Yes, you read that right: for today only, I’m reducing the price on four of my games to FREE. I have never dropped the price of any of my games to free before, and now you get four in one day!

Maybe it’s that the holidays are coming up, or maybe I was just in a good mood. Who cares?! You get free games! So what are you waiting for? Go to the App Store and download these games now!

Dapple (Reg. Price: $2.99)

Monkeys in Space (Reg. Price: $1.99)

LandFormer (Reg. Price of Premium Content: $1.99)

* LandFormer was always a free download. However, the Premium Content is available from the In-Game Shop for FREE today.

Dirty Diapers (Reg. Price: $0.99)

I hope you enjoy the games. And if you do, please feel free to throw a good review up on the App Store.  Happy Holidays!

Owen

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:

• twitter
• facebook
• Google+
• 148Apps.biz
• Reddit
• 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:

1. The survey would collect no personal data
2. 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:

1. The number of games released on the App Store
2. The number of months the developer had games on the App Store
3. 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

Owen

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

In three years, I’ve released four games to the App Store:

• Dapple
• Monkeys in Space: Escape to Banana Base Alpha
• LandFormer
• Dirty Diapers

And I’ve done some major client work:

• Cargo Runners

I’ve also recently submitted an app to the store that I created for my eight-month-old son:

• Baby’s Musical Hands (Coming Soon!)

I made a cool HTML5 party game that you play on your cell phone at TOJam with Matt Rix and Whitaker Blackall:

• What Just Happened?!

I wrote a chapter in a book:

• iPhone Advanced Projects

And I’ve spoken at several conferences:

• 360iDev San Jose 2009
• 360iDev San Jose 2010
• FITC Mobile 2010

I have had a lot of fun, I have struggled at times, and I have met the most incredible people in the indie games community. Thank you all for making this such a great experience, and thank you so much to everyone who has bought my games. Here’s to many more years of indie development!

Owen

Note: This article refers to being “indie” in the sense of running your own business. If you’re working a salaried position at a small indie studio, much of this won’t apply.

1. Lack of Stable Income

Let’s get this out of the way right off the bat, because it’s the biggie. As an indie developer, you will most likely not have a steady income. Your income will fluctuate greatly from day to day. Until you launch that first game, your income will be $0. Even after you launch that first game, your income may very well still be close to $0. You need to be ready for that.

Game Developer Magazine does an annual survey of game developer salaries around the world (but mostly centred in the US). This past year they did the first indie salary survey [1]. The survey found that the average annual income for a solo indie developer (i.e. a dev working by his or herself) is about $11,000 USD. The average increases to about $20,000 if the developer works as part of a team of two or more people. This is why so many indie developers do contract work on the side. Making your own game is a risk, but being paid to develop someone else’s game is less risky.

But there’s an upside: if you’re one of the few lucky ones to release a really killer game that takes off and becomes a hit, the potential to make a lot of money is there. Just don’t rely on it as your plan for sustaining the business.

What does this mean? It’s going to be an adjustment. If you’re used to working a job with a regular salary, working for yourself will take some time to get used to. You’ll start thinking about your time differently, and also start thinking about money differently. Instead of thinking “This DVD is only $20, I’ll take it!” You’ll start thinking “Wow, $20…that’s like selling 29 copies of my game at $0.99…that’s like…three days of sales.”

2. Work/Life Balance

In my other post I talked about the freedom we have as indie developers to work the hours we want to work. However, the flip side of that is that the line between home life and work life can easily become blurred. If you’re working for a larger indie studio you may have office space and this isn’t as much of a problem. But if you’re working from home, it’s easy to “just work one more hour” after dinner, or “just write a few more emails before bed”. Next thing you know it’s 2:00 AM and you’re introducing three bugs every 15 minutes into your rendering system. When your work computer is in your home, it can be difficult to force yourself to stop working, or sometimes to start working.

I’m a guy who likes his routine (boy is that changing now that I have a one-month-old baby). My routine helps me to work during “working hours” and not work when I want to spend time with my family. Even though I work from home, (before the baby) I got up every day at 7:30, showered, ate breakfast, got dressed, and “went to work”. It helps me to delineate the difference between being at home, and being at work. A friend of mine told me about his friend who used to walk around the block and return home to force himself to think about being “at work” differently. Where I still struggle the most is at the end of the day. 5:30 or 6:00 rolls around and I need to start cooking dinner, but it’s easy to “just write a couple more lines of code” and get lost in it.

