>I released the game at £1.49 / $1.99. My rationale behind the pricing was that it was a niche game, and therefore anyone who wanted to play it wouldn't mind paying the slightly higher (but let's be honest, still very low) cost, and I wanted to make back the money I spent on art (around £400/$600). Secondly I think even the modest increase from £0.69/$.99 rules out a lot of impulse purchases, which would have no doubt increased the number of "it's too hard!" and "I don't understand!" reviews no end - this was a game made for BMXers after all.
This makes total sense, and I hadn't previously considered the effect of pricing on potential reviews. He was able to focus his audience (by raising the price), knowing that it would encourage more motivated gamers that were less likely to get frustrated by the mechanics. Thus avoiding the annoying 1-star reviews that can tank a rating.
It doesn't, App Store is all about impulse purchases. Anything remotely casual should be .99c or free, use ingame purchases to capture extra value. If the game plays half decent and is shiny(has non-amateur art), it should have a pop up sometime ingame reminding players to review and it will have no problem getting a 4-5 star rating. All of which doesn't actually matter if you get right because you still need a hook or angles that gets people playing YOUR game instead of the 1000s of other similairly polished and entertaining games(many of which are going to be better known, by virtue of branding/bigger marketing budget/connections/whatever)
It is what it is. I've had an app in the top 100 paid for the past couple years and that's how I interpret the market. The vast majority of money spent on the App Store is impulse buys, not researched decisions.
I disagree with the cheap / free and then 'capture extra value' model, purely because I personally hate games that do that. That's not to say that it doesn't make good business sense, just that I wouldn't enjoy making those kinds of games. If it was my livelihood perhaps I'd feel differently, but I'm very happy being in a situation where I can make exactly what I want, for the market I want! (full disclosure: I'm the guy that wrote the blog post).
What you've said regarding pricing & the freemium model is entirely correct. But this race-to-the-bottom that everyone has been forced into annoys me to no end.
Personally I'd much rather pay $5 or even $10 for a good game if it's going to give me a few hours of entertainment.
Unfortunately there's so much crap on the app store that it's a big risk paying that much for something unless you know (based on reviews/recommendations etc) that it's good.
Another positive thing about pricing it above the .99 min is that if you do, you can't have sales or reduce the price of your game. Starting at 1.99 gives you some freedom to bend your price a bit.
I do agency work in Australia and pretty much every app I've ever made cracks a top 10 list in Australia briefly. It's really not that many downloads to get there.
Getting any traction in the US though seems to be much more difficult (and the scale difference is enormous).
Agreed. The headline is misleading. The game only briefly broke the top 100 in 8 countries (out of 138), and the highest paid app rank it ever reached in the US was 216. Source: appannie.com
I kind of agree with you, but being a UK citizen I was watching the UK app store by default. Bearing in mind that I was hoping to make a few hundred quid / dollars being in the top 100 in any chart was a result! :)
I'll be sharing this article with every person who comes to me with a "great app idea" because "that's where the money is".
This is a great tale of the hard work and perseverance required to launch a game as a solo dev - and I would call it a success. "New car money", though, is not the success so many devs (and would be devs) seem to think comes easily.
That was my first thought... if the motivation is monetary upside, "new car money" in exchange for someone's eight-month bootstrap is not quite enough for a lot of professional programmers. Fine if it's for the love and enjoyment of it, though.
I know a person who has several games consistently in the top 10. And, him and his team also started out as 'hobbist' game devs. To me, it seemed like they took several years of taking risks, perseverance, dedication, creativity, trial and error, and of course luck to make it big. But, eventually, a blockbuster emerged.
I'm a bit of a long time lurker, but I just have to say that I'm genuinely incredibly proud for there to be a discussion about my game on hacker news - I'm not sure it's really the right place for it (I'm no startup), but I've screen-capped it nevertheless.
The most important thing to note in that article is the revenue graph near the end.
You might make a few $K in on the first day, but if it's all downhill from there, you don't have a sustainable business.
