My iOS Indie-Game Numbers | Hacker News Reader

My iOS Indie-Game Numbers

txt.jazzychad.net

325 pointsjazzychad143 comments

User acquisition for mobile is just as important as developing an application. There are companies with larger development teams AND many folks working on user acquisition AND marketing budgets reaching a millions of dollars per month, cross promotions, international reach, etc. As an indie developer, you wear all hats, from development to marketing. It's simply not reliable to launch a title and hope it takes off by itself or hope that sending emails to journalists will be enough on acquisition. If you'd spent hundreds of hours on development - figure out to spend just as much on acquisition. Doing paid acquisition might not work as the CPI (cost per install( for installs is most likely going to be much higher than an untuned app's LTV (lifetime Value).

I'd hacked together a 'mobile marketing' checklist before, it might help: https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing

This is a great checklist!

Hi Chad, are you still playing all of your games yourself? I wonder if they are "sticky" enough? Bit hard to tell from the screen captures - they don't really stand out to me in the screenshots. But I like word games so will check out Letters!

While you got the OK for the Letterpress UI from the creator, I wonder if anyone else who's unaware of that would notice and think you're a clone and ignore you?

I released my first ever iOS game* last week and it's a word game like yours. Not sure if we (two man team) just got lucky, but overnight we hit millionth game played and we've hit #1 word game in 30 countries at one point or another. People are playing about 3-5 games per second at any given point of the day which amazes me. The game took us four months to make - a month on the core mechanic and the rest polishing.

I have a pipeline of game ideas I think are very good so definitely intend to make more.

* Our game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8

Hexiled looks great! The graphics definitely stand out (especially the space theme). I'll play it tonight. Best of luck.

I do think the OP's apps look a little too much like Letterpress. If I had seen them in the App Store, I would have dismissed them as a ripoff and have never given them a chance...

Also, the font in the Letters app doesn't look as professional as Hexiled, Letterpress, or SpellTower. Even in the app icon, the letter L's font weight varies, and the 2 feels italicized in a weird way. See: http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg

It's funny you should say that as the font in Hexiled ended up being the very, very default Arial Black and the icons are almost entirely based off Font Awesome. I paid a lot of attention though to consistency where possible (colours, use of caps, "voice" of the game, etc) but there's a lot of room for improvement.

Thanks so much for the encouragement. We've had a great experience launching the game. I'm on Twitter at @isaacforman if you have any feedback about Hexiled.

Nothing wrong with default fonts... :-) I've used many an app that uses nothing more than Helvetica (Neue).

Maybe it's just taste, but I found Letters' font to be too rounded. It's like Arial Rounded, and reminds me of Comic Sans. Letterpress's font is also a little rounded, but for some reason it looks more professional to me than Letters' font.

yes -- hexiled is a great example of a quality game done right with very little (need for) marketing.

i'm cheering for you! go, man, go!

>In the end, I've had to chalk all these apps up to the "hobby" category as it has been a money-losing proposition.

This is what Taleb calls an extremistan world, you can't apply a gaussian distribution to this situation. It is difficult to find a mediocre filmmaker that just makes enough money to get by, or a writer, or a painter... You either become fairly succesful or you die without ever being able to "make it".

You can't really tell when your next game will become the next Words with friends, Angry Birds, Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. But if it does, you can go from a "hobby" to a full time job even needing to hire a team.

Yeah. I made $2,000 my first month on the Android Top New charts, dropped off the charts after the 30 days and it's now about 1 sale every two days. You either get pushed all the way up and make millions, or not much at all.

Reskin it and submit as a new game (effectively cloning yourself). If the issue is that not enough people see your game then they won't know it is a clone so who cares?

This lines up with Gama Sutra's indie salary survey[0] pretty well; 11k average income, 2% >200k.

[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/221630/6_key_points_from_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tournament_theory

is an economic theory for explaining that.

It doesn't matter if it's games or not games. These numbers ring basically true to me.

I've done enough apps that the math doesn't work out to me anymore. Simply put, you're selling candy bars, but without the disposable aspect, so your customer LTV on a $1 app is $0.7. If you have a suite of 5 or 10 $1 apps, even if you had a huge cross sell of 5 of those 10 apps, your LTV is 70% of $5... $3.50.

In that scenario, to get paid $70,000, you need 20,000 customers to buy 50% of your products each year.

Honestly, if you can get 20,000 to buy your app you've either hit a top list or you are so good at marketing that it is nonsensical that you would be selling $1 apps.

So yeah, for most developers the app store business isn't much of a business at all. Maybe leveraging it to get interest in desktop or console apps where the per unit price is closer to $20-100 would help.

Even then, I don't think you will see or hear many stores about app store millionaires going forward. The money might be there, but it's too diluted to make much of a dent.

Might as well buy a lottery ticket, it costs you less time and money with basically the same outcome.

When you develop a game you're taking a big risk. There are so many ways people can entertain themselves that your game has to be something really special - and even that may not be enough. Secondly, ripping off the letterpress UI (with or without permission) was a bad idea imo. If I saw the screenshots my first thought would be. "this is a letterpress ripoff" and I wouldn't have downloaded it.

If you create an app that solves a real problem or solves a problem better than the current solutions you can do okay in the App Store. It's rare to do great but you can do well enough. Games don't solve problems. They add to a growing number of ways to entertain ourselves which includes movies, music, tv, news, the internet - and all these are accessible on a mobile device.

P.S. Not trying to sound too negative about games but making money in entertainment is difficult. People have so many options - many of which are free - and they'll take the cheapest one.