However, it can be done. You can find a really nice balance between work and life outside of work. It’s just going to take more discipline than if you worked for someone else.

3. Oh So Much Paperwork

All you want to do is make great games, but if you’re reading this, you’re probably pretty serious about it. You’re running a business. Running a business comes with a lot of work that isn’t much fun: filling out international tax treaty forms, doing your monthly bookkeeping (did I say monthly? er…yearly?), filing your taxes, dealing with copyright or trademark infringement, figuring out how to make money, etc, etc. But it all needs to be done. Your brain will want to say to you “hey man, you could be logging your business receipts in your accounting software right now…but wouldn’t you much rather be implementing that new animation system you’ve been dying to try??” Sometimes you need to tell that little voice to shut up and take care of the business.

4. Feeling Like a Failure

Ok, this is starting to get kind of personal…and I really hope I’m not the only one who feels this sometimes. As much as you’ll have days where you absolutely LOVE being indie and making your own games, you will probably have days where it just sucks. You’ll get your daily sales report (if you’re selling on the App Store) and have a day where you made $1.43 the previous day and you’ll start to wonder what you’re doing with your life. You’ll hit a roadblock with your game and wonder if you’ll ever be able to solve it. You’ll get to an alpha build with your game and realize all the fun work is done and now you just have to hunker down and finish the boring parts of making a game. You’ll have a day where all your ideas feel like they’re the worst idea you’ve ever had.

I’m here to tell you: that’s ok. But this is why it’s so important that you LOVE making games. Because not all parts of the process are fun. Some parts suck. Some parts will make you want to quit. But if you really love it, if you can’t think of anything else you’d rather be doing with your life, then you’ll push through the bad days and you’ll get back to loving it again.

But…It’s Worth It

So yes, there are parts of being an indie developer that aren’t all sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows (you really should click that link). But you know what? I still love it! Because for all the annoyances and hard days, they all pale in comparison to the fact that I get to make the games I want to make every day!

Owen

[1] Brandon Sheffield and Jeffrey Fleming. “9th Annual Game Developer Salary Survey“. Game Developer Magazine. April 2010: 12.

Now that I’m starting to learn to cope with very little sleep, and our new son is starting to find what might be described as the beginnings of a routine, I thought it was time to get back into the saddle and write up a post. Since I haven’t done any work in the last two weeks, a technical post seemed out of the question. And given that my life has been turned upside down, and I’m learning what it means to have no free time, I thought I’d talk about the value of our time as indie developers.

There seem to be three kinds of indie developers: those who treat games as a creative endeavour first and business second; those who treat games as a business first and a creative endeavour second; and those who think about both the art and the business carefully when building games. I’ll admit, I’m one who thinks about the creative aspect first and the business second, but I do think of this as a business. I’m not a hobbyist. I need to make money to be able to keep making games.

A year and half ago I wrote up a controversial blog post that talked about the relatively slow start that my first game, Dapple, got off to in a post called “The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)“. The post was meant to show another side to all the Instant Millionaire stories that were running about the App Store at the time. However, one thing that surprised me was that I received a lot of angry mail (some of it extremely angry) in response to the post. One of the things that people got most upset about was my calculation of the budget for the game.

In my breakdown I had called out my own time as part of the budget for the game. This upset a lot of people. But let’s consider this first. How many times have you been at a conference or an iPhone dev meetup and heard a conversation like this:

Dev 1: “So how much did your game cost to make?”
Dev 2: “Well, I paid $200 for sound effects from WebsiteX, but I did the art and programming myself, so that was free.”

I know I’ve heard that a lot. Hell, I think I’ve even said that at one point or another. What bothers is me is that so many of us have this attitude that our time isn’t worth anything. Why are the two months you spent programming and drawing “free”? It’s not. Your time is valuable. Your time is money.