That's not to say this guy hasn't made an impressive accomplishment (which getting any game in the top 25 is) - just be wary of the stories of "overnight success" that we hear now and then on the app store.
I think 'all downhill from there' is pushing it a bit far - I certainly don't want my story to put off any potential developers! If I wasn't such a sensible / boring fellow I could still (a year later) be comfortably living off my monthly income.
I recently broke top 50 in the Productivity category with my first app, which brought in over 5,000 downloads and counting. I didn't receive "new car" money, but I have already received a few freelancing clients because of it, which surpassed my goals.
Fantastic execution, and good luck with all of your future projects!
These things are always motivation boosters. I've had a gaming idea for a long time now but I feel that I know close to nothing about graphics programming to make it work.
It's motivating from a hacker/programmer perspective, not so much from a business one. 8 months full-time effort for new car money? Unless he means a new Tesla Model S, it's not very encouraging, especially considering so few reach this level of success.
I don't want to put other developers off - when I talk about 'new car money' I'm not talking about earnings where I can afford a car and nothing else, just that I'm not out buying mansions in Beverly Hills (or Primrose Hill for those in the UK).
I didn't go in to this to make money, so the financial benefit has been a hugely pleasant surprise!
yep. what i want to read is an article about failure, or stats about rate of failures, where failure is not earning above average wage over the time it took to make the app.
Well, even he probably has only an imprecise idea how many hundreds of hours he spent on it, but I'll speculate it's comparable to how many hours he'd spend getting a master's degree in CS (at night, while working full time during the day). I don't know how the job market works in his specialty in his country, but in some job markets in the US, I estimate that being able to list that game and its sales performance on a resume is worth rather more than a master's degree. So from that side effect alone, this sounds at least as good as him taking a generous fellowship to get an exceedingly good master's degree. It's not vast wealth in one fell swoop, but it doesn't seem like a failure. And if he wants never to send out another resume in his life, instead writing and selling his own software, it's harder to quantify the benefits of business and tech experience on a first app, but ramen profitability on one's first less-than-a-year-in-development app sounds OK to me. The title oversells the achievement (top 25 ... in some smaller countries) but your term "failure" undersells it even more.
Hi, I'm Adam, the guy that made the game. I completely see where you're coming from, but in the article you'll read that my measure of success was making back the few hundred dollars I spent on art - so as far as I'm concerned I've succeeded beyond my wildest dreams!
I understand that my success is another man's failure, and that's fine with me. The 'success' of Pumped 1 is funding the development of Pumped 2 - I actually have a budget this time! But it's definitely not a bootstrapped multi-million pound startup - just me making games about grown men on kids bikes! :)
The article mentions some resources in the Engine and Learning Materials sections.
He learned by following tutorials for Corona SDK[1] for a couple months, learning what he could of Lua[2] and making a very simple game.
Then, he switched to Cocos2D[3] and had to learn Objective-C and Xcode. He bought the books Programming in Objective-C[4] and Learning Cocos2D[5] and started reading and coding.
He also regularly visited the Cocos2D forums[6] and Ray Wenderlich's site[7] to solve problems as they came up.
Start by deciding whether you want to target a single platform or a list of multiple platforms, and then choose whether you want to work with 2D, fixed pipeline 3D, or programmable pipeline 3D.
For single platform 2D, research the platforms standard development kit. For cross-platform 2D, find a library exposing an API supporting all available platforms[1]. For cross platform 3D, create a list of hardware you wish to support and find the maximum common OpenGL\GLES version and GLSL shader version.
This should give you an idea of the graphics API you will be working with and need to learn.
[1] http://www.libsdl.org/ is one such library if you go this route, I believe it's used in Angry Birds and Valve's Linux port of Steam.
This makes total sense, and I hadn't previously considered the effect of pricing on potential reviews. He was able to focus his audience (by raising the price), knowing that it would encourage more motivated gamers that were less likely to get frustrated by the mechanics. Thus avoiding the annoying 1-star reviews that can tank a rating.