I think you nailed it. If I stumbled across these I would never download them because I tend to notice something new and unique and these look exactly like more of the same. It makes sense that if you make something similar to 1,000 other games that being successful would be like getting a 999 on a thousand-sided die.

Not to imply that it is easy to make something new (and good.) I have been working on a prototype of a game and the first feedback I got was all about how it was different than others games and that's bad. Trying to create something original is definitely swimming against the current.

I don't disagree with you, and partly I have always wanted to write a game or two (I've published many other non-game apps, also w/o much financial success), but I wanted to learn about the market... and I did!

Yeah, you beat me there too. The best game I ever made is barely half finished (no matter how much I work I do it seems to stay half finished.) Plus you got a really great article about download numbers out of it.

I tried my hand at a simple game once - it was also a disaster. Although it wasn't nearly as polished as yours look.

I'm surprised nobody is talking about the actual game!? It's really not standing out. Another "Word" type game that barely innovates on the genre.

I guess people are so focused on marketing, user acquisition and not .... wait for it.... PRODUCT!

This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.

Yeah, I wrote this game Orb (http://joeblau.com/orb./) In 3 days for iOS and Android. I didn't put any money into marketing it, but I did promote it. I made my game to test the effectiveness of the Apple Store vs the Play Store vs the Amazon store for an app with minimal publishing. I've definitely learned a lot which I'll probably blog about soon.

I will be the negative guy here, down-vote if you will.

What kind of profit did you expect? As a game app consumer I only buy the very best (original and/or polished) apps in their respective categories. E.g. Leo's Fortune, FTL, Limbo, Icebreaker, Reaper would be very easy purchases for me. You can see those games had _a lot_ of effort put into. In my subjective, blatant and impolite opinion your apps could be more of the cause of the over-saturation problem rather than victims. Saying that, I have nothing to show myself so far :).

This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product itself?

Not all downloads are equal. There are far too many iOS games to make a profit. Had he spent the same amount of time/effort/budget making a productivity tool that catered to a niche market, he could have easily made a net profit.

Except that productivity apps can and do run afoul of Apple and won't always get approved.

Exactly why do I need a zillion apps to mount an SMB share on iOS and do something with <insert specific file type>?

Answer: so iOS doesn't grow a decent music program to compete with iTunes. Apple won't approve things that might compete with their own cash cows.

Or because the set of people who want to mount an SMB share on iOS to get to their music... ah, while "consists primarily of you" is overly snarky, I think it's safe to say that it's probably vanishingly small.

There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud, and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve.

tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy stuff.

Could you cite some of these nonapproved productivity apps please?

A prolific programmer isn't what a game needs after it launches.

Or before, apparently. Knowing what the game market wants (and then designing that) is surprisingly hard.

> focus more on marketing than on the product itself

Welcome to the software business.

Software >publishing< business :-)

Any one of those games could have (and may yet) reached a critical mass that would lead to profitability, but the market is almost completely unpredictable.

Threes was well-designed, simple, and easy to learn, but the moment it hit the market there were a thousand clones (or more like 2048 clones, amirite?).

Flappy Bird was a weekend project with "borrowed" artwork and by all rights none of us should even know what it is.

There is next to no hope for anyone that doesn't have a massive enough advertising budget to convince people that "hey, all your friends are going to be playing this game, you don't want to miss out." Anything beyond that is blind luck or a truly brilliant/original idea.

I think the truth is that if you're making a free game, you have to put an incredible amount of consideration into replay value and how to keep people playing for long periods (and then how to extract money from them :/ ).

Otherwise you make a paid game and hope an Apple-featuring makes you enough.

I wonder what would happen if app games were run like desktop MMORPGs, where there is a monthly fee. That fee could even be paid via a site, also freeing the app of Apple's cut.

You would never get your app approved by Apple.

How man SaaS companies have monthly fees with free apps? Then, after you login, the features that you have paid for are available. I can think of plenty.

I don't see why not, if you hide the "monthly" under energy mechanics.

I would resist the urge to give too much credit to luck and marketing when it comes to indie game success. Notable outliers like Bastion, Sword + Sworcery, and FTL were all stunning executions. The FTL team did almost no marketing, but released a product that spoke directly to the target market of desktop gamers. Passionate people played it, liked it, and told others.

It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience.

There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I don't think that's the only path.

Just a slight correction: FTL had a very successful kickstarter which generated tons of marketing and hype before launch - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-tha...

Bastion was also published by Warner Brothers so it had some significant weight behind it.

Slight addendum for your slight (and correct) corrections :) Both games had been in self-funded development a long time and had achieved some degree of critical acclaim before Kickstarter and signing on with WB, respectively. I might argue that their previous work had created the conditions for them to earn those victories and reap the benefits.

For Bastion, it's probably good to be explicit that WB did not provide them funding. The benefit to Supergiant was access to advertising and speeding their way through the publishing process for Xbox Live Arcade. A significant victory they sought out and earned, to be sure.

In the case of FTL, the success of the Kickstarter may have generated some additional buzz because of how much they beat their goal. But the reason they beat their goal was that their game had already been discovered and appreciated (even in its early form) by a community of people passionate about games. Without organized marketing on their part, aside from showing the game to many of their colleagues.

In the case of FTL, the Kickstarter campaign was a marketing campaign and a very effective one.

Thanks for writing this up, it is always interesting and saddening to getting a deeper look at indie development on the app store.