Let’s think about it this way. If you had hired a programmer and an artist to build the game for you, how much would it have cost you? Would it have been free? If you had taken on a two month contract instead of building your own game, would you have done it for free? No. We are professional developers. Yes, we’re indie. Yes, we work for ourselves. But our time is not free. We need to start thinking about the cost of our time when we’re considering the cost of making a game.

Now, I’m not advocating avoiding a game you desperately want to make because you know it will lose money. What I’m trying to get at is that you should at least be aware that it’s going to lose money. If you still need to make the game, make it. We’re professionals. Our time is valuable. Let’s make informed decisions. Let’s take ourselves seriously.

Owen

P.S. Happy Halloween, everyone!

Introduction

If you haven’t played the game, LandFormer is a puzzle game for iPhone/iPod touch. Each level is made up of a 5×5 grid of terrain at different heights (oceans, up to mountains). The goal on each level is to use land forming tools to modify the heights of the terrain tiles to flatten things out. It’s a challenging game that starts off very easy, but get quite difficult in the harder levels. It’s a game that requires skill, patience, but most of all, intuition.

The game is free to download and try (there are 12 levels currently in the free version of the game), with In-App Purchase (IAP) available to upgrade to the “full” version of the game, as well as IAP for additional visual themes and additional levels. I think of it like a demo, where the user gets to try it and then decide if they want to spend money on more levels. The free version also contains ads, which are disabled if the player buys any content from the in-game shop.

The game launched on June 29, 2010 and has had 147,000 downloads of the free version of the game so far.

What Went Right?

1) Gameplay

I’m really happy with how the game itself turned out. LandFormer started as a prototype called “UpDown” that I did in 6 hours at the all-night GameJam for 360iDev Denver in September, 2009 (I participated via Skype). After I launched Monkeys in Space, I returned to the prototype in early 2010 and started playing around with ways to make it more fun, and settled on the terraforming theme, which helps players understand what they’re supposed to do, and why.

What I like most about the game is that I haven’t really seen other puzzle games like it. It’s similar in play-style to sliding block puzzle games (it requires a similar combination of spatial reasoning and intuition), but the up/down movement of the pieces makes it feel very new and requires new ways of thinking. It’s also very easy to learn how to play, but takes time to really master it and get good at the more difficult puzzles. In the end, I think the gameplay stands as being strong, and I’m very pleased with how the game turned out.

2) Strong Launch

This is my 3rd game, and thus my 3rd game launch. However, with LandFormer I decided it was time to try a new launch strategy. With my previous games, I launched the games as soon as Apple approved them. This caused all sorts of problems in terms of getting press materials out, and reviews trickling out gradually. With LandFormer, I decided to set a proper release date. When Apple approved the game, I set the release date for a week and a half into the future. I immediately sent out press releases to sites along with promo codes (yes, they work once the game has been approved, but before it’s available in the store) for press to try the game. Because my content is all IAP on my server, I could also make it available to the press for free during the pre-launch review period. Very handy.

The result of this new launch strategy was that several large review sites had reviews out within one or two days of launch. This helped pick up momentum for the game, then the first Thursday after launch Apple featured it as a Hot New Game. The Friday immediately after the feature, Gizmodo ran a review of the game, which boosted downloads tremendously for the following weekend.

I really couldn’t have asked for much better a launch. The only way it could have been better was by getting a front-page feature, or App of the Week feature from Apple. They’re probably just saving that for my next game (har har).

3) Free + IAP

As all developers do, I struggled a lot with the pricing model for the game. My other games are both paid games, but Dapple has a separate Lite version for players to “try before they buy”. The thing I don’t like about the Lite model is that it requires players to download two separate apps if they then want to buy the game. It always felt kludgy to me. Ultimately I decided to set things up like a PC or XBLA demo: free to download it, but if you like it, buy the full upgrade from within the game. This is the really exciting monetization path that IAP opened up when Apple introduced it.

Because I was implementing the in-game store for this anyway, it also allowed me to developing a theming system for the game and sell themes. It also means I can continue to release new level packs for users without having to update the game itself.

I think the model has a lot of potential on the app store. The free download gets you maximum visibility on the store (people are willing to download something just because it’s free), but then you have a way to earn some money within the app. However, it’s not all rainbows and unicorns: see the corresponding section in What Went Wrong.

