That's really impressive. Have you seen more monetary success with big games like Dark Raider or the small 1-2 month games? What will you be concentrating on in the future? If advertising on TA/other ads was not effective, what have you found to be most effective? Do you see good 'life' from your games (good sales over time) or big bursts followed by a small trickle of sales?
So far the smaller games have made more money. Just depends on the content and what people are looking for. In the future I'll be sticking to casual games that appeal to a wider audience, and be reusing code and content if possible across games to save time. The best advertising is being on the top 100 in a category. Getting there is the problem and I haven't figured out a way for my new games. Some of the games have good steady sales in the hundreds every day, while some have a big burst at the beginning and slow down to <50 a day.
Age group: 30 Team size: 3 full-time, 2 part-time contractors (I am the founder/owner) Games produced: We're actually not in games at all, but I thought I'd post anyway because of interest. Hooked In Motion makes the iCollect apps, World Customs & Cultures, and a number of smaller apps under the Ethan Productions name. Budget: Just the cost of my employees, office rent, utilities, etc. We have no upfront or budgeted costs on projects and try to stay away from them as much as possible. Marketing options: We do all of our own in-app cross promotion and a lot of promo code give-a-ways. We also do press releases on every new new major version we release. We do a lot of forum and word-of-mouth promotions as well. We're currently trying to increase our Twitter following and expand our website. Any sort of paid advertising has worked very poorly for us. Development time: Longest development time was a month, shortest was a day. We try to get projects out fast and then iterate on them quickly. We can't afford to spend 6+ month on one project. Doing Well/Not Doing Well: I quit my day job, where I made $100k/year, in Aug 2008 to work solely on iPhone apps. It was a huge risk but it has paid off. Hired our first employee in Aug 2009. Q1 (meaning first 3 months) of 2010 we are projecting to do $170,000 in revenue just from App Store apps. We are doing very well and can only see it going up from here. We run off no debt and very low expenses. Competition of course is our main concern. Long term: We're expanding towards Android later this year and we'll be potentially hiring more if the revenues stay strong. We're planning to really open the idea box up this summer for some really cool new apps. We're also going to be doing more cross-connection between apps, meaning many apps will be iPhone, iPad, website, and desktop app companions of each other.
Dogtown Studios here. I have created a page where we explain what we did for our latest game. The only update is that the backup funding fell through and we didn't get it. But it looks like we didn't need it anyway. Success Insider
I just released my first game, http://spiritapp.com. Which has taken me 6 months, not including time I spent making other prototypes, some of which might still emerge now. It's been out a week now, and sales have been ok, but not really enough for me to live off. I'm working on putting in OpenFeint in 1.1, and I've sent out a barrage of review requests and forum posts this last week. Hopefully I might get enough of a surge in the next few weeks to get me up in the charts. I did quit my day job to make this. I fully admire the people that can do it in the spare time. I tried, I just couldn't do it. But having said that, I do think you have to commit fully to things like this to be a success. This has been solely developed by me, so I've only required the expenses to keep me going working from home. I do plan on continuing as long as sales pick up a little. I have a good code base and a few work in progress games, and *lots* of ideas. Congrats RPGGuy on your success! A really impressive amount of work you have done there.
Cascadia Games LLC Team size range: 1 to 4, depending on project Age range: 20 to 33; I'm 29 Games produced: Zombie Karts, Cascadia Kart, Xeno Sola, Mini Chess (removed), Mini Shogi, Mini Makruk, Mini Shatranj; also TGB Kart Kit Budget: Typically < $200 per game; about $1500 startup costs Marketing options: Twitter, various review sites, targeted ads; less than %1 of gross receipts spent on ads Development time: Xeno Sola was 4 months; most less than 2 months Doing Well/Not Doing Well: A typical month brings in $650 or so. Definitely not quitting my day job. But income is well above costs and contributors, outside of myself, have been paid reasonably for their time via royalties. Over 3500 games and over 100 kits sold in our first ~10 months of existence. Long term: Current projects are a new game in a new genre (for us) and a complementary content pack to our current kit. I don't anticipate any single game becoming a big hit, so we'll continue to be conservative with small games that have short development periods and low costs. By the end of the year, I'd like to see our monthly income as consistently double its current rate.