It seems like more simplistic puzzle games like these have potential to completely blow up, but the market is also completely flooded with them. And I have found that it can be difficult to find quality in the genre. I would imagine that games that have heavier focus on art and polish can make a world of difference. It seems it gets attention from blogs/review sites and more probable for Apple to feature them.

Regardless, it is frustrating that your hard work that goes into these games didn't get the attention they may have deserved. Keep up the great work and hopefully we hear back from you soon about a monetarily successful game, whether that be in the app store or elsewhere.

The App Store is EXTREMELY clogged on the low-end. If it's your first game, if you use "puzzle" to describe it, if it's a spin on Tetris or Threes or Snake or match-3 or anything well-known, if someone could clone it in a week...that's the low-end. Not only will you have trouble getting customers to notice you, but you'll also fight just to get any kind of review.

What's also happening is that developers (myself included: http://appstore.com/daisypop) think "Wow, I shouldn't have spent so much time on that; I need to make something simpler and more rapidly so I have a better chance of turning a profit." This accelerates the problem.

The thing is I want to know about these fun new games. I feel like discovery is the actual problem.

If I had a random app installed on my home screen every day and I could say "more like this" or "this is horrible" I think it'd be cool. But it would have to be passive.

Apple acquired one in 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine)

Been expected app discovery to be a solved problem since the acquisition... since the Chomp founders left Apple recently, I would love to hear what happened.

What do you mean by it would have to be passive? It would come up with a new app everyday but you would still have to indicate if you liked the app or not.

Actually I can't believe there aren't already a billion apps doing this - you could make a fucking fortune selling access to your app, compared with the ever growing data on what kinds of apps do well.

I don't want to think about the app install process. If I mess with an app, I'd like to register whether I liked it or not.

That's a pretty good idea — iTunes radio for games. Too bad Apple has to be the one to do it.

My iOS Indie-Nongame Numbers

First published app (an educational niche): $1,832 in first three months. $1,360 in past 30 days.

Second published app (a semi-educational game-related app): $49 in first three months. $6 in past 30 days.

Third published app (an educational niche): $360 in first three months. $385 in past 30 days.

I now have over a dozen apps. Three of those earn less than $100 a month and I've all but abandoned them. Four more also earn less than $100 a month but are part of suite of clones that address different niches. Together, the suite earns over $200 a month now. My top 4 apps earn more like $100, $300, $400, and $1400 a month now. Over the past year, those iOS apps earned me just over $40,000. Not enough to live on alone but it's not a bad start.

My iPad comic-reader numbers

Average rating: 4.9 stars $3 paid upfront: $2750 (first 11 months) Free with one-time $3 IAP: $1560 (past 3 months) Currently averaging around $15 per day from IAPs.

Details: http://chunkyreader.tumblr.com/post/93410425677/sales

I would be interested in more information regarding your marketing for these apps, if you would be open to writing about it

I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales.

The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps" list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run ads for any other apps except mine.)

Nice, thanks for the summary

I wonder if there could be a Kickstarter for indie iOS apps (no companies allowed). Seems like an awful lot of time invested to design and build an app without really knowing if it'll be popular or make money.

The "pre-funding" model would be able to give indie developers 1) early fan base, 2) early revenue, 3) early validation instead of working in the dark

I remember reading how Threes was made and IIRC it was on the order of many many months and redesigns before users saw/heard anything. But they hit the lottery jackpot I guess

I think there needs to be more thought and research put into validating that your app idea is worthwhile. There have been traditional means of finding your market and using surveys or engagement to get a good feeling of whether or not people will actually want your product.

I make side-project apps all the time, but I'm aware that they are basically just scratching some itch I had. If you go into it expecting to make the big-bucks without doing market research and not having a marketing budget, you're going to have a bad time.

You could just use Kickstarter. Giving out rewards apparently is rather difficult thanks to Apple's App Store rules [1], but is doable [2] if you don't mind paying them the usual 30%.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37569.0

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/18dclr/question_giv...

Steam Greenlight sort of fits this. You can gauge desirability by how many people specify they would buy your game if it were available. But I'm not sure if you get any actual insight into the numbers.

Check out Ramen: https://ramen.is not for iOS apps/games exclusively but with a core focus on software projects.

Here's yesterday's blog post he was inspired by:

http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look...

Here's an infographic with the sales for a much larger indie game [Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP]:

http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/

>'I am not sure how to break into the App Store today except by winning the lottery.'

I'm not sure I follow.

It's a trio of side-projects, none of which have been available for even a full year yet, entering into a 'total bloodbath' marketplace.

Is it typical to expect immediate success and profitability doing this?

Traditionally, 'breaking in' is something people might spend years if not decades on and likely without the benefit of employment at a successful start-up during the week.

Things take time and persevering for longer than a year while refining and/or generating a fully original title would seem to be a good start.

like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up.

a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers.

tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art.

1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath"

while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank, that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component.

you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-playing, average-genre games.

if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional.

just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they can't build amazing games.

2) marketing is everything.

no. no it's not.

i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented, measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!!

come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having issues. come to find out, you need a good game.

if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough. you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content to share and they will.

that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far.

3) it's a lottery.

only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict as an example:

awful 2048 grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-history/...

still substantial threes grossing data: http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-history/...

if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.) that looks like a lottery.

if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next minecraft or spelunky.

so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise" book.

if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet -- to make quality games. you only think you do.

don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.

Excellent points all around! As an indie developer myself I've had to learn these lessons the hard way.