4) Level Editor

When I started building the game, I was building levels as string of data then loading them into the game and testing them. This was ridiculous. I realized early on that building a level could be seen as solving a level in reverse. I was able to very quickly build a first pass at a level editor just by reversing the rules: start with a flat plane, and use the tools to deform it. This had two advantages: 1) it made building levels much easier, and 2) it meant that any level created in the level editor was guaranteed to have a solution.

Once I had it working for my own purposes I decided that it needed to be available to players in the game. The level editor is so easy and intuitive to use, I need people to be able to play with it. I’m happy I took the time to do the UI work required to build the level editor out into something that everyone could use.

The editor allows players to create their own levels, but beyond that, I implemented a sharing system based on URLs, where players could email a level to a friend. The friend clicks a link in the email and the level opens inside their copy of the game for them to play. It’s a simple system, that I think works quite nicely.

5) Doing Everything (Almost)

Since Monkeys in Space, I’ve been doing everything except the music in my games by myself. For both Monkeys and LandFormer I did all of the game design, programmer, artwork, UI design, sound design, PR, and marketing. I don’t do music, because that’s just something I’m not capable of doing myself. However, doing everything myself has given me a lot of freedom to make the game exactly how I want to make it. It also allows me to think about how a change will impact all the various aspects of the game. And, perhaps most importantly, it allows me to save a huge amount of out-of-pocket expense. I would love to have the funds to pay a full-time artist to work on the game, but that’s just not in the cards for me yet. I do have some art background, but doing all my own art for these games has helped me get a lot better than I was. I hope I’ll continue to improve. However, this is also another one of those things that also appears on the What Went Wrong section. So let’s get to that now.

What Went Wrong?

1) Free + IAP

I listed the reasons why I thought Free + IAP was great for LandFormer, but it’s also something that didn’t work great. One thing I was not at all prepared for was a backlash from users over the pricing model. I thought that players would be happy that they were given an opportunity to try the game before spending any money on it. However, the reaction from a lot of players instead was “The game says it’s free, but you have to buy stuff!” I got called a cheat, a liar, and a con artist.

My immediate reaction was that my app description clearly states that you only get the Beginner levels for free and have to buy the others. The app page in the store also lists the top IAP. But what I learned is that no one reads that stuff. I think I got a lot of downloads (especially after some of the big press stories ran) from people who saw the name, the icon, and “free” and downloaded it.

The problem is that there’s a disconnect between my view of the pricing model, and that of the minority of angry, vocal, app store consumers. I saw: “LandFormer offers you a way to try the game for free, and if you like it, buy it.” That customer sees: “Hey, a free game!” And then is angry when they discover they can’t play all the levels for free.

In the end, I’m not sure if the pricing model I chose for LandFormer was the right call or not. I’m not convinced that I wouldn’t have made more money by distributing a Lite version and a separate paid version (or only a paid version). App Store customers have gotten used to that model. I think it’s a problem with the fact that IAP didn’t exist from the start. Users had a year to get used to a certain business model, now we’re trying to change that. It’s going to be a difficult transition.

Not to go on about this for too long, but I think the Free + IAP model works best for games where you’re giving away a complete game for free, and then selling IAP for additional content that’s not required. If I ever do another free game, I’ll be looking toward that model.

2) iOS 4 + Multitasking

Apple launched iOS 4 on June 21, 2010, 8 days before I launched LandFormer, but 2 days after Apple had approved it. I had time with the beta SDK to make sure the game didn’t crash and that the game could be put into the background and restored properly before shipping it. However, I spent a great deal of time over the next 3 updates fixing weird little issues that cropped up because of iOS 4 multitasking. Multitasking caused all kinds of problems with my level sharing system, as well as my save system. I believe there was also one crash that only showed up in iOS 4 because of a change in the way some touch events fired. I’m not blaming Apple, it was just bad luck on my part that I launched so close to iOS 4, and I couldn’t afford to delay the launch of the game any more to deal with all the little issues that cropped up.

