How to sell your game online without using an app-store
positech.co.uk
positech.co.uk
1. I’ve sold tens of thousands of games direct online, since I started in 1998
2. It took me maybe 5 years before I could live from my direct sales, and was able to quit my job.
10's of thousands doesn't sound like much over 12 years, and it took him 5 years to go full time.
This reminds me of the story of Pangea software. An indie Mac shareware game company. They launched with the iPhone App Store: http://www.bizjournals.com/austin/stories/2008/11/17/story1....
Although his game development business [Pangea] launched in 1987, the revenue generated in six months by just two of its iPhone games has matched the retail revenue of all of Pangea’s preceding personal computer games combined, he says.
In 6 months they made more than 21 years of being an indie shareware developer. That is the promise/possibility of a highly traffic'd app store. And yes, results not typical, but I think the point still stands.
The Flash industry can deliver an enormous quantity of eyeballs onto a game. My own best has had almost 6 million people play it although I track games much larger than that.
It's starting to get under my skin that I lose 30% of my app's (http://goo.gl/USEr) revenue for nothing more than a listing in the app store and payment processing.
I can't speak to android, but suggesting that the iOS App Store is "nothing more than a listing and payment processing" is sort of like saying you'd rather sell your widget directly from your basement rather through Wal-Mart so you don't have to give up the retail markup to Wal-Mart.