I'd also like to throw in one additional point: Selling apps up front for $0.99 is a bad idea. It makes it look and feel cheap. The average user doesn't see any difference between $0.99 and $1.99 or even $2.99 anyways, it's all under the "impulse buy" threshold. Scale up the price to something respectable, you won't lose any sales[1], which means more money in the end.

Oh and here's one additional data point, if anyone is curious: we made a mobile game called Big Action Mega Fight![2] It came out earlier last year, initially as a free-to-play game. We worked hard at it, iterating on gameplay and pushing several content updates. In the end we got plenty of downloads but no revenue. The F2P model had never really sat well with us anyways so we ended up pushing one last big update and switching the business model back to premium and making more money in the process :) [3]. In my humble if biased opinion, the only reason we got any money at all is because the game stood out visually. Anyways I could go on... I'm happy to share more if anyone is interested.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/12/stats-99-cent-apps-arent-sell...

[2] http://bigactionmegafight.com/

[3] http://toucharcade.com/2014/07/25/big-action-mega-fight-succ...

Counterpoint: Chronology (http://store.steampowered.com/app/269330/). The guys who made it has been in the games business for about a decade, the game is pretty, interesting and has some novel mechanics.

It was part of the steam summer sales, at 50% of.

I don't think they have sold a thousand copies yet and the game has been up for months. Counter that with Goat Simulator - which saw a huge sale boost during the sale.

Unless you can point to a few games that fit your bill for being good games before they are released and then become successful after your prediction I doubt you are right.

And anyway the way to make money now seems to be to make the game fun and addictive (farmville wasn't either) then constantly charge users once they have gotten invested (think Clash of Clans - oh you are shielded from attack initially and can raid an easy AI and build up stuff, then you are no longer shielded and need to build so much more without getting raided and then you can't really do that without IAP).

Chronology is a platform-puzzler. There's thousands of those.

I can see the conditions in m3mnoch's comment as necessary but not sufficient. It's still possible to make a great game and fail, for no very good reason.

IAPs certainly make money, at the cost of a dysfunctional addictive relationship with your users. And that leads to political pressure against the model as a whole: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/11095/20140724/eu-urges-go...

Just from the screenshots, Chronology seems to be a game that doesn't really fit the Steam audience. Might be better on Facebook, Humble Bundle, or a tablet device.

I don't know, braid/limbo/etc are all successful on steam and it looks like a platformer that could be considered vaguely similar?

I never saw it on the steam sale, and unless it was accompanied by some good press I'd not have clicked anyway. I still have 10+ completely unplayed sale games to get through...

The main character being an old man is not a good idea. It's important for an adventure game to create a character that the target audience can relate with, even if it's a hedgehog or something abstract. Albeit I agree with you in general, just furthering this point.

> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional.

This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with the solo game/app developer. Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?

Marketing.

>> 2) marketing is everything.

> no. no it's not.

Unfortunately, it is. See, it doesn't matter how novel and awesome (aka differentiated) your product is, you still have to sell it. In order to sell the product, you have to have the right product. This is why traditional marketing includes product development (look up the 5 Ps of marketing). Marketing as a function can tell you where your users are and what they're looking for. Then you design your product based on that, and find the optimal way to sell that product to your target users. The pricing/promotion piece (or what people usually think of as "marketing") comes at the end.

Promotion in and of itself is not a differentiation strategy unless you have deep pockets. But promotion is absolutely required to launch a successful product: I don't care how differentiated your product is, if your users don't know about it, it might as well not exist at all.

> 3) it's a lottery.

It pretty much is a lottery at this point. Any game with a unique concept that is doable by a single person is pretty much immediately copied 10 times over by a Chinese/Indian sweatshop. Why develop your own new game when you can copy someone else's? Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up.

App development has become a portfolio game specifically to deal with the randomness. If you view the costs for developing a product as encompassing both SW development costs AND marketing costs, the marketing costs would easily outstrip the development costs. Underperforming apps are unceremoniously killed, and more marketing dollars pumped into the ones that start succeeding.

It's hard to play that game as an indie developer, which is why we've seen so many of these posts pop up recently. People were sold on this vision of an egalitarian, meritocratic app economy and it's just not true. In a maturing market like mobile gaming, the one who shouts the loudest commands the most attention. For an indie dev with no capital, that can be really hard to do.

>>Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?

I don't believe this is true. I think Paper's Please is the best recent example -- we've had the technology to make this game for decades, and it's never been done until now. I suspect there are quite a few concepts out there that are able to be realized by solo developers that just haven't been thought of yet.

In regard to the author, the type of games he made are a dime a dozen. At this point they're unoriginal and uninspiring, and it shouldn't be a surprise that they failed to catch on. I think marketing is extremely important, especially in the app market, but you need to have a product that you can market. This is the biggest problem.

edit: Also, naming. Naming is extremely important. Why would you name your game Letters? Are you trying to make it hard to find on search engines? For anyone making an app or game out there, spend a lot of time on picking a name. Make sure you're the first result in google if someone types in "your_game_name_here game". "Letters game" returns 208,000,000 results on Google, it's not feasible for someone to find it that way, which just hinders word of mouth. It's also hardly rememberable.

Absolutely on naming. I read the article and thought that Letters sounded like a good game so I figured I'd go get it. I went to the app store, searched for 'Letters' and got a million early childhood apps returned (actually around 2300, but I couldn't find it).

I ended up searching for Tetra, wading through a few Tetris clones, finding the author, looking at the other games he had published, then finding Letters in the 'also by' section. Frustrating and a big issue for discoverability - if I wanted to recommend the game to a friend, how do I do that without sending them a link or getting them to wade through my list of games on Game Centre?

indeed. you're totally correct on naming. that's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time.

and, i would love for someone to bring out the counter example -- we've got lots of examples of poorly done games with and without marketing that don't go anywhere. does anyone have the counter example of a brilliant game with no marketing going nowhere?