3) Ad Network

I mentioned in the introduction that I decided to include ads in the free version of the game. This is in this section for several reasons. At the peak of LandFormer’s popularity, it was being downloaded about 12,000 times per day. This translated into about 50,000 ad impressions a day. However, my click-through rate (CTR) was abysmal. It turned out that the way I was loading ads meant that a lot of people never saw the ads I requested. On my best day, I made about $5 off of ads. In the first update to the game (v1.1) I released a fix that made sure that ads were displayed properly to users. However, by the time it was approved I was down to a few hundred downloads a day of the free game. Even though my CTR increased dramatically with the change, my earnings averaged out around $0.30-0.40/day.

On top of that, the ad network I used had a crash bug in its code. After a couple of weeks trying to help them track the problem down, they told me they weren’t going to look into it any further. I was getting several support requests a week from players about this crash, so ultimately I pulled their ad network out of my game and I wrote my own custom system.

The game now (in v1.1.2) pulls ads of my own server. This is cool for several reasons. Now I get to decide what ads get shown in the game, it means I can cross promote my other games, and it means that I can promote games that I actually buy and play. I use LinkShare to get a small royalty any time someone actually buys through this system, but that’s been next to nothing so far. Still, I’d rather help support developers whose work I respect and have no crashes, than get the $0.30/day but with 10% of users experiencing a crash every time they launch the game.

4) Themes

When I built the IAP system I was very excited to be able to sell themes (skins) for the game. The way I had set up the graphics engine meant that it would be easy for me to load different textures to change the look of the game. I thought players would like the chance to be able to customize their experience a bit more too, but I was wrong. I’m seeing about a 0.1% conversion rate on themes (i.e. about 1 in 1000 people download a theme).

At this point, I only have one theme for sale. So it could be that people just don’t like that theme. It could also be that people just like the default art more. Or it could just be that people really don’t care about theming this kind of game. Though, if you think about it another way, if 1 in 100 people buy the premium content, the users who would buy a theme are probably a subset of that 1 in 100. So that means about 1 in 10 of those people have bought the theme, so maybe that’s ok. Still, when you do the math, that’s about $100 made off the theme so far, and it took almost a week of art work to build it (not even counting the time it took to put the theming system in place). When you look at it like that, it’s not as worth it.

I’m currently working on another theme. If it doesn’t sell, I probably won’t be releasing more themes. I think themes would sell better in a game where you could play the whole game for free. I think people might be willing to buy a theme in that case.

5) Doing Everything (Almost)

I’ve already outlined why I thought this worked for the project, but doing everything by oneself also comes with some big downsides. The biggest is time. LandFormer took 5 months from start to launch (then another month of work after launch). I’d guess that at least 2 months of that was doing the artwork and UI design for the game. If I could have afforded to pay a professional artist to do that for me, they probably would have taken half the time, and they could have been doing it while I programmed.

The other big downside is not having someone to bounce ideas off of. Working with an artist allows you to brainstorm, to try new things, and play with the concepts in the artistic direction of the game. When you’re doing it all yourself, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of just doing the first thing that comes to mind. It’s hard to force yourself to try multiple things and to find the best artistic solution to a problem.

Conclusion

In the end, I’m extremely pleased with the way that LandFormer turned out. I think it’s my strongest game to date. The game was also an opportunity for me to experiment with several new things I’d never tried before: IAP, free games, ad-supported games, and user-created content and sharing. I’m very happy with the number of free downloads the game has had. I find it absolutely amazing to think that almost 150,000 people have downloaded my game! At the same time, I’d be lying if I said I was happy with the conversion rate I’ve seen from free to paid.

The game continues to get a couple hundred downloads a day, and it seems to have stabilized there. I hope that it will maintain this level (or higher) for quite some time. The fact that it’s free seems to help keep the downloads alive.

Every game is an incredible learning experience, and I’ve learned a lot in making and launching LandFormer. I’ll be continuing to support it and add new content, but I’m also looking ahead to what’s next. Onward!

Owen

Thank you to everyone who bought one of my games over the last two years; you’re awesome. And a big thank you to the indie iPhone and indie games community for all the inspiration and support. I’m honoured to be part of this community, and I look forward to being a part of it for years to come.

Owen

I returned home from the Game Developers Conference (GDC) nearly a week ago, but I feel like it has taken me this long to be able to recover from the late nights, the jetlag, the cold I caught, and put things into perspective. I thought I’d share a summary of my experience there, for those who are thinking of maybe going next year.

