it seems that making money with IOS developing is much harder than when i started more than 4 years ago!
Does anyone feel so?
It seems that without advertising your game with iAd these days, it might be very hard to earn good money, even if you made awesome games!
My new games, fall right at the bottom of game’s list and never see the sun, it does not even get a chance to be seen by downloaders anymore!
It get listed in the new category for less than a day, then it’s pushed down by other new games, then it’s not seen anymore.
This has been happening for the last 6 months or so.
So i have been thinking about promoting my game with iAd new workbench, but just need to get some idea of how much do i need to spend and is it worth while?
Have anyone tried it? how much did you spend and was it worth while? (worth while = got the money spent back and some extra money)
Yes, it is much harder because people are paying much much more per acquisition.
I talked to some ad companies and some of them are saying that their clients are willing to pay $6 per acquisition for a free user. That blew my mind.
Unless your current game is able to retain and monetize like crazy, I find it hard to compete with others who have much deeper pockets. Even if you do have a ton of cash to blow, once you hit the charts, the other companies will be notified and they’ll increase their bids to stay on top; I’ve experienced this first hand.
But with that said, if anyone has a different experience, I would also love to hear it.
Thanks for sharing your insights, which I’m finding both fascinating and depressing at the same time. I think we’re starting to see a reversal where the PC market is becoming a more level playing field compared to mobile. Come to think about it, all the indie games that caught my intention started their lives as PC or console exclusives before they were ported to mobile. That is if they were ported at all.
That is scary!
So if our games cant be seen and we cant make it even with advertising! Then what do you guys suggest we can do, i mean eventually with time, we might be forced to quit developing for IOS!
I was thinking to throw about $1000-$4000 to advertise with iAd network, but what you just said made me rethink about the whole advertising thing.
Should we just set and wait? Or can we developers do something about it?
I wish I have an answer for you because then I wouldn’t be struggling. Ha.
I think it’s all about analytics. We collected data on the LTV (life time value) of our users and then calculate what we can spend on user acquisition to have a return on investment. For us, it’s never worth it because our users are not spending enough money in our games. However, for you, if you have a good game with a good monetizing model, you may get a return on investment. But collect analytics and make an informed decision because it will be different for every app/game you release.
One thing that worked for us was cross promotion from within our own network. People who like our games tend to buy other games we released. It’s great because cross promotion is free and the conversion rates are high.
Also, I wouldn’t set and wait. I don’t think that ever works despite all the stories we read about.
I always thought about making a developer unity, where we kinda gather and share our thoughts and have an affective saying in the App Store market as so when things are hard on us all, we can talk to Apple as a unity so they would listen…
It’s just a thought, but i know that this would definitely work. We just need active developers do join us.