Eh few people would know that game, by definition.

My best example would be Chronology (http://store.steampowered.com/app/269330/) which did have a bit of marketing that went absolutely nowhere. It is a pretty good game though.

hrm. i think you're right and that's a pretty good whack at it.

they've got a pretty solid environment artist, so it looks nice. concept is interesting. great potential. sophomore-seeming execution. beyond that, the mixed metacritic [1] reviews + the $10 price + the non-sharability are probably why it's not going anywhere.

for what it's worth, my advice for the devs if they happen to see this: add in multiplayer where you can play as the snail or the inventor. get some more content in there even if you have to sell it as iap because two hours of gameplay isn't enough for long-term sustainability. drop the price to between $2.99 and $4.99 and make it an impulse buy.

[1] http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/chronology

>>>> it's never been done until now

Again, we come back to marketing.

Would you bet that it has never been done, or it has been done but no one has ever heard of it?

Just developing a good game and hoping that people will (somehow) discover it is a lottery, same lottery like developing 100 shitty games, just with better odds.

Paper's Please has never been done. We've had a few big indie games released in the past few years which have legitimately not been done before (FTL is another big one that comes to mind).

What's so hard to believe about there being unexplored video game ideas out there? The industry is still relatively young, and it's always had a high barrier to entry until recently (and I'd argue that, for the average person, the barrier to entry is still much higher than that of writing, music creation, photography, drawing, or even movie creation).

>Also, naming. Naming is extremely important. Why would you name your game Letters?

And yet, Dots is a huge hit. Despite the fact that there is a traditional board game named "dots".

Of course there are outliers, but on the whole you want to have a name which is unique, rememberable, and able to be found through google without having to wade through a sea of unrelated items. There are anecdotes of people in this very thread who tried to download the game and couldn't because they were getting too many other games with a similar name. I think it's hard to argue that the name is working for his benefit here.

The bottom line: Picking a name like Letters decreases your chances of success. It doesn't eliminate it (like you said, Dot's is very popular), but it's something that should be avoided, and it's something that is easily avoided.

> So how do you differentiate?

> Marketing.

again, no.

while i feel your pain and the cognotive dissonance associated with "it can't be that i don't make decent games! it has to be someone else's fault!" -- i have hard, objective data that disagrees with you.

i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate.

i lived that for two years.

then, the retention bottom fell out. we burned through all of the naive and all that was left was a cadre of seasoned "me too" recognizing gamers.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

complain about clash of clans' business model all you want -- it's a quality game.

also please note, i'm not saying marketing isn't important, it's just not even close to "the most important" especially depending on the situation. if you have a giant budget with a ton of developers, it's pretty important. if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.

> i have assembled the funnel-and-churn data. i've put together the reports greenlighting games because the ltv has exceeded the cost of acquisition. i've used average instead of median so our whales inflated the reports. and after all of that, i've seen their 30-day retention numbers still stagnate.

In other words, you were managing promotion. Promotion is an important part of marketing, but it's not the entirety of it [1]. If the game objectively sucked, then you failed at the "Product" piece of marketing. This is the part where you listen to your customers and make changes to your product to make it more attractive to your target market (you did identify target markets for your games, right?) Product development should be squarely a marketing function; otherwise you'll end up building a product that nobody wants (like the original author did).

> if you are a small shop where everyone has day jobs and you can endure slower, organic growth? it's not worth the money.

In other words, it's only not important if you're not running a business and don't expect your app to be successful. Otherwise, marketing sounds pretty important to everyone. "Organic growth" doesn't happen in the app economy; you need explosive growth to hit the scale at which you can even begin to start recovering your costs (I recall reading one of these where the guy bought an iPad to develop his game with, and didn't even end up covering the cost of the iPad).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix#McCarthy.27s_four...

oh, and it just occurred to me that i might not be clear on describing the bridge that's joining the gaps you're talking about.

the reason i bring up the promotion parts (ltv! k-factor! arppu!) is that i have stanford friends who were knee-deep in that business (you should see the multi-variant testing we could do) and spoke very much like you do with the "marketing is everything, just measure, adjust the product for fit, promote!"

it was very, very objective.

they were frustrated with the creatives telling them "no!", so they left and started their own gigs (more than one person, not singling anyone out here) where they could launch and iterated -- all of them were abject, bankrupting failures.

marketing (promotion, as everyone reading this is thinking) is important, yes, but having the right creative is more important to an astounding and unbelievable extent.

seems to me you're lumping everything into marketing. i can understand that from a scholarship perspective, of course.

however, i would bet that if you told game designers (product development) they were marketing schleps and not part of the dev team, well... let's just say cliffyb might bring back bulletstorm.

>Marketing. >> 2) marketing is everything. > no. no it's not. >Unfortunately, it is.

This. Marketing and virality is in fact everything. Back when I was struggling for money, I used to push gift card offers on Facebook (I'm not proud of it). At the time everyone in a third world country with an internet connection was pushing essentially identical pages that would ask people to post a Facebook comment and then they would be forwarded to the offer, where we might get $1-$2 if they enter their email address.

Because of the sheer number of these identical pages, it was impossible to really make any money. But one day I decided to start commenting on my competitors' comment pages, saying that the current page was a scam but this other one (my page) was the real deal, and then voted that comment to the top. 48 hours later, I had made about $38,000 from the same page that everyone else was using.

