For the every day developer that is. I know large corporations are raking in the dough. I’ve given up on mobile for over two years now and been practicing PC games instead. But I guess I could bang out a few mobile if there’s even a fighting chance to make money.
How hard do people have to slave on marketing just to get say - 8,000 downloads? I’ve heard horror stories of devs working 2 - 3 months on apps that landed 90 downloads. Truly disappointing.
Well, from what I hear you have basically two choices if you are not flush with marketing cash:
Throw as many games on the market as possible, hoping to increase your chance for a hit (from 0.001% to 0.1% or something), and more importantly hoping that every of those games makes a small dripfeed income, which adds up to something usable.
Just hope for your luck, and your game or guerilla marketing going viral.
Seems lately some people are having some luck again with premium games, though we are talking about bigger games and sometimes bigger devs here.
Still, that is encouraging. On the other hand, some vocal opinionmakers on youtube are complaining more and more about the rampant mis-use of IAP on mobile platforms, which I guess will make free to play a harder sell at least among the less casual mobile games marketed towards a better informed player base.
Guess others will be more helpful with numbers, as I am more of an observer than an active dev on mobile.
Plenty of local devs seem to be doing fairly well off of the mobile market. Games like Crossy Road, Shooty Skies. Outfolded, Train Conductor World. All of these were made by every day developers.
The rules are the same as ever. Make a quality product. Let your audience know about it. Monetise effectively.
Mobile might be saturated. But there is still room to make successful games.
Yeah its possible that you get hardly any downloads but you could also get no downloads on steam as well.
Didn’t read what two persons above said but here’s what I think. “working 2 - 3 months on apps that landed 90 downloads” is no guarantee of anything. I’ve worked on some things (not games) for many years with very little as result… same goes for games. Time used is not a measurement of any quality produced.
One can use years on game and it could be 0 downloads. But if you create something neat, funny, clever or unique at some point of time that happens to be right for you creation, you have a good chance of making nice money. It should be quite obvious that days of being first on the market in iOS or Android (or any mobile platform) are long gone, so making first driving/runner game or generic Flappy Bird clone is not an option if you are into making money.
Options are quality and uniqueness over quantity or less clever idea with less stellar execution supported by clever and efficient use of marketing… IMHO. There are no “mobile” or “PC” buckets that you can fill with bland or average product then hope it will sell - a better product / game that has some quality edge over the competitors will shine on any platform.
Yep. Since the app store market is so overabundant with games today you have to now change your mindset on how to sell your game. In the past you could launch and sell a game on the app store using an impulse buy strategy…very little marketing, launch it and forget it, hope it’s seen on some main page or high up in search results. Today you have to angle your strategy to look at yourself and product as a destination business. This means your business (yourself and your game) will be sitting in a vast ocean of competitors. The key word is now “destination”. People who will buy your game are actively looking for it because you directed them towards your product. Use EVERYTHING in your arsenal to direct people to your game. All of the social media channel marketing on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Groups, Google+, Instagram, mobile gaming related forums, Reddit, Youtube videos, get some people doing “Let’s Plays” of your game. On top of the digital online direction of customers → get yourself business cards with a URL to your game, get a magnetic sign for your car made with the game graphic and name on it (URL, but less likely to memorize that), make flyers for your game and post them on the boards in your apartment lobby, the gym, the laundrymat, etc. Go to local Unity group meetings, indie developer group meetings and join a local Meetup.com group in your area for game developers. Talk about your game, pass out the business cards, show the game off on a laptop or something. There are a ton of channels to direct people to your destination product. It’s a TON of work and that’s where a lot of us indie developers falter.
Let me add, that YES you can be successful even in a survivable moderate way. Doesn’t have to be Hipster Whale success to keep paying your bills and making more games. I have seen a large trend away from IAP and ads to premium games. I think that’s what the market is saying to us, they will pay money for quality games.
In other types of business this is called sweat equity – and apart from what it does to improve your end-product, exactly as you’ve observed, the details are of zero interest or value to customers and investors alike.
I’m wondering if the OP saw this blog post that went up yesterday:
( I have a hard time believing the variance in play-time between platforms is as statistically valuable as the article implies.)
Didn’t they show that iOS and Android were just about even in play time on each platform? That’s crazy. I remember when iOS had all of the market share. I think this was just a matter of the Android platform maturing and curating a bit and of course the iOS platform losing customers due to hardware changes and stuff.
