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Comment by retromario | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it's a challenging market.

Just to add another data point, we're small indie (games) developer, we spent over a year on our first title with very little marketing budget and these are our sales figures from our launch: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/YacineSalmi/20160519/273030/E...

In short, decent sales but not enough to recoup our costs. Still, we never expected that we would hit gold on the first try. I think to be as sustainable on iOS you either have a successful niche product or a collection of product, with each release building a further revenue stream.

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That game looks pretty neat. You just sold a copy :) But it's a game I've never heard of before, and I'm pretty good about checking the new games lists on the App Store each week. So I think the takeaway from this shouldn't be that premium games (is $2.99 really "premium"?) don't work, but rather that you can't rely on free marketing to sell your game. Once a game falls off the lists, it's pretty hard for people to stumble across it unless they're looking for it specifically.

Thank you!

That's another problem, there are so many good games coming out on a weekly basis, it's hard enough to stand out among those, let alone the 800 other games coming out every week.

We've experimented with various marketing ideas. Advertising is very challenging, especially when it costs more to acquire a user than we charge for the game. The F2P user acquisition market insanity has made this a complete non-starter. Press seems to have very little impact unless it's a big publication. So we're focusing on word of mouth and quality and a longer term outlook.

At $3 a pop there isn't much margin to pay for marketing either.

Leaving higher ARPU (free to pay) or viral customer acquisition. But yeh it's a tough market.

It's very very hard to make premium games on the App Store now. A typical top 25 premium game (which worldwide in Q1 were games like Five Nights at Freddy's or Scribblenauts Unlimited or Bloons TD 5 HD) earned about $300,000 in Q1 worldwide.

Top 25 game free to play game (which were games similar to Summoners War or Star Wars™: Galaxy of Heroes) earned about $15,000,000. There's a huge gap and this is apparent in what games actually gross a lot.

These are both iPhone only numbers.

This is when you need to build on your experience and go back for another shot. Maybe try a free variant with IAP.

We had a similar run to you. Built http://www.hexiledgame.com/ and had great reviews and some flurries of downloads, but outside of features and basic press, it's hard to really get rolling. Our game was free with one optional IAP to unlock extra modes more quickly, remove ads, etc - I thought that was a reasonable middle ground.

If I was doing it over and wanted to make money, I'd spend more time on virality, incentives to keep people playing, and not cap the most a hardcore fan can spend on that single IAP we had.

The reality is that a paid game needs to get especially lucky to maintain features or word of mouth and see a serious return.

Please edit your comment and add http:// in front of the link so that HN will abbreviate it. Without that, your comment messes up the page width on mobile.

Fixed, thanks for the head's up.

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