Actually, even bad publicity (an "awful review") can be a good thing! A fellow on Touch Arcade wrote an unflattering user review for Karate Fighter, a port of Kung Fu Master Arcade. Immediately afterwards, the game actually got a nice spike in sales, go figure! Between entrenched, already popular apps, the constant influx of new apps, jaded and overwhelmed review sites, getting any eyeballs at all is the biggest challenge facing developers.
Age: 38 Team: One, and subcontracting up to 6 others at a time Budget: Rogue Touch had a budget of roughly $500 (not including hardware or my time). My next game's budget is looking to be over $20,000 before I am done. Marketing: All the usual, TouchArcade is a great place to spread the word, twitter, my own fourms, e-mail to various site owners and magazine editors. I am thinking of a more concentrated paid PR campaign for my next game, if I can get some quotes. I think marketing and PR guys are overbooked or something Development Time: Rogue Touch took about 4 months part time, but I had to learn Xcode, Objective-C, and the SDK in addition to my consulting work by day. I did a lot of the artwork myself, or based on freely available sprite images. I also did not "cheat" and simply port an existing copy of Rogue, as I wanted to understand it inside and out. The next game has seen much more planning and design time on paper, and little code yet. I've spent about 3 months time commissioning artists to help out in areas like sprite animation, tilesets, illustrations, and so on. Still at least 2 months more to completion. I learned a LOT the firsts time around but this is a bigger project than before! Doing Well: Sales of Rogue Touch were never *amazing* other than in April 2009 when it became the #1 RPG in the USA and Japan for about 10 days. It still sells though, and I have never had a zero-sale day yet (it'll be a year later this month). Never expected it to become as popular as it did actually, it was more of a learning experience for me, but I am glad that it made a lot of people happy! The App store is really still a hobby for me, so I don't rely on it to pay my bills. That said, I have higher hopes for my next project, which is why I've sunk in a lot for the development budget.
Oh wow $20,000 good luck on that man, I would definitely look into advertising if you're spending that much money.
Yeah, as I said I've put out the request for proposal from one marketing group already. They're over a month behind in even providing a quote which does not instill confidence that they could do anything for me at launch. I'll be doing a lot more on advertising and PR once I get into the final 30 days or so prior to release. Thankfully I don't need this to be a mega-hit to survive. I wouldn't put that kind of money into the game if I couldn't afford to lose it. Of course, I'd like to at least recover the development costs, and don't think it should be too hard to do after seeing how a game like Rogue Touch managed to do. Now if the next game DID become a hit, I would actually get into game development full time... we'll see what happens this spring
Ohhhh now i notice that title, I was just looking at it the other day I was actually thinking of buying it! I found another rogue game for free though lol, looks like you done pretty well with sales on that
Would love to post that I'm doing well, but can't because my first game is not out yet!! To be honest I've no clue how well it will sell, hopefully more than 10 copies..
Can't wait to see your new project Data Age: 24 Team: Tides of War (me) + 3 freelance artists, Ski Champ (me) Budget: Tides of War: $400, Ski Champ: $0 Marketing: Touch Arcade, word of mouth Development time: Tides (3 months, including learning SDK), Ski Champ (2 weeks) Results: Tides did 'okay', earning back the cost of development (mainly art) and nothing else. Ski Champ was featured as New and Noteworthy, which paid off to the tune of ~$2000, with no development costs I'm not going to quit my day job anytime soon, but it's a fun hobby. I SHOULD be focusing on smaller, quick to market apps but my third app that I'm working on now is a little more ambitious. I might seek out a publisher like Chillingo to help out. I'm constantly torn between what I think is most profitable (moron tests, fart apps, stick men) and what I like working on. I usually end up trying to strike a balance, but skew more towards what I like to work on. The money is fun, but I can't stand to develop apps that I don't myself enjoy. It's mainly a hobby after all, it should be fun.
Same here, it's more hobby as I'm developing it in free time and can't see quiting day job anytime soon. Agree about balance, I could of released my game few months ago, but decided to add Bluetooth/Wifi multi player, now adding AI players, probably will add Plus+ with asynchronous multi player support as well, so god knows when I'm going to finish it. Good thing being independent developer is that I can develop my game for as long as I want until I'm happy with it. Sorry for off topic talks.
