First things first: I’ve never really been on-board with whole ‘App store, sell your title for .99 cents’ bit.
That being said, I see developers still making money off of it. I can’t help but think my apathy towards mobile and other online app stores is a bit foolish, in hindsight.
So, I’m taking another look at the .99-cent app; given somerecentdiscussions, I’m wondering how developers are remaining profitable in the fast-paced app store atmospheres, in Google’s App Market, the IOS App Store, and the Nook app store.
Visibility seems to be the major challenge, but this is something I don’t know a lot about…in the changing flux of the app stores, how are you getting your titles sold?
I haven’t been either, as for the 99 cents. It seems really cheap for the amount of work you put into it. However, I’m willing to trust it enough to invest roughly $1000 into my most recent project to support it. As I said I don’t know much. However, I’m hoping to have enough response from forums to get my game going. You never really know, its a gamble.
I was once in the same crowd, believing that the mobile market was a waste of time. However, you can’t deny the numbers; which is why our first mobile game will be on the market next week.
The thing with mobile games is to keep them light and casual to keep your own development costs down. A great (semi-popular) game on the App Store can pull in between 50k and 100k over a year. It may even sustain those numbers for a couple years. Doing the math, don’t dump $50k into developing it.
Then get a press kit put together and send it out to the massive number of app review sites. Keep updating the game, listen to feedback, etc. We already have a forum set up, ready for customers to tell us their thoughts so that we can customize and tweak the first major update for the most positive impact.
Your game needs to be free with an in app upgrade to make it the full paid version.
If you don’t want to follow that plan, you better pray that it gets picked up and featured somewhere, otherwise you will probably end up with <10 downloads. 5-7 of those being people you know.
Getting people to part with $1 sounds easy, but its not.
200 free downloads will always be better than 0-10@$1
How would one accomplish this? Would it merely require the use of a DRM system? Is a Free Demo/Paid Full model used at all? Are there other ways of pulling this off that are coming to prominence?
@OP - Your job is to make a good product. Marketing matters, but comes AFTER you have a good product. In the words of Cal Newport, it’s a ‘winner-take-all’ market. My apps must be AT LEAST excellent or they suck - no middle ground.
I’ll tell you how to succeed, but you won’t listen. Make a product in 8 weeks! Start it, finish it, release it - 8 weeks! Learn from your mistakes. Repeat.
I made Zombies vs. Knights in four; if I had taken eight instead, I probably would have turned out a significantly better, but still experimental game, because I could have done more development based on testers’ feedback. In hindsight, that development would have involved unit micromanagement, but that’s minutiae that’s unimportant to the topic at hand. I’ll remember your advice, though!
I do have a question for you - you say your apps “at least must be excellent, or they suck - there is no middle ground.” How are you determining the quality of your games? I am aware fun is a hard thing to quantify, and that a game is like a work of art - you know it’s good enough when you see it - but given that there’s a whole business around this subject, there has to be some rhyme or reason underlying your decision of a game’s quality. I’m curious as to how you get to it.
Hand it to real people. Don’t show, guide, or excuse. Show LOTS of people and listen. REALLY watch how they use it - facial expressions. Then, polish and publish. Get external feedback - real, honest, ‘not-protecting-you’ feedback. Give a few products away as an investment in your own learning.
Growth is hard. My ego was shattered 50x! It hurts, but with practice, I got better at hearing the bad stuff. I listened, I improved. And one day, I began to recognize the difference between low-quality and low-budget. One is okay, one is not.
Gigi.
PS - Looking specifically for game design stuff? Read A Book of Lenses. Or google for ‘Why Games Work - The Science of Learning’. Read about Flow.
In addition to the obvious (analyzing and observing what makes successful games), there are tons of good books and articles on game theory and design. Not to mention much more on related aspects like art. Testing is part of research. Put very early prototypes in front of people to see what happens. Knowledge + experience. Making a quality game isn’t difficult to do at all as long as you put time (generally a bit more than 8 weeks, especially for a single dev) and effort into and are serious about it. It’s not rocket science, but it is science.