The only difference was my marketing strategy. In a sea of copycats, the only way to differentiate yourself is through marketing.

Sorry m3mnoch is down-voting anyone who mentions marketing. Join the club.

heh. if only i had the power to downvote. even then, i wouldn't downvote folks who simply disagree with me. i love to argue with them too much!

Is that marketing or underhanded behaviour? Sounds like spamming?

> Is that marketing or underhanded behaviour?

The two are not mutually exclusive categories.

Black hat marketing.

I am curious if anyone knows the answer to this or has tried it. If you had a judgment against them, couldn't you attach the judgment to their app store earnings and have apple send you their check?

I suspect they would just start publishing under a new user? Just thinking out loud as my law grad self is intrigued by this question.

> Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up.

Ugh, the dreaded re-skin. In a past life, I helped launch a game, and then push it through two re-skins when the original floundered. Turns out that broken mechanics and poor design doesn't change when you change the art on the outside.

The marketing mattered, finding product-market fit mattered, but a poor game still does shit-all for you.

Just wanted to throw that in there because it gave me the heebie-jeebies reading about it again.

Your point didn't really prove that reskinning didn't work. Reskinning is not a guaranteed process, but it can and does work. Especially with the app store.

Release a version, make improvements, release another version reskinned the next week.

Oh, I totally agree. But the point with re-skinning is that you can develop a decent game with fun mechanics, and someone will rip it off and release a re-skin within a month. That re-skin could easily outsell your original app.

3x 10,000 hours experience required? That would have the average age of a successful indie developers being something like 50 years. Surely not.

I understand the negativity but all these are small productions given persistance and experimentation I think jazzychad eventually will make a profitable game - as far as I can see he has the skills.

I read crunchbase for King a couple of days ago - it says: "We have more than 180 fun titles in 14 languages". Leaving their hit / failure ratio at what? 5 out of 180. And that is for company that does nothing but casual games.

3x 10,000 hours experience required? That would have the average age of a successful indie developers being something like 50 years. Surely not.

I assume GP hinted at distributing that experience across a team of developers.

I disagree with the lottery notion. There are two important differences:

In a lottery you know exactly what your odds of winning are and what the (best) possible outcomes are. In the App Store on the other hand, the odds are more or less unknown (which is why this post is interesting in the first place, I guess).

They are also dependent on a variety of factors, including your marketing success, quality of the game, etc. As an independent app developer it's difficult if not impossible to get a grip on those numbers. On the other hand, if you are Kim Kardashian there are probably some calculations you can do that give you an idea about how well your game is going to do (FYI: There is a Kim Kardashian game. Also a person named Kim Kardashian)

The second difference to a lottery is, that in the App Store you do not have an upper bound for your success. It could be anything form zero (most likely) to flappy-bird-crazy and beyond.

So do these differences matter after all?

Yes, because they dictate what kind of game you have to make, or in other words what kind of risks you are able to take: While major publishers have to stick to "mee-too" variations of game concepts that are known to work, you as a hobbyist can try out radical ideas. Things that are "never going to work". You face a limited amount of loss (the time it takes to make the game) but face a (virtually) unbound gain. This also means that the 1-week variety is much more promising, just not the "mee-too" ones.

3*10000 hours is 10 years of full time job 365 days 8 hours per day. Do you really think, that somebody did that? Before he created mobile game in 3 months?

Sorry but you're vastly underestimating the power of marketing. "Yo" was basically an entirely marketing play, same with Flappy Bird, and their are several more examples. Candy Crush is by no means innovative, they polished an existing flash game that had been around for ages and marketed it correctly. Examples through counter examples; Bing will never succeed, simply because the brand has been devalued to a point that such migration is impossible. Amazon cannot make it in hardware no matter their innovation, because of how deeply invested people are with Apple/Google. I am sorry to say that in some respects; it is you with the blindspot.

That being said their are also examples of what you say working, but I have spoke to many people who have worked on AAA titles on mobile which have spent millions on R&D, with the best possible designers and developers, only to have a game like flappy bird outdo them. This is not only about being innovative, in fact it's sometime not, but rather having a anti-attitude to what the current market is in order to differentiate. Making an app for kids? Ask kids what they want, having a holier than though approach is only going to kick yourself in the face.

so, you're going to tell us that "yo" isn't the very definition of hitting the app lottery?

edit: and i believe you're conflating "marketing" with "coverage for hitting the lottery".

Their is also a lot of evidence to show Flappy Bird's position in the top apps placement was because of gray hat marketing.

Read the story of how it came to be, it was marketing. Keep in mind also the name itself is a huge reason for this.

again, you're conflating "marketing" with "coverage for hitting the lottery".

from this article: http://www.haaretz.com/business/start-up-of-the-week/1.59991...

  They decided to release the app to the App Store, 
  and people slowly started hearing about it. The 
  first serious buzz happened when blogger ad technical 
  Robert Scoble wrote about Yo after a visit to Israel. 
  He called it “the stupidest” but “most addicting” app.

  Thus the Yo app became the conversation of the day 
  among the startup crowd in Silicon Valley and New 
  York, who tweeted how excited they were at using it. 
  As interest burgeoned, Arbel moved to San Francisco 
  last week.

You proved my point " The first serious buzz happened when blogger ad technical Robert Scoble wrote about Yo after a visit to Israel. He called it “the stupidest” but “most addicting” app." Until then no-one knew about it, what is that called marketing. Are you going to down-vote me because you're wrong? How about Flappybird? That didn't gain any traction until the #1 Youtube video maker PewDiePie made a video on how much he hated it.

