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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?