer to the market place know just how much that skews to those sitting at the very top. [...]
Another source of revenue is in-app purchases. I didn’t see any mention of that. Would that be included in the ‘Sales Revenue’ or is it only taking into account the purchase price of the game?
Thanks. Very good work. Interesting data. We’re hoping for more of the same. Quite valuable for context & decision support. We’ll be keeping at it until we have the requisite titles & devs to ensure success in the space.
[...] Here is the most definite answer I’ve seen so far. [...]
I would be interested about which type of app created how much revenue
1. Genuine idea or genuine product, including high production costs (like Fire2, Week Cal, Pleco, Samurai2, Labyrinth, Tweetbot, Escape …) or
2. Copy from Xcode or github sample projects + apply own branding/artwork (which apparently form the majority of apps in the app store)
This would show if personal effort and bringing one´s own visions to life is worth it or better go with the mass market and copy paste (to put it into Seth Godin words: “average products for average people”)
[...] iOS Game Revenue Survey [...]
Thanks a lot for doing this. This data is very interesting and provides some insight into iOS game developer revenues.
[...] About 75% of iOS developers have earned less than $25,000 in lifetime revenue, according to one survey of game developers. The best deal around for revenue sharing, however, remains the Chrome Web Store. Google charges [...]
[...] We’ve agreed that we want to make a push to go for iOS devices – which will mark the first significant investment our little enterprise will have to make. $400 dollars for the iOS licence in Unity, and $99 dollars to the Apple app store comes out to about a $500 investment to split between us. I’ll have to admit that’s a bit daunting… especially considering that most titles on the app store only earn their budding programmers small sums of cash to begin with. [...]