Tales of App Store failure
deadpanic.com
deadpanic.com
Eventually the craziness will die down, and only the more serious developers will stick around. There's bound to be some big consolidation. It's inevitable as the market matures, and we've seen this pattern over and over and over and over.
The real question though, is whether the pricing model and consumer expectations have been so degraded that the situation is unredeemable. At 70 cents per sale, the revenue isn't enough to support many players.
At current prices, the TAM of iPhone apps looks like around a billion dollars, with Apple skimming around 300 million right off the top. So, that leaves us with around $700 million in revenue per year.
That's enough to support a handful of small-to-midsize development shops, with nobody capturing more than a few million a year. However, the money certainly isn't enough to support multiple large software businesses. Adobe alone did $700 million in sales last quarter.
I don't think that this is a healthy state of affairs. Hopefully, things will improve after the shakeout.
There are tools out there that are being designed to help you as a developer do this, http://appsto.re , is one example. Apps need better metrics and feedback to improve sales.
No, but the gold rush might be. The iPhone is still a very viable platform for making money selling software. Mobile apps can be incredibly useful, and the App Store makes it easy for people to spend money.
It's hard to get noticed right now because there has been an absolute flood of apps. As people start to figure out that not all app developers get rich, that flood will slow to a more reasonable stream.
There does seem to be a market inefficiency in the huge disparity in sales between apps that are featured by Apple and apps that aren't. Picking up that slack in the market has to be an opportunity for a startup. If Apple isn't providing a good way for great apps to be found in the App Store, someone else should.
I don't quite follow that logic. The expectation seems to be to write one successful App store game and then live off the revenue happily forever after?
Seems to me that if the game cost, say 20000$ to make, and you make 2000$/month for 10 months, you have hit break even. During those months, you can create more App store games that will add to the revenue.
Instead of one game making 2000$/month, you could also have 10 games making 200$/month, and so on...
If it continues to sell and sell for years, ultimately it won't have been a failure. It was just a couple of months work but brings in money forever (I know, it probably won't sell forever, but that is another issue).
Two updates a month is probably full-time work, so there isn't any time left over to build new apps, and no surplus capital either. Plus, that's assuming that each and every update spikes sales like the launch did.
According to the OP, daily sales are currently holding steady at around 11 sales a day. That's a little bit over $200 a month in persistent revenue. At that rate, it would take almost a decade for the game to break even, given a cost of $20,000 to develop.
Special note: This is for a game that cost only $20,000 to make. Building a solid AAA title can cost hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars.
Lesson: Putting stuff in the app store won't do anything for you unless you market it outside the app store. Not sure that's a very original lesson. Surely that's obvious?