Day 1 for a $1 app on the Mac App Store | Hacker News Reader

Day 1 for a $1 app on the Mac App Store

lacquer.fi

62 pointspavlov13 comments

Yesterday I promised [1] to tell HN about the sales of my app on the Mac App Store. This blog post exclusively opens the business secret kimono to reveal the riches I shall make from selling $1 image generator apps. (Spoiler: not likely.)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2076077

I posted our sales stats here (alongside stats from other Unity-made games): http://blur.st/sales-day-1

  Units sold for us, all of these are $2.99:
  
  452 Blush
  128 Off-Road Velociraptor Safari
  101 Crane Wars
  13 Time Donkey
  
  694 total units, $1,452 revenue after Apple's take.

Man, I don't know what any of those games do, but "Off-Road Velociraptor Safari" and "Time Donkey" sound amazing.

I don't own a Mac, however. Off to your page to read about your company!

Velociraptor Safari is well-known enough to merit its own Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-Road_Velociraptor_Safari

I think you can play it free in your browser. Works surprisingly well, actually.

http://blurst.com/raptor-safari/

My favorite Blurst game, though (not in the app store yet) is Minotaur China Shop. Doesn't get better than this.

http://blurst.com/minotaur-china-shop/

This is a nice boost to a typical $4k / month Finnish programmer salary.

You think I'm making that much from my one-man video software operation? Sorry to disappoint you :P

I bought it after I you mentioned it on Reddit. 8-)

This seems like too small a sample size to really conclude anything.

He doesn't seem to draw any solid conclusions but instead has started a blog to keep the community updated with actual numbers. The title is "Day 1" even - unlike some articles which are trying to draw out grand conclusions on the App Store.

It is interesting to see the type of numbers the developers are seeing. They tend to be promising and I look forward to analysis as more and more users update and Lion is released.

And, are we informed now? Can we make more intelligent decisions based on these data? It doesn't have to be a peer reviewed article but ~100 sales for one dev in one day doesn't tell me anything.

I don't have access to anyone else's data. Apple only publishes relative sales rankings, as in: "sixth highest-selling app in category XYZ". (Apple has also told us that there were a million downloads during the first day, but that's even less useful than my number...)

That's why I felt that there is some general interest in publishing these numbers, as it gives other developers an idea of what level of sales is actually taking place on the Mac App Store. At least I find it interesting to know that ~100 units / day is enough for a solid position on the Top Paid list in the Graphics & Design category.

This is a blog post, not a peer-reviewed journal article.

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