Hi all,
I’m curious to know how many of you have made reasonable money from the sale of your apps? I’m a hobbyist, so i’m doing it for fun rather than the money, though it would be nice to think my apps will pay for themselves and more…
If you’ve made good money from your app(s), I understand you might not want to discuss figures, but some insight would be appreciated, as well as a link to information about said app.
Thanks
Mat
Hi,
I made two asset store assets ( I see asset store as another platform ), you can see them in my signature.
They sell reasonably well ( bought Pro and new hardware from profits ).
They also opened three freelance offers, I currently work on one under NDA but I can say that I am satisfied by the terms.
As a hobbyist, its ok. I spend a reasonable small amount of time ( ~25 hours weekly ) and I can fund my hobby.
I think that it will take some time until I 'll start developing my own apps, since I have to gather more funds and experience. Maybe in 1-2 years.
Good luck with yours apps,
-Ippokratis
It really depends on what you think is reasonable… But I have made decent money off my app even considering I have not updated it in 2 months. The app definitely paid for itself and more in my case. I can’t speak for others but I know the business is quite sketchy. Will you be able to repay yourself with any given app? Really depends how long you have to wait to be repaid. If you invest 1k into a decent app and update it every so often, you will likely be able to make it back within a year. But again, there are no guarantees. I have just picked these numbers up from what I have read on the web and what my friends are making.
Backyard Zombies was my first game on android. I launched it on 3 markets:
Google Play($0.99 version and a free + ads version)
amazon app store($0.99 version)
NOOK app store($0.99 version)
I haven’t made any real money on Google Play although ads tends to give me anywhere between $3 to $10 a day still. Amazon is about a couple bucks a day but once it was featured as the Free App of the Day I got about a thousand bucks in that month.
Now the NOOK is where the money is at… Currently BZ is ranked like 2500 but it still sells about 10-20 units a day at 0.99. For the first 2 months though I was making anywhere between $80 to $150 a day when it was in the top 100(My highest rank was like 12).
Backyard Zombies was made in 3 months all while learning unity. I’m majoring in computer science so i did have a bit of programming knowledge. Unity is an amazing hobby and it allowed me to stop working as a server at Steak n Shake LOL because I actually made more money from making apps. This is all part time too so if you like doing it as a hobby go for it because there is a good chance you can make some pretty decent cash.
On Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.SmashGames.BackyardZombies&hl=en
Profitable would be too much, but my first mobile game “Highway Run” (see signature), makes like $2 till $10 a day on the AppStore.
Of course this number is much higher in the first two months, but it’s okay for what it is:
my (or “our” since a friend made the 3d content) first testgame on mobile platforms made after work as hobbyist. 
Thanks for the insight guys. I’ll check out some of these games tonight.
Final question, how substantial are your games? I’m currently working on a game which I intend only to have 1 mode of play, which will be an endless, randomly progressing game where the player needs to get as far as possible. To begin with I was planning on 1 style of level and if it proves to be a good game with sales and ratings, I would update the game to include more levels and features. My worry is this might not be substantial enough for people, even at 69p.
thanks again
Mat
Very interesting. Any tips on how to package and publish for Nook store?
Thank you!
My first app gatsby golf sells a few hundred units on the app store and mac store per month but almost nothing literally nothing on droid or amazon.
Just upload the same .apk file when you register to be a NOOK developer. They ask for all the info, images, icon etc. just like the Google Play store. But they may give you a problem about the sleep or the “N” button not shutting down the app. A fix for this is in every scene just include a check for the escape key and have your app quit or load the menu scene or whatever.
Good luck and happy developing!
Many thanks @Somedays
I’ve changed my strategy recently and I’m experimenting with it to find out for myself what works and what doesn’t.
There is a lot of potential in selling software. When you work at a day job for someone else you do x amount of work in x amount of time and you get paid x fixed amount. Thing is, once you’ve put in that hour’s work, unless your company has some kind of profit sharing you aren’t going to see any increase in your income beyond a fixed amount. The time you put in isn’t an investment, it’s just a flat-rate value. So you work 1 hour, you get paid $10, that’s it. That time is never going to pay you back more than $10. Guess who really profits from your efforts? However, when you create and sell software, there is the potential for your time’s value to multiply over the course of time. If you put in that 1 hour and create something and sell it, it may only sell a little bit at first, rating your hour as worth, say, $1/hour. But over time, the more time passes the more income you generate. Gradually that one hour could become worth $10/hour, or $50/hour.
Selling software is a sweet deal. You don’t need a warehouse to store inventory. You don’t need a manufacturing facility. It doesn’t cost you anything to reproduce more copies of the product. You don’t need to even deal with taking orders and dealing with payments or setting up a secure website. If you sell an asset through the asset store you just need your computer, your talents, and some time. Then you throw it up there, if it’s useful and good quality and fills a niche that there’s a need for (ie you relieve some pain), people will buy it. Then the time you put in to creating the product just keeps on paying you back over and over and over again, endlessly. Those few weeks or months or whatever that you use are not just down the toilet when you’re done - they’re an investment that will keep paying you back in future.
