Question about profit

here's why..

Too much competition. A million downloads for a single paid app is not easy at all.

 

In my country the taxes are 24%, 60% is a bit much!But yeah, it's hard to sell one mil, but not impossible!There are 390824 more than half are crap, 100.000 are fart machines), and the rest are birds games!Make a quality game, and promote it, to get the word spreading and you should be ok!

 

Nothing wrong with the math, apart from even the UK not taxing you that heavily.

The problem here is that only a tiny handful of games generate that sort of income. If a dev is going to make millions, it also has to be from a fairly simple game too - the bigger ones cost probably a lot more than you think to develop in the first place.

If you get a runaway success then there will be champagne corks popping all over the place, but it's not a valid business model to assume your game will do that, regardless of how good it is.

Our game (Great Little War Game) is a moderate success and that's probably where most decent developers live. The game has almost covered its costs and might even make a profit after a couple more months, but the AppStore is simply not a license to print money.

 

@Prozak you don't see many apps selling 1000 000+ at least not relative to the number of apps available. I recently posted the sales figures for my app Squid Drop in these forums. These are probably a bit better than what a lot of indies experience. The success stories are nice as inspiration but the fact is that the majority of developers (myself included) will never make money from the App Store, at least not if calculating work hours...

 

The majority of developers and yourself might want to reëvaluate your business models because that makes no sense.

 

It's very simple: The size of the App Store market is not large enough to cater for the huge number of developers. There is simply not enough money going around for everyone to make an income. It's not as simple as changing the business model. This is not particularly uncommon, it as fairly common misconception that starting a business automatically creates an income.

Personally I'm doing all the development on my spare time as I have another job creating the an income to support my family and myself. I am not quite ready to throw in the towel. While I (for the most part) enjoy the development process I might have to reconsider whether the time and money I spend on App development is worth it at some stage.

 

At least not as long as a huge number of games/apps are very similar. Unless someone is a fan of a genre, people are not going to buy half a dozen of the "basically the same" type of game. This is even more true to utilities. If I bought one calculator and one editor, I don't need another one (and won't even look for it) unless something comes out that does what I need multiple times better than what I already have.

There's also the same problem that I saw happening in the "shareware" boom in the 80s and early 90s, when everyone was a developer (just like in today's age of blogs where everyone is a writer and journalist) and the initial profitability was quickly diminished by the flood of mediocre and shallow stuff that watered down the profit potential for everyone -- and eventually even killed people's interest in homegrown shareware altogether. I saw these events unfold from the perspective of both a reviewer (for printed magazines at the time) and a developer (I abandoned both fields in 1995), and somehow the AppStore gold rush reminds me of that.

 

Anyone can say what you will be making if app was in top ten in words chart?

 

I estimate that less than 200 apps since the inception of the App Store in 08 have sold over 1 million copies. The number is probably closer to 120. Apple released an All Time Paid Rankings List in the winter and if you know the sales figure for one or two of the apps on that list, you can estimate the rest. It is also VERY top heavy.

Some more recent stats revealed by a couple of devs on another board said they sold only about 10,000 copies / day in the top 10 overall US paid list. At that rate, they'd need to be in the top 10 for 100 days straight to break into the 1 mil copies sold. There are some consistent games/apps in the top 10, but there are very few that have lasted 100 days. Even Air Penguin has fallen to #24 today.

In the real world, there are a lot of hidden costs that you can't see. Advertising can cost 2-3x more than development costs, but no one is ever going to publicly reveal the most cost effective methods of advertising.


[edit]
Pre-Rankings change, rank #10 approx 6k copies/day, #7 approx 15k copies/day.

 

That should actually be:

1,000,000 x $0.99 = $990,000

As said above only a small percentage of devs will ever sell anything like a million copies of a single paid app.

Hypothetically if we all sold a million copies for every app there would soon be over 100 times more developers all wanting in on the gold rush, each releasing yet another horrifically poor clone of some previously successful Doodle Zombie Bird Defense game, and it would soon settle with the exact same profit distribution as it is now - a few making a fortune but most not turning a profit.

Because apps are so cheap and making apps is so accessible this is inevitably how it has to be.

 

I read on a big site that Words with Friends was making a million dollars a month between paid app and ad share.

Just Google the term "Words with Friends a million a month
Also Adsense if you have millions of players like that clicking well- work it out.

 

Survivorship bias

For every huge success story you hear about, there's who-knows-how-many other devs that fared poorly. It's just that those stories are commonplace and uninteresting, so nobody really cares to discuss those stories. You're not going to find some easy opportunity to get a 200,000% ROI on your money just lying around like that (not to mention that $500 for a dev's time is a horrendous underestimate).

 

If you have several millions you'll probably see a fair income from adSense. That being said people "clicking well" is not very likely is it...?

 

Yeah but the other ) site said a million a month

 

There are certainly success stories in the App Store. The reason they make the news however is of course that they are newsworthy. Devs failing commercially isn't news because it happens all the time...

 

Don't be fooled. A lot of devs earn over a million downloads during free campaigns, and then naturally play that number up (not saying this is a bad thing mind you). For a purely paid app to have a million downloads, I imagine that is VERY rare.

 

You're talking about a top 20 game, of course there's good money involved. Now what about the other 54,538 (as of 2011-05-15) games?

Let's also remember that Words with Friends is now owned by Zynga who already have a massive thing going with the likes of FarmVille and whatever else they've put on Facebook. It's not really an indie game anymore.

 

Good point, a lot of people are fooled into thinking those million+ downloads in app descriptions are paid. I would think the number of games/apps with 1 mil downloads all paid might be below 50 or even 20... out of the hundred thousands in the app store. And in today's store a lot of games that shoot up the charts are by devs that have enough successful apps out there to cross market.

 

Forgive me MODS for posting this but I have to get a point across.

pocketgamer.co.uk/r/PG.Biz/Newtoy+news/news.asp?c=24868