
My iOS Indie-Game Numbers - jazzychad
http://txt.jazzychad.net/gist/19a05ad4e7ef77072b44
======
diziet
User acquisition for mobile is just as important as developing an application.
There are companies with larger development teams AND many folks working on
user acquisition AND marketing budgets reaching a millions of dollars per
month, cross promotions, international reach, etc. As an indie developer, you
wear all hats, from development to marketing. It's simply not reliable to
launch a title and hope it takes off by itself or hope that sending emails to
journalists will be enough on acquisition. If you'd spent hundreds of hours on
development - figure out to spend just as much on acquisition. Doing paid
acquisition might not work as the CPI (cost per install( for installs is most
likely going to be much higher than an untuned app's LTV (lifetime Value).

I'd hacked together a 'mobile marketing' checklist before, it might help:
[https://sensortower.com/iphone-app-marketing](https://sensortower.com/iphone-
app-marketing)

~~~
jonaldomo
This is a great checklist!

------
prawn
Hi Chad, are you still playing all of your games yourself? I wonder if they
are "sticky" enough? Bit hard to tell from the screen captures - they don't
really stand out to me in the screenshots. But I like word games so will check
out Letters!

While you got the OK for the Letterpress UI from the creator, I wonder if
anyone else who's unaware of that would notice and think you're a clone and
ignore you?

I released my first ever iOS game* last week and it's a word game like yours.
Not sure if we (two man team) just got lucky, but overnight we hit millionth
game played and we've hit #1 word game in 30 countries at one point or
another. People are playing about 3-5 games per second at any given point of
the day which amazes me. The game took us four months to make - a month on the
core mechanic and the rest polishing.

I have a pipeline of game ideas I think are very good so definitely intend to
make more.

* Our game: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hexiled/id881274996?mt=8)

~~~
ronyeh
Hexiled looks great! The graphics definitely stand out (especially the space
theme). I'll play it tonight. Best of luck.

I do think the OP's apps look a little too much like Letterpress. If I had
seen them in the App Store, I would have dismissed them as a ripoff and have
never given them a chance...

Also, the font in the Letters app doesn't look as professional as Hexiled,
Letterpress, or SpellTower. Even in the app icon, the letter L's font weight
varies, and the 2 feels italicized in a weird way. See:
[http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/MV2SAQK.jpg)

~~~
prawn
It's funny you should say that as the font in Hexiled ended up being the very,
very default Arial Black and the icons are almost entirely based off Font
Awesome. I paid a lot of attention though to consistency where possible
(colours, use of caps, "voice" of the game, etc) but there's a lot of room for
improvement.

Thanks so much for the encouragement. We've had a great experience launching
the game. I'm on Twitter at @isaacforman if you have any feedback about
Hexiled.

~~~
ronyeh
Nothing wrong with default fonts... :-) I've used many an app that uses
nothing more than Helvetica (Neue).

Maybe it's just taste, but I found Letters' font to be too rounded. It's like
Arial Rounded, and reminds me of Comic Sans. Letterpress's font is also a
little rounded, but for some reason it looks more professional to me than
Letters' font.

------
josu
>In the end, I've had to chalk all these apps up to the "hobby" category as it
has been a money-losing proposition.

This is what Taleb calls an extremistan world, you can't apply a gaussian
distribution to this situation. It is difficult to find a mediocre filmmaker
that just makes enough money to get by, or a writer, or a painter... You
either become fairly succesful or you die without ever being able to "make
it".

You can't really tell when your next game will become the next Words with
friends, Angry Birds, Flappy Bird or Candy Crush. But if it does, you can go
from a "hobby" to a full time job even needing to hire a team.

~~~
ChrisClark
Yeah. I made $2,000 my first month on the Android Top New charts, dropped off
the charts after the 30 days and it's now about 1 sale every two days. You
either get pushed all the way up and make millions, or not much at all.

~~~
tomjen3
Reskin it and submit as a new game (effectively cloning yourself). If the
issue is that not enough people see your game then they won't know it is a
clone so who cares?

------
programminggeek
It doesn't matter if it's games or not games. These numbers ring basically
true to me.

I've done enough apps that the math doesn't work out to me anymore. Simply
put, you're selling candy bars, but without the disposable aspect, so your
customer LTV on a $1 app is $0.7. If you have a suite of 5 or 10 $1 apps, even
if you had a huge cross sell of 5 of those 10 apps, your LTV is 70% of $5...
$3.50.

In that scenario, to get paid $70,000, you need 20,000 customers to buy 50% of
your products each year.

Honestly, if you can get 20,000 to buy your app you've either hit a top list
or you are so good at marketing that it is nonsensical that you would be
selling $1 apps.

So yeah, for most developers the app store business isn't much of a business
at all. Maybe leveraging it to get interest in desktop or console apps where
the per unit price is closer to $20-100 would help.

Even then, I don't think you will see or hear many stores about app store
millionaires going forward. The money might be there, but it's too diluted to
make much of a dent.

Might as well buy a lottery ticket, it costs you less time and money with
basically the same outcome.

------
k-mcgrady
When you develop a game you're taking a big risk. There are so many ways
people can entertain themselves that your game has to be something really
special - and even that may not be enough. Secondly, ripping off the
letterpress UI (with or without permission) was a bad idea imo. If I saw the
screenshots my first thought would be. "this is a letterpress ripoff" and I
wouldn't have downloaded it.