Don’t take any of this for facts, those are all my observations and nothing more.
I don’t think the market is really oversaturated. Almost every weeks, the App Store promotes one or two games that are not quite on par with their usual best new games and don’t come from publishers who the App Store is known to have relations with.
I’m sure it’s because they simply couldn’t find better content for the week. It’s not unusual that they put up a year old game into best new games as well. Sometimes its their business partners making requests, but I’d bet some weeks they just cant find good new content.
Some weeks, all games are incredible and off limits for a 2 months/1 man type of game, but that’s not the standard.
Loading the App Store every thursday, studying the games being featured, getting a solid idea of the polish and content level and then trying to do better is prob the way to go imho. I think every serious dev has a fair chance.
That’s if you want to rely on the app store as your primary marketing source. Freemiums on the front best new games page usually land 100k-120k gamecenter users within the week they’re being featured. Gamecenter users * 3 is usually a good indicator of downloads. The revenue generated from this varies extremely based on your monetization setup.
Dude, I have worked on mobile apps that got 130k downloads in less than a year, that I spent a single day on. Like the initial version took ONE DAY to entirely create the whole app…
On the flip side of that, I’ve spent 6 months on an asteroids clone game (when I was getting familiar with unity mobile years ago) and it has only had about 30-40k downloads in 4 years!
The take away here is that yes, the mobile market is still very viable. Google play is a flooded mess but there is STILL room for money and success to be made there… iOS is not as flooded but is quite filled with higher quality apps, and the competition is stiffer, the users might be a little more picky? Tizen is brand new! Tizen gets more downloads over in India than any other platform for me… and since InMobi just released an Ad SDK…
Get in there and make some apps man 
Who knows, if you could get a game half as popular as a flappy angry crossy jetpack temple fruit… you’d be able to frigging retire haha
DISCLAIMER: One day of me crunching code and slapping my face to the keyboard might not equal one day of you doing it 
… maybe it would take you, an hour? A week?
Edit: I guess another thing to consider is how the app market is “strange” compared to other markets… having the right name, the right description, the right icon - often can make a huge difference in whether or not your app is discovered by searching users! This variable makes it highly likely that the tactic of rapid prototyping and releasing as many apps as you possibly can (even if they aren’t super fantastic quality) is indeed a functional way to make money and support further endeavors. It also poses a big risk! If you spend lots and lots of time and money producing something people might not find, or might make you rich… your rolling the dice…
make a good product and properly market your product. Just like getting noticed on any other platform.
I’d have thought that it’s because there’s value in creating new success as opposed to further promoting existing success. Once everyone knows about something featuring it is unlikely to generate many new sales or downloads, because
the number of people who are interested in it but haven’t already got it will be shrinking. A good quality, relatively unknown title is a great opportunity for Apple to generate downloads or sales, because it’s good enough to generate interest and it’s new to the majority of people who might see it.
Lucky Apple users, Apple is starting to purge their entire system from dead products, non-compatible products, etc.
So be aware of that for anyone who has any old games/apps they’ve put on there.
That’s a true concept, but you got me wrong. I’m saying they are featuring old content into the new games category. I, like you, believe they would prefer featuring solid new content every weeks, but because of the lack of proper submissions, they always end up featuring a bit of old stuff as well as mediocre new releases.
It’s just based on my observations, but I suggest you do the experiment. Keep up to date with the App Store for a month. You will notice the average quality of the new games category varies a lot. That denotes an issue, they wouldn’t want to purposely lower the quality of what they’re displaying. I personally think this comes from a lack of good submissions, hence I think the market is not oversaturated.
Wonderful isn’t it?
I’m not sure if the mobile market became saturated, or turned like everything else.
It might just mean you’ll have the same luck as any other business you run on your own now. It’ll be a lot of work, lots of possible failures ahead, though if you stick to it long enough eventually you’ll make it work.
I believe you can find success on the app store if you develop a game that has high production values, solid gameplay, is fun, and is marketed well, and has good social/multiplayer features.
Cross posting in case OP didn’t catch it.
No it is not viable for indie developer.
And no, I am not trolling, I am saying from experience since I work as programmer at small game studio and we were developing for android/iOS.
I’m curious how this works. How can one be working for a small studio if the market is not viable? Do you bosses not see it? Or do we just have different definitions of indie?