After reading this article about Monument Valley, and the fact that only a small minority of players actually ended up paying for it, I’m beginning to wonder if paid mobile games are viable? Viable being: able to break even, maybe fund next project.
Even after that fact, there’s still the platforms 30% cut, tax and team wages. I just can’t see how you could break even, let alone fund a follow-up project, unless of course your game gets attention.
Mobile applications are generally 5-10 times cheaper then say a PC game, meaning you’re already aiming for 5-10 times amount of players on an already saturated marketplace.
Hoping someone can dispel all my worries and fears about this!
The estimate could be much higher than the reality. Only they really know. I did find the Gamasutra article interesting because it confirms something I have long suspected. The link between piracy and location.
I don’t think pirating is a big issue with Android because I seen on Google Play there was an option to not allow people to do anything Google Related if it wasn’t purchased from their store.
It is more common on Android than iOS though. Did a search for “pirating Android” and “pirating iOS”. Google turns up 229,000 results for Android and 139,000 for iOS.
@The_BenEvans - You have to consider all the incomes and expenses that surround a project. Sure, you might have a 95% piracy rate but if you still sell X thousand copies per day for a few dollars each then you might brake even and you might be able to use the leftovers to fund the next project but if you only sell X copies per day…
It is always a risk to publish a game, there are hundreds of ways to grow and loose sales. The question is, can you afford to fight and struggle for a place on the market? It is the same on other platforms… Blizzard got a name with a reputation and that is enough for them to sell but even the best developers are prepared for a fight when they start a new studio unless they got rich investors that are prepared to flood the company with money.
Why not keep your day job and keep your game as a side thingy? You can then afford to loose fights and if you get lucky, maybe you develop your own reputation tomorrow or in a few years where you can make a living only from your game projects
@Deon-Cadme Luckily Unity Dev is my day job haha! We’re starting off with a F2P title, but trying to figure out a route to go after that’s complete and out there.
Yeah, maybe piracy is just something that inevitably happens unfortunately and developers just have to deal with it, as long as companies don’t go under because of it. If mobile games are still making enough income from sales then I guess it’s still viable.
Wow, they are a lot of well paid professionals paid good money that need something other than trolling for pirated SW to do in their free time is how I see it.
Your average gamer, GooglePlay or iOS prefers not to waste time with those sites. Of course MonumentValley likely would have remained in obscurity were it not for the fact other tech folk wanted to see it and try it out without paying for it.
Interesting though that paid games are now called Premium.
When I was searching if my new Android tablet might be upgradable to Lollipop I found about 50% of the results and more were related to posts be folks that were IT workers looking to root their Androids. I suppose that’s how you install trojaned MonumentValley.
It is less about installing pirated software and more about pushing the lifespan of a device. Quite a number of devices are capped at specific Android versions yet they are capable of running better.
My dad, for example, has a Nook that is officially stuck Android 2.x. Rooting the device though would allow for a much newer version (at least 3.x if I recall correctly).
Those pirated versions ain’t running on non-rooted tablets.
Well I’d upgrade Android OS too but not at the hassle of rooting it, not that I’m afraid of bricking a $75 tablet; I’ve installed FreeBSD 1.0 in ancient times or rather carefully followed instructions to install that mess. It has more to do with it’s more sensible to buy a $50 - $75 new quad core tablet with Lollipop that to run Lollipop on single core a7 HW. You then get a review for your app on why your app using Unity won’t run good on a rooted, upgraded, single core cpu/gpu from 3 years ago after you published at a API level to prevent that problem.
The HW specs just don’t fall in your lap because you’ve bought some tablet. It took a fair amount of searching to find out my tablet has a MP450 GPU although I have no ideal how many GPU cores that would mean. I think, implicitly, at least two
When you publish they go by API level on Android not HW because the average owner of a tablet doesn’t have clue as to the HW in the tablet. With makes someone with enough knowledge and motivation to have rooted an unsupported tablet to the API level you published support for and then complain about your app seem silly.
Windows I did have to spell out minimum and recommended HW specs. Honestly that should just stick to the Minimum shouldn’t they? The ‘Recommended’ has always seemed like an out for crummy SW.
We’re starting off with a F2P title, but trying to figure out a route to go after that’s complete and out there.