Age: 35 Team: 1 (me) + freelance artists for all the art stuff Budget: Age of Tribes cost me around high x.xxx$ - and I've spent the double value including all the trial-and-error stuff I did, including my first (and basically abandoned) game "Kittys Adventure". The next game will cost less - mid x.xxx$ - mainly because I've learned my lesson and I know exactly what I want. Marketing: I have a list with ~70 preview sites and will contact all of them, beside of that: Twitter, boards like this, word of mouth Development time: around 5 months for Age of Tribes Results: sales will start this friday so I have no idea yet
Hi Lazypeon! Hope that my next game meets or exceeds your expectations (and everyone else's) I agree that nobody should quit their day job unless they've already hit the big time in the App Store. Not one month of good sales mind you, but many months worth and/or several times your yearly income outside the store! Treat it as a hobby, an expensive one in my case... Also agree that you should work on what you enjoy and not whatever the stupid "hot app" of the moment is. I can't bring myself down to that level. Everything that I want to produce for the iPhone and/or iPad is much more ambitious, and therefore time consuming and expensive to make. Fortunately the app store market looks like it's slowly maturing and going for games with a little more than 10 seconds of entertainment in them, and realizing that sometimes you have to pay more than 99 cents for the good stuff. We'll see if that continues.
it doesn't have to be expensive plan good. i'm quitting my day job to focus on my own thing - but, i have established great paying development opportunities that can capitalize on my experience and management of resources within mobile development. it should open up more time for me to focus on my "fun projects" - which end up on the app store!
In my case with this game it does have to be expensive... Unless you can tell me where to find some artists that can draw me 1500+ frames of animated sprites, 300+ tiles, hundreds of items, and dozens of illustrations for my game for a lot cheaper? And I mean professional artists who have worked on popular Nintendo DS games like some of my current guys have. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and pay to play with the big guys My "day job" already offers me flexibility to work on this stuff, since I've been a self employed consultant and programmer for 12+ years now. I wish I could focus on game design full time, but it will remain a hobby until I can meet or exceed my current consulting income with app store sales. I need to get pretty damn high up the charts to have any hope of that! Even if I don't, I'm having a lot of fun with it, and creating some neat games that *I* want to play
+1 I like your attitude. If you stick with making stuff that *you* love, it's hard to go wrong. Art assets don't come cheap. Invest as much as you feel comfortable, and don't assume that you'll guarenteed to recoup costs.
@CommanderData, just curious as to what your job as a consultant really entails? I understand the self-employed programing aspect, I have worked once under 1099IC As a PHP Developer, but never really understood the role of a consultant.
Well, my area of work is a bit specialized... industrial automation... Some of my time is spent telling companies how to improve their process and equipment, some of it on how to collect and present manufacturing data, and the majority of it goes to actually integrating new production lines, re-writing old programs to improve efficiency, that sort of thing. As many specialized things go, not many people do it, and even fewer do it *well*, which means I usually have as much work as I want to take on. On game development- I've always had a soft spot for video games since seeing my first Space Invaders and Asteroids games at the arcades. From that point on I wanted to make my own games someday, and I finally got around to it 30 years later. Even if I can't make a career out of it, at least I can enjoy it
I work with some friends on their studio. It hasn't been good. We've developed one single game at a time where people had been laid-off, and the result was a super-simplistic game that i doubt anyone in the studio actually liked. It was more of a "what's easier to make" scenario. My 2D fighting game (based on my comic book) only got to a concept vid i did to show off how it would work, we had some meetings, i wrote the game design and... that's it. Lay-offs, and now it's in limbo. Basically, moral is low and nobody even considers anything else.
Alien Swing was released about 2 weeks ago, after roughly three months of development. How's it working out? Not best well, currently. I made a game I'm really pleased with, and it was a lot of fun to write so from that point of view it was good, and the reviews we've got have been pretty positive. However, it's not paying back it's costs (roughly £1000 in equipment costs, another £1000 for art + sound, and £6000-8000+ in opportunity costs in not doing other work) nor showing much chance of doing so I've had to go back to contracting. I've got plans to work up a free version and an update that comes in under the recently increased 20Mb 3G limit - which I'm hoping might turn things around but we'll have to wait and see.
Age group : 34 Team size : 1 Games produced : Blue Skies, i Fishing, i Fishing Saltwater, Dark Raider, Asteroids 3K, The Guy Game, The Girl Game, Pocket Farm, Super Football Kick, Super Soccer Kick, Puppet Jump Budget : < $1000 per game, but I have bought 2 macbook pro's to develop on. Marketing options : Advertised on TA for 4 weeks (different games) which didn't show any difference in sales, released lite versions of most games, cross promoted and using OpenFeint to show banners and cross promote all games. Development time : Dark Raider took 5 months, all the other games took 1-2 months. Doing Well/Not Doing Well : I quit my day job in August 2008 before I even had anything to sell. I just knew there was an opportunity and I had the skills in programming, art, and music to do everything on my own and make a go of it. I am doing well and have not made less than $30k every month since I started. With recent additions of ads from Admob in the lite versions I will be around $50k/month. Long term : I have more games based on the 3D engine I've secretly developed over the past year coming out. There are also ideas for some iPad specific games in the works plus iPad versions of existing games with higher resolution graphics. With the success I've had I don't see myself doing anything else for a very long time
