Hi there,
Im Jack Shiels, the dev of Choma: http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=31946
Anyways, we are 15 and 16, which means that investing in something as big as the iphone expansion is quite a big thing. How easy is it to get a return on the original investment? How well do small apps do in general? Could I pay off the cost within a few months?
As far as I am aware, the App store is a bit of a gold mine atm, what are your experiences like?
Thanks for your time.
At 15 and 16 are you even legally able to enter into the contracts necessary to publish items for sale on app store?
AppStore = !GoldMine; For all but a few the odds of even making back the cost of your $99 iPhone dev license is no mean feat not to mention recouping what Unity iPhone costs. As I have said in other threads, the odds of making any real money are like the odds of getting struck by lightning WHILE you are getting attacked by a shark IN your bath tub.
I will just get a parent to sign up.
So I guess that you are saying this is a bad idea then. Are you an AppStore dev yourself? How many sales have you achieved? I think that it could be done with the right amount of publicity. Have you considered this?
i think one cannot calculate in any way the success on the app store prior release. Of course quality and fun of gameplay will be a factor. Recently my first Unity app went live on app store, with a little publicity pushing done by my contractor, it got ~100 sells per day recently. Sadly this doesn’t go to my bank because it wa a fixed payed job i accepted simply for the opportunity to jump onto unity iphone development. Actually I thought it would’nt sell that good ( guessed about 4-5 per day), because it’s a fun app showing some girl dancing around in 3D , wiping the iphone screen clean if you dare to touch…
But what’s your background ? I cant even imagine myself being 15 again and having the skills to do something like iphone game development…
Well, we have been using unity for about 4 years now. We have entered the Unite competitions for 3 years in a row - choma is the latest one.
We recently started work on a game destined for the iPhone, but now I am having second thoughts. I just need some opinions. How well do you think Choma would do?
Thanks
I don’t want to talk you out of porting your game to iPhone. My point is go into it with your eyes open. Read all the articles you can regarding peoples experiences with AppStore sales, there are tons of them good and bad. There are several very helpful posts in this section of the forums as well. A couple of guys really laid it out there. READ the contracts you agree to as well (or your parents as the case may be) there are a lot of goodies in there.
To answer your question I have published 2 iPhone games. Neither were wildly successful. I have another near release and am considering alternative revenue mods like AdMob, etc.
It is a crap shoot even with a good quality well polished game. Do your homework, then decide if you want to roll the dice or not.
Best of luck in any event.
–J
Personally the experience, knowledge gained, and fun you will have in creating your iphone game is worth it in itself. Go into it to make a fun series of games and you’ll easily make your investment back for the developer subscription and unity purchase. It might take a 1 to 1.5 years of sales but you’ll do it. Just don’t go spending a ton of money on graphics or other items and it’s very easy to make your money back if your patient and write more than 1 game.
I’d say go for it as it’ll really help you in the long run if you want to go into game development. iPhone development really forces you to think about resource management and performance which casual PC game development does not anymore.
I guess you make a good point. The educational value seems worth it alone.
One more question: how well does the engine perform? Is it a real task to get to grips with it?
I’d say its worth putting the game on the iPhone. It should perform pretty well, but you will likely have to put some time into optimizing it. And there are some gotchas because some things aren’t supported on Unity iPhone.
You’d likely make back the cost of a unity iPhone basic license. But if you approach it as an experiment, then your downside isn’t too bad.
Hanging out on the Touch Arcade forums or any place where there are other 16 year olds will likely help you develop buzz for your game. You need to get some initial awareness and the best way to do that is to let as many people as you can know about your game. There are also a lot of people who will do youtube reviews of the game. Your age is an asset here.
Ok, now I’ve had some time to play Choma. This is a fantastic effort, the artistic style and gameplay are pretty good. I think it needs a bit more polishing to become a full fledged product. (I couldn’t get to the tutorial, I clicked on the box and nothing happened…) To make it an iphone product, I’d think you probably want to make 3-4 more levels to it. You’ll also need to play around with controls to translate to something appropriate for the iPhone.
But I think if you do that- polish it up, add more levels, you might have a hit on your hands. I’d recommend releasing a free version with just the tutorial and one level, and then charging for the full game. Stylistically its a great game and I think it could do very well on the iPhone. Much like Rolando.
Also, make some videos of gameplay. Its really hard to get the concept from looking at still images and screen shots. So, getting some video out there on YouTube etc will help alot-- probably the most effective marketing you can do.
You may have to make some adjustments for performance on the iphone to get good framerates, but this depends a lot on how you coded the game, so not sure. (If you’re using too many draw calls, then combining textures and sharing materials will cut down on the drawcalls.)
If I were in your position, I’d be doing exactly what I described above, and be pretty enthusiastic about my chances.
Good luck!
Hey,
First of all, thank you so much for the feedback - your comments have really helped me get some direction in this. Second - I think I know what we are going to do now… 
Of course, I will be wise in this situation, but the overall response from all of you has been very helpful.
So thanks for investing a bit of time into us (especially neo), I really appreciate your help.
Jack