Marketing is a deliberate attempt to promote a product with the intention of selling it. If the authors or publishers of Yo approached Scoble or the Youtuber and persuaded them to feature their product, that's marketing. If Scoble or the Youtuber came across these apps on their own and randomly decided to mention them then that's not marketing, it's just luck.

Are we going to argue semantics on HN? If I show my app to anyone, which he did. Whether it is a news station or my mom it is marketing. He didn't just magically see it, the developer specifically showed him. You also have no idea if the Youtube video was influenced by the developer do you? I have worked with game streamers and had them promote some of our products; it's not hard. Feel free to post a dictionary definition of "marketing" if you want to continue this pointless debate on semantics.

Fair points.

On the topic of online buzz, see Ryan Holiday's book, "Trust Me, I'm Lying", https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ryan-holiday/trus...

Marketing and propaganda are very similar, if people believe something to be true. It is.

A lot of these famous social accounts aren't even the people in the photos. It's kinda disturbing once you get deep, everything seems so fake.

Doug Rushkoff & PBS had an episode about this topic, "Generation Like"

http://www.dailydot.com/geek/inside-fandom-media-campaign/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/generation-like/

People like you poison this site's ecosystem. Anytime you receive any counter to your misguided opinion you can silence the dissent by down-voting. Nothing you have said provides a insightful counter to anything I have said. You are just trying to bury my responses because you know you are wrong. It's disgusting, I thought this site was better than this.

fyi - i can't downvote. not enough karma or something. /shrug

so, it's not me.

If you have a good game and that game is easy to share

Then you've done your marketing correctly.

That's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most important thing by far

I believe you consider marketing to be some kind of shady activity.

Marketing is really only defining your product's audience, then your product, and how you're going to reach said audience.

In my opinion the 10.000 hours rule is wrong (recently there even was a HN post about the 10.000 hours rule being wrong).

Your third point seems to be true, because I can't remember one of the few well made mobile games not being at least decently successful.

Your other points seem to resonate with my observations as well, may I know if you're involved in the game industry?

yessir. i am in the game industry. and, i'd love to share my numbers, but we've since been snapped up by disney and i bet they'd frown on my giving out the secret sauce they've paid for.

edit: oh, and for the 10,000 hours thing -- that's not a literal thing. i was just using that as a stand-in for "you must be an expert in".

Can you elaborate on "awful grossing" of 2048 versus Threes. I'm not seeing any significant decline in 2048 grossing ranks.

sure, sure. remember the context is "not a lottery".

first, blow up the top-grossing date range to "all time".

if you look at the trending data for 2048, it's in freefall. they're down and off the bottom of the charts now for us:overall and us:games. a non-craftsmanship game that's a lottery winner can't pull out of this spiral because the game isn't deep enough to re-engage their audience.

if you look at the trending data for threes, you'll see even with their latest price bump, they still haven't fallen off the us:overall charts. even then, they have levers like "more content" and "price drops" and "in-game events" where they can get bumps to put them back up in the, say top 400 in us:overall two weeks ago. quality game, earning their revenue.

not to mention threes still hasn't fallen out of the top 100 for us:puzzle where 2048 hasn't seen that since april.

because, note: "downloads" are neat. "registered users" are neat. but those are vanity metrics. "can you earn enough money to sustain your business" is the most important metric to an indie game developer. can you keep doing what you love and stave off working for someone else yet another day?

Do you mind sharing what success you've had with your games?

the game space is VERY crowded for mobile

if I were to think about mobile apps I would aim for some specialty market segment, e.g. doctors, or lawyers, or construction, or weddings, etc. not games. too crowded. too many voices.

My friend and I kicked around putting some effort into building an app a few years back when people started publishing the "how to make money on the app store" posts. So thank you for posting this.

My suggestion is to find a website with an established niche (outside of the traditional app review websites) and audience who will promote your product ... and build something for that audience.

For example, my website has a ton of traffic in September and October. It's new though, so we are still working out monetization. There's a couple games in the market that would appeal to my visitors. I could probably give one a significant bump. And not one of them has ever contacted me about a review, provided a promo code, etc ... let alone a revenue share.

I didn't spend much time looking at Letters, but maybe it would do well on the blog of a english teacher?

> This also means that 74 people out of 21,309 (0.3%) paid to unlock internationally compared to 112 out of 5521 (2%) that paid to unlock domestically.

I don't know how many of these are DAU (you didn't say), but these numbers are not as bad as they might seem. 1%-5% is about industry average for % spenders in games. Where you need to tune things is figure out who the spenders are and raise your ROI. You state that you spent $700 to get $261 in revenue which is about 37% ROI. Not good, but its a start atleast. Obviously you want to be above 1. What I would do is invest a little in some analytics, figure out who your spenders are and cohort them. Then see if you can reduce your spend, become more targeted in your buying, while also increasing opportunities to earn more revenue. Just my $0.02

$0.99 for an App is not sustainable pricing unless your product is mass-marketed in order to make up the numbers. My company have several products in iOS and Mac App Stores and none of them are near this price. In fact, one of our products (Websecurify for iOS) is $16 which you may say is an expensive app for iOS but this is a more realistic pricing. I doubt we would have achieved any effect if we had priced it $0.99. Btw, the next version of our app will probably cost twice as much because even $16 is barely sustainable.

I think it is time for iOS developers get their strategy checked up. I know a lot of people want to get their app/game to a lot of people but unless you have evidence that you app is reaching millions of people, it is not going to work.

