Someone has asked us to license our Moobox app*… and we have no idea how much we should ask!
We’re fairly good at estimating Flash games (cheaper than water), but somehow I feel like iPhone apps are more upper-class than that and shouldn’t be depreciated. I’d like to ask for a billion dollars, but Chris tells me it’s ‘not realistic’. Damn you, reality.
On top of that, we’re euros and he’s dollars, so one of us is gonna feel the pain of an 1.3 exchange rate…
Raise your hand if you’re as surprised as me. We’ve passed the 100k downloads bar after a month and a half, but never published any update so since then the app is slowly dying. Not to mention that it was pointless to begin with.
While I haven’t licensed an iPhone app, I have recently licensed source code and had the same problem.
In my case, I had to come up with a number that would make up for the lost sales and would make me feel like my work wasn’t wasted. Do an estimate of how much you think you’ll actually make from the app in the next two years. Then consider how much work you put into it. Did it take you 6 months or a weekend? Also, consider what the customer intends to do with it. Is this to promote a motion picture opening or some milk brand?
In the end, I said to myself, I’d hand over the source for a shiny new MacBook and Pro license to some pretty spiffy iPhone development tools (ahem…).
Also, it may be possible to feel other the customer and ask, “So what did you have in mind?”. Getting a starting number is always a good place to start because they’ll will start at about 1/2 of what they are willing to pay. Be sure you can leave the discussion open-ended. You should be able to say, “That sounds good. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”
I’ve done a number of deals like this and the more serious the customer, the quicker the negotiations will go. Real customers have things to do besides talk on the phone to you. The tire kickers will exchange e-mail and phone messages endlessly.
I also get a fair amount of e-mail that basically says, “How much for the whole thing?”. Those guys often disappear when any other price besides “free” is mentioned.
Well… doesn’t really apply. The app is free, we did it mostly for fun (test-drive Unity iPhone just plain ‘do something else than contract work this week’), so we never expected to get a penny from it.
I realize I didn’t formulate my question very well, I was more wondering what’s the street price of such an app… if there even is a street price yet?
Again, making a (dubious) comparison with Flash games, sometimes the work you put in is about 0% of the equation, because the market is so saturated. Students can make damn good games for squat, it’s offensive. It’s even happened to us to give our price, client says no way, so we find a student that does it for a bowl of rice, we cut the price in 2 (3… 4…) and still make a shameless margin. All it boils down to in this case is marketing business.
Or, there are the apps that are done once, and sold 10 times with to 10 different clients with custom skin. I actually don’t even know if the guy wants us to take down our app, or just a second one at his brand… it’s the first we have to find out.
True. We’re gonna do that first.
Totally true. I wouldn’t be surprised if this guy had sent the same email to 50 other iPhone devs. So yeah, I really have no idea what the iPhone market’s like.
Right now you still have the chance to make big bucks from the market. But I doubt that that is his primary intend.
Especially in your case its a lot of market value: Assume he takes your app, adds AdMob to it and offers an update?
With the current rate on AdMob, thats more than peanuts he can expect, a few tousand to ten tousands of dollar in 2009 are pretty realistic with your installed userbase of 100k+.
Not to consider what he could make if he intends to use your game for cross advertising his “real project”.
Reachability and publicity is the most valuable thing you can have on the iPhone
Hello, fellow frenchman !
Do you have a link to the game? since there are zillions of whack-a-moles on the appstore…
The price seems about similar to what we’re used to with Flash for this type of gameplay… dammit.
PS: didn’t know about you guys, had a look at your site, cute stuff! Love the part about substainable dev, way to go.
Well you can register for an account. Takes a few minutes and you should have access. If try to setup a new ad campaign it will ask for your bid and the min value you can enter is what you currently get per click on other members campaigns …
Uh. I didn’t see it like that at all, that is very interesting advice.
I don’t really realize if 100k is that big a deal or not… since it’s free, the number is biased. I still haven’t seen many stats (except for Martin that happily crushes ours ;)).
Plus, judging from the “wtf is this crap?” reviews/death threats, the userbase is probably way below 100k, I’d be very interested to know the uninstall reports (but I don’t think Apple tracks that?). Publishing an update and seeing how many people bother downloading it would be a pretty good stat I guess.
Still, you’re probably right, this app is just collecting dust on our shelf.
Anyway… it looks like our prospect is looking for a finished build, as an advergame (the cow would by replaced by his mascot, and would say slogans instead of moo). So I doubt he could/would AdMob it… but we can! He doesn’t want exclusivity, so we could do both (and finally take over the world; 'bout time!).
OK. With non exclusive its of less worth as he likely won’t be able to reach your whole userbase for example.
Since 2.2 apple is at least tracking the device uninstalls, as it annoys you with “do you want to rate this program” popups when you try to delete apps
AppStory, episode #425: the first guy ended up not replying after we gave him our price, just as kenlem had anticipated he might. Some people like to waste other people’s time I guess…
Since then, another person contacted us…?!? are some guys out to buy the whole AppStore catalog or what?
We learned from the first experience and gave our without wasting time with a love dance this time, expecting he’d also bail out.
He didn’t, so far… fingers crossed! Stay tuned for episode #426.
I’ve had to put up with a lot of crazy e-mails but everyone once in awhile you get a big fish.
From my experience, the big guys don’t mess around. They ask the price and then either buy or walk away. The ones that ask a lot of questions are the ones that will never actually make a deal.
Ben, I made similar experiences. Lots of people contacting me wanting to produce something, I wasted a bunch of time first on each, but then quickly realized a lot of them were wannabe’s and now went over to send out a standard reply now that every hour costs money, even upfront talking. I explain them in the mail why and that helps at least me to sort out the real ones…
FYI … I’ve had (slightly) over 100k download of the free version of Zen of Snow. It currently contains no advertising.
I’d sell* it if someone was really interested in it (I haven’t really every thought about it)… but that makes me wonder, how would I (or any developer) sell an app that is already published in iTunes? If I remove it from my account and the new owner submits it under their iPhone developer account, they would lose the user install base.
* When I say “sell”, I mean sell the source code and all rights to the software, transferring ownership of the actual program to some other company.
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