In all honesty, the game i’m referring to, wasnt creating with Unity. I dont even know if the code I originally used would still work. I got the code online. It was using apples API though, so I dont see any reason for you to not be able to do it still, but I cant give you any direction on the subject, because I havnt released a Unity IOS game as of yet.
One thing that I learnt was dont do it after your initial release. I dont know if its still a problem, but when I released my game I hadnt put it in (I made that optimistic mistake of thinking people would just buy my game cause it was amazing and awesome - turns out it was too hard for ppl… oops), any way, after realising no-one wanted to pay to download it, I made it free with IAP. Of course, the problem was, anyone that had brought it already got screwed by the update, because the game didnt know it had been purchased already, so it downgraded existing users to the demo. opps!
Its hard to say why some games go viral while others (99% of games released) go no-where… luck of the draw, better marketing, being spotted (and liked) by someone with sway… Im yet to crack that market, but as gigi says, the best method is to try (and most likely fail).
Depends on the game design. But say you have a game like angry birds that is comprised of many levels. Simply only contain a limited number of levels with the initial release, and set a the rest up using IAP. Or make weapons limited or whatever. The IAP contains the rest of the content that makes it a “full” whereas the limited initial version is the “demo”. Just make sure you contain enough to ensure the player’s interest is peaked enough to drop the coin to continue.
It’s not that hard to say at all, it starts with a quality game. All the advertising in the world won’t turn a weak game into a good one. “Viral” is result of people sharing it with their friends. They generally won’t bother to share “Hey check out this game, it’s not that interesting or attractive, and I got bored with it after two minutes, but hey, it could be two minutes of fun for you too, maybe.” People share stuff that impresses them. If it doesn’t impress, it won’t go viral. (unless it so bad it is entertaining or something like that, but that won’t translate into sales)
It does seem pretty daunting with mobile now that there’s such a huge trend towards free-to-play. I am not sure what the consumer actually thinks of free to play… it seems to be successful for many developers and perhaps moreso than pay-up-front but is it just because the pay-up-front is too difficult/cut-throat? It does seem either way you need to have a really simple/easy-to-use game with cuteness and instant gratification aimed at being playable by as many people as possible and with polished graphics in order to even have a chance. And to then only get 99 cents for it when on the desktop you might get $10 or $20 per copy is pretty daunting, but there’s a lot of people buying. I wish there were some charts or graphs showing how the reduction in price corresponds to more sales overall ,but from what I hear if you want to make more money then you should go with desktop games or casual desktop games. Unless you make a mobile game that sees some significant success.
Well there is one easy way take a gander at some of the top 500 games and ask yourself how does your game compare to them (and try to be objective). Its the same thing anywhere really, if your game is no good it wont get any exposure fall off the features and is pretty much DOA. A game that is free with IAP is going to have less of a barrier (people will be more willing to try anything because its free).
Taking a (momentary) step away from the .99c app store world, a question arises - which have you the audience found to be more profitable: .99c appstore, or $10 desktop?
The way I see it, both have vastly different audiences, but in the end I can see the mobile app winning out merely because of how ubiquitous mobile devices actually are. Of course, the part of me that’s a businessman wants everyone to buy…quite a dilemma!
What you suspect and what is true are different things. We need some hard data, not assumptions. Some other folks told me they felt strongly that desktop was much more lucrative unless you can get a mobile hit.
That sounds to me a lot like, “try both and report your findings.” I think I’ll take you up on that offer…after I’ve built the best possible game I can, on my current project.
I have recommended a lot of games among my friends/family, but I am a gamer/computer builder for my hobbies, and starting out as a game developer as my primary job now, with my first title aimed mainly at mobile (but with a PC version being likely shortly after) under way. Among gamers it is quite normal to talk about new games or cool things you stumbled upon, so micro-pockets of viral marketing do indeed occur be it in person or on various gaming forums/hardware forums/small blogs/etc. As zombiegorilla touched on, you only see games that impressed or impacted someone in a way get mentioned, unless it’s bad and someone just comments “avoid X, I tried it and it was boring + buggy”.
Remember, view things from a gamer’s perspective as well as a dev’s. Don’t think of just what you do or do not do, but what others do as well, tempered with common sense and educated guesses from statistics, intuition, and market research.