There is some pain involved with selling software though… I’m wholeheartedly open to providing customer support but the fact is it can be time consuming, so when I decide what to create I’m thinking about how to make the app as friendly and intuitive and self-explanatory as possible. That means making generally smaller assets. Big monolithic software needs a lot more explaining, a lot more documentation, a lot more customer service, and gives rise to a lot more questions and requests. The idea of having a community form around your product is good and can work well to increase your audience and loyalty, but at the same time if you’re a one-man-band you just won’t have time to properly support a community and it could be a big headache that you don’t need. Customer support (if it’s needed) is all good n’all, but the honest fact is, they are a time sink, and that time you spend in customer support is NOT so much of an investment. Sure it can help your image or help give your app/company some reputation, but the fact is the hours you spend supporting the user after your app went on sale is time unpaid, or at best at a flat rate per hour. It has far less multiplicative potential. It would be better (I think) to make the app so easy and simple that it doesn’t need any support - not to make that support wrong when it IS needed, but to simply circumvent the need for it in the first place. Time is better spent working on minor improvements to the app, major new versions at possibly a higher price, or making new apps.
So what I’m trying to do for now is to make small assets that are self contained, simple, obvious, easy to use, they just work, they fulfill a niche, they relieve some pain/save time/make something easier, don’t need much documentation, don’t need much explanation or support, are small enough to be easy to maintain and fix bugs in (you don’t want that pain either), and just work as nice clean little money-making machines. Not that it’s all about the money, but it makes business sense to me to focus on simple quality products rather than creating time-sink nightmares. Each app might only be small, and might only fulfill a small niche or have a smaller audience, but it will do what it does well and find the people who really need it. The aim is to create MANY such small assets so that each builds up a steady thread of income over time. Slow and steady wins the race. Even if I only make say $100 a month from an asset I’m fine with that. And I only put in a few weeks work on each, and only sell them for a fairly low affordable price (e.g. $20-$30). Maybe within a year those few weeks work will have been worth $100’s per hour. The point is I keep on making these small assets and they all work together to create a larger overall income, without all the hassles and headaches and pain. Because what’s important is seeing your time as an investment which can keep on giving and not as something that has a fixed value. Employers hire people at a fixed hourly wage because it makes business sense for THEM to profit from the work you do, which increases their ongoing profit-making potential but does not feed that expansion back to you. That’s how THEY make their money, it’s not how you’re going to make yours.
As I say this is just my current approach and may or may not work, but I’m finding out and experimenting with it. We’ll see how it goes. I still don’t know yet if a bigger asset is worth the headaches involved versus how much income it produces - that’s something I have to keep experimenting with and seeing real results. I think if you are interested in seeing bigger assets in the $50-$100 value range you probably have to put in months of work on each, plus provide a proper website, plus write extensive documentation, plus provide a lot more customer support to understand and work with the intricate complexities of the product… I’m sure some people are okay with that but for me, as a single developer who only has part-time hours to work on anything, it doesn’t make sense for me right now to make something big. I’m okay with it taking longer for my time investment to pay off. I would be very interested to know if anyone has any data on whether the size/price of an app is more profitable (in terms of money and support time) when it’s a bigger product compared to a simpler cheaper product.
Personally, I have yet to make any money but that is because I have not released an application or an asset yet.
However, I know that a lot of people are successfully making a living using Unity. One of the successes I know about is the guy behind NGUI, ArenMook. NGUI has been out for nearly a year and quickly became the number 1 selling asset in the Unity Asset Store. ArenMook says that he has to support it between 2-3 hours each day but in its first year it is going to pull in around $300,000 (link). A big time commitment for a single asset but a huge pay-off that I’m sure most people would say is worth it.
Of course, NGUI is amazing and is definitely worth it so it totally makes sense that it has achieved that level of success so some might say you have to be incredibly lucky or incredibly talented (like ArenMook) to pull it off but I think it is a great sign for anyone wanting to sell assets in the Unity Asset Store.
Yes this is a nice motivation booster for people who want to make money with the AssetStore. But like the app market success stories ala Tiny Wings, you should take that with a grain of salt.
Your example is one of the rare exceptions and does not reflect the average asset store seller income. It’s only a handful people making that kind of money(Exactly the same people, that sitting at the Asset Store top 5 Overall) .
Yes there are factors involved - public opinoin, need, market, timing, buzz, etc… it also capitalized on a lot of pain/resentment towards Unity’s built-in GUI system which greatly amplifies its appeal. It’s good to look for where people are in pain like that and where you can help to alleviate that pain.
Yeah unity gui sucks. I refuse to buy one of the third party GUIs because I know its just around the corner…
Lol, same I can’t afford it…but my game has tonnes to go so I’ll just leave GUI stuff until last.
Hey man I just received an estimate for a app. The price was $14,080. I have never made and app before and dont know if this would be a good investment. Zco would make the app. All I can tell you about the app is that it relates to music, and finding songs. Any advise you could give me?
I’d say investing 14k into your first app is an exercise in stupidity from a business standpoint because you’ll make fat zero back without connections. You need feature team connections. You need press connections. You need to be a known developer. You can’t make it in this biz without connections. If someone does, it was exactly the same as winning the lottery. Some hundreds of people worldwide win the lottery every week so it seems like you hear a lot of success stories. But there’s 7 billion people out there.
Test market first. Understand the market. Then invest money if you’ve had moderate success before.
Hippo’s offering sage advice there. Especially considering it’s a long-dead thread.
If you want to succeed, then invest in LOTS of apps. Not one. The idea is ‘Bullets, then Canonballs’. Right now, you know too little. Build something for 4k. Consider it the cost of ‘learning’ how apps are built. When it sucks, learn anyway. And then build the next thing, and the next and the next. Cause the only metric shown to correlate to income is the number of apps you’ve already built before.
Good luck,
Gigi.