The "Letters" numbers shock me, I follow Chad on Twitter, downloaded the game and found it to be very addictive, especially the mechanic of solving the daily word. Chad, I really think there is something there in Letters; it definitely deserves some push.

I agree - I downloaded and played for at least a couple weeks. Important note: I'm not a gamer and rarely ever get caught up in a game for that amount of time.

Thanks. Yeah, I do too... I'm not sure how to push it. I just need a financier :)

As a non-expert reading this thread with some objective distance, the repeated recommendations that stand out are the importance of a distinctive (& searchable) name, and a graphical look/description that fights 'copycat' impressions. (Otherwise, the game never even gets a look from players or reviewers.) So maybe fresh eyes & new language/visual brainstorming would be more relevant than a financier?

You've already got one possible alternate name – "The Letters Game" – in your domain/twitter-handle, but I suspect something even more distinctive is possible. You might also tweak the icon and color scheme to convey more novelty compared to the famous category-leaders...

Well, a publisher or submitting to the major mobile gaming sites, like TouchArcade.

Speaking of, have you made any threads in the Touch Arcade forums? I've seen several apps get their initial exposure by just posting and asking for feedback.

Some people may say that we are in a Idiocracy, seeing games like Flappy bird become trend setters while AAA titles are getting barely any downloads. Mobile game developers need to understand the platform is more important than the game. In that you develop what is best for the platform and demographic. Not what you perceive as being high quality and pour millions of dollars and R&D. The more you make the mobile game look like a job, regardless how difficult it was to make, it will not be enjoyed because of such complexity. Although for simple Apps that have little ways to differ from the crowd, then marketing with some quirky difference to it seems to be the most effective.

I feel that, in the long run, apps are meant to be user interface to something bigger than being an all-encompassing entity for use cases outside of music, gaming and a few other categories. In other words, the service being accessed through an app will be equally if not more important compared to the app itself. And I just don't see indie devs being able to manage and scale on both fronts equally, yet. Maybe the more infrastructure as a code and web app development get commoditized, the better will be the chances for indies to shine/profit again? Until then, app is just gonna be a fancy (and in many cases the only) endpoint for most sustainable business models.

Making it on the App store with games is extremely hard. I have 3 friends who each developed a mobile game and made no money, basically the games serve as portfolio for future work. I don't think the quality is the issue with what my friends produced:

http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/

http://gamewhizzes.com/

http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php

Most likely marketing failures.

That being said, I am working on one myself and have all the hopes that any indie has.

marketing failures?

how would you differentiate them with marketing? "yet another color bubble popper!" "yet another side-scrolling shooter where you kill the undead!" "yet another match three with fruit!"

i'm not sure i agree with your assessment as to marketing failures. if you said me-too-market-fit, however, i'd say you were on to something.

their level of polish is pretty nice, so they should step out of the lottery and make a non-me-too quality game. i bet they would be pretty successful with it. in fact, if they keep with it, i'd put money on it they'll eventually be very successful.

I hope you are right - that a fun new gameplay with an adequate level of polish is enough for moderate success. I guess that deep down I also believe the same and that is what makes me keep on going to finish my side project.

Are you comfortable sharing any details on your side project? Stuff like this interests me.

It's a game I have been working on for some time. The gameplay is simple and easy to copy and that is why I have been reluctant to show it to too many people. I hope to finish it in the next 6 months but It could take longer depending on how much spare time I have for it. I am planning on showing it to the HN crowd first - the support is always pretty good here.

I think you'd have more success if you twist your games a wee bit, and try and turn them educational. That way you'd be able to put them in the educational category, where this guy who has similar word styles games as yours, is doing very well:

http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-educatio...

Also, I couldn't find your contact info on your blog - is it there somewhere? You'd want press to be able to find it if so....

Same for us..

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-thoth/i... This one had promotion through free app of the day. Lifetime revenue was around $700. Paid around $400 in ads

https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-free/id5770998... Spent ca $1500 on ads, made $20 revenue.

maybe link to the english version of the app store page for the one you spent $1500 on ads for.

I spent 6 month developing a game in my spare time:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-turtles/id892249118?ls...

3 weeks after the launch the game sold 6 copies and made 8,95$. I sent out 51 promo codes to various review sites but only 8 of them got redeemed.

I can already guess how impossible it is to enter the iOS gaming market.

I couldn't find 'letters' by searching on 'letters' in the app store... too many other things came up first. By search for your other games, then going to letters I was able to try it.

Pretty fun, would be nice if it had some of the 'hip' words used these days, "Selfie" etc

(edit, had some stuff in here about would be nice if there was an undo)

Yes, searching for "Letters" is not great. The irony is that if the app was ranked highly it would show up much higher in the results, so it's a double-edge sword.

Regarding "undoing" a letter selection, you can't, and that was intentional. It simplifies the UI (you can however reset the whole word by trying to submit an invalid word), and even if you could undo, the time you would spend doing it would pretty much wreck your score for that round, so overall it's no good. I know this frustrates some people, but after several weeks of playtesting and hearing this complaint, after the first few rounds that complaint quickly vanished, so I stuck with my decision.

After playing for the last 20 minutes, I agree, undo would get in the way.

I hate in-game ads. But if paired with an in-game ad-buyout option, they do tend to remind me that, if I'm going to be playing the game repeatedly, I should do the buy-out.

So even if ads earn a negligible amount... are they ever worth trying as a mechanism to boost in-game purchases?

Thanks for sharing your numbers, they were an eye opener for me, and now I'll need to plan a better strategy...

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