Executive Summary: SO AWESOME!!!

GDC is held every year in San Francisco. I’ve been in the games industry for over 6 years now, but this was my first time at the conference, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I managed to get an All Access Pass to the conference, so I was there for the summits and tutorials, as well as the main conference.

Let me back up a little and talk about my reasoning for going, as that will help you understand why the conference was so valuable to me. At the beginning of the year I started thinking about what conferences I wanted to attend. 360iDev was a must-attend for me, so I booked that first. However, I was torn between attending WWDC (Apple’s big annual conference) or GDC. I attended WWDC last year and it was great. But this year I felt like what I really needed was general game design inspiration, and less Apple-specific technical inspiration. With that in mind, I chose GDC. My goal for the conference was to focus mainly on game design sessions and take in a few technical and business sessions.

So, I arrived in San Francisco Monday, March 8th, the day before the Summits started. I managed to meet up with a bunch of iPhone devs I know from Toronto, other conferences, or Twitter. We had a few beers and tried to adjust to west coast time. It was a good way to ease myself into the week.

Tuesday and Wednesday were the Summit & Tutorial days at GDC. There were two summits I was interested in: the iPhone Summit, and the Independent Games Summit (IGS). I think I spent about 60% of my time at the IGS and about 40% at the iPhone Summit. I saw some great technical iPhone talks by Noel Llopis from SnappyTouch and Phil Hassey from Galcon. I also saw some great IGS talks that ranged in topic from managing an independent game studio’s creative process, to how to better design indie games. I saw a session by Ron Carmel from 2D Boy, several awesome sessions by the people at thatgamecompany (Flower is one of my favourite games), and a terrific session by Randy Smith from Tiger Style (among so many others!). By the end of the Summits, my head was already spinning with inspiration. The IGS design talks in particular were extremely motivating for me. Getting a chance to meet and hear amazing indie game designers/developers talk about their processes was fantastic. It started me thinking about a lot of things as they relate to my own processes. More on that later…

A tiny segment of the massive GDC Expo

The IGF Awards

Thursday through Saturday were the main conference, expo, and Independent Games Festival Awards. I sat in session after amazing session listening to industry leaders in game design, technical development, and business talk about their processes. I saw Peter Molyneux talk, Sid Meier talk, and even Will Wright talk. I saw a moving and inspirational talk by Brenda Brathwaite on her exploration into board games with serious themes. I saw a head-ache inducing (in a good way!) talk on PixelJunk Shooter’s real-time fluid dynamics system that made me really miss doing PS3 SPU programming. I saw an in-depth and honest look a the successes and problems encountered by Naughty Dog’s attempts to create an active cinematic experience for Uncharted 2. I was blown away by the quality of the content, and I was left reeling by how the talks started forcing me to think about the direction I want to take with my own games.

There were huge crowds in the halls between sessions!

But of course, the sessions are only part of GDC. The other part comes from meetings and parties. I was able to set up a few meetings with iPhone press to show them my new game. That was really great to be able to demo the game in person. I think it was extremely valuable. Then each night there were countless parties happening. Each party was a great chance to meet people in person who I’ve only communicated with on twitter or via email. It was a chance to discuss iPhone development with other people going through the same thing as me. It was a chance to discuss game design in general with other game designers and developers. It was a chance to have fun with people who share in the same daily challenges that I do.

Will Wright giving his presentation!

For me, I got out of GDC exactly what I wanted: design inspiration, new friends, new business connections and a wealth of knowledge. But perhaps most importantly, GDC helped me to put me back on track with where I want to take my games. When I decided to go indie in 2008, it was because I wanted to make the games that I was compelled to make. What I’ve noticed is that I’ve been making more and more design decisions lately based on what I think will sell well. This isn’t how I want to make games. I want to make the games that I have to make, not that I think I should make because I think it might make some money, even though the idea doesn’t excite me. Granted, I would love to be able to make the games that I feel compelled to make and have them also become a financial success. And obviously I can’t ignore the fact that I’m running a business. But GDC helped to remind me of what I want my priorities to be, and that, to me, is the most important part of having gone.

Owen