If you create an app that solves a real problem or solves a problem better
than the current solutions you can do okay in the App Store. It's rare to do
great but you can do well enough. Games don't solve problems. They add to a
growing number of ways to entertain ourselves which includes movies, music,
tv, news, the internet - and all these are accessible on a mobile device.

P.S. Not trying to sound too negative about games but making money in
entertainment is difficult. People have so many options - many of which are
free - and they'll take the cheapest one.

~~~
jazzychad
I don't disagree with you, and partly I have always wanted to write a game or
two (I've published many other non-game apps, also w/o much financial
success), but I wanted to learn about the market... and I did!

~~~
protonfish
Yeah, you beat me there too. The best game I ever made is barely half finished
(no matter how much I work I do it seems to stay half finished.) Plus you got
a really great article about download numbers out of it.

------
Elizer0x0309
I'm surprised nobody is talking about the actual game!? It's really not
standing out. Another "Word" type game that barely innovates on the genre.

I guess people are so focused on marketing, user acquisition and not .... wait
for it.... PRODUCT!

~~~
kpao
This is mostly the feeling I get from reading those articles about lousy sale
on iOS. It has become too easy to write those types of simple games, what are
those guys expecting? It's a known fact that if you write such a game in a few
weeks, it will most likely not generate any money.

~~~
joeblau
Yeah, I wrote this game Orb
([http://joeblau.com/orb./](http://joeblau.com/orb./)) In 3 days for iOS and
Android. I didn't put any money into marketing it, but I did promote it. I
made my game to test the effectiveness of the Apple Store vs the Play Store vs
the Amazon store for an app with minimal publishing. I've definitely learned a
lot which I'll probably blog about soon.

------
_random_
I will be the negative guy here, down-vote if you will.

What kind of profit did you expect? As a game app consumer I only buy the very
best (original and/or polished) apps in their respective categories. E.g.
Leo's Fortune, FTL, Limbo, Icebreaker, Reaper would be very easy purchases for
me. You can see those games had _a lot_ of effort put into. In my subjective,
blatant and impolite opinion your apps could be more of the cause of the over-
saturation problem rather than victims. Saying that, I have nothing to show
myself so far :).

------
acconrad
This is scary - a prolific programmer acquires nearly 30,000 downloads and
can't even create a profit based on the price of his advertising. What hope is
there for newcomers other than to focus more on marketing than on the product
itself?

~~~
chime
Not all downloads are equal. There are far too many iOS games to make a
profit. Had he spent the same amount of time/effort/budget making a
productivity tool that catered to a niche market, he could have easily made a
net profit.

~~~
bsder
Except that productivity apps can and do run afoul of Apple and won't always
get approved.

Exactly why do I need a zillion apps to mount an SMB share on iOS and do
something with <insert specific file type>?

Answer: so iOS doesn't grow a decent music program to compete with iTunes.
Apple won't approve things that might compete with their own cash cows.

~~~
chipotle_coyote
Or because the set of people who want to mount an SMB share on iOS to get to
their music... ah, while "consists primarily of you" is overly snarky, I think
it's safe to say that it's _probably_ vanishingly small.

There are all sorts of annoyances about the iOS ecosystem and a good chunk of
them are driven by Apple's policies, but the notion that Apple cripples their
system with the explicit intent of making it difficult to compete with them is
hard to make a strong case for. Apple has their own direct competitor to
Pandora, but Pandora is still in the app store. As is Spotify, and SoundCloud,
and Beats (which was there before they were an Apple product), and
iHeartRadio, and and and. Oh, you say you meant non-streaming players? A lot
of people love Ecoute, but there's also Lagu and TuneShell and Listen and I'm
sure others I don't know of, which have all sorts of tricks up their sleeve.

tl;dr: kneejerking about Apple is easy and fun! But there's enough actual
things to kvetch about without "Apple hates their users, man" conspiracy
stuff.

------
kwhinnery
I would resist the urge to give too much credit to luck and marketing when it
comes to indie game success. Notable outliers like Bastion, Sword + Sworcery,
and FTL were all stunning executions. The FTL team did almost no marketing,
but released a product that spoke directly to the target market of desktop
gamers. Passionate people played it, liked it, and told others.

It's hard to achieve that level of success because it's hard to execute on
that level of excellence with a concept that resonates with an audience.

There are other paths to financial success, surely, where monied studios can
pump out derivative crap with in-app purchases and virtual goods. I guess the
talent there comes from being able to tune experiences designed for shallow
addiction, like food scientists creating the cheese dust for Doritos. But I
don't think that's the only path.

~~~
jazzychad
Just a slight correction: FTL had a very successful kickstarter which
generated tons of marketing and hype before launch -
[https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-
tha...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/64409699/ftl-faster-than-light)

Bastion was also published by Warner Brothers so it had some significant
weight behind it.

~~~
kwhinnery
Slight addendum for your slight (and correct) corrections :) Both games had
been in self-funded development a long time and had achieved some degree of
critical acclaim before Kickstarter and signing on with WB, respectively. I
might argue that their previous work had created the conditions for them to
earn those victories and reap the benefits.

For Bastion, it's probably good to be explicit that WB did not provide them
funding. The benefit to Supergiant was access to advertising and speeding
their way through the publishing process for Xbox Live Arcade. A significant
victory they sought out and earned, to be sure.

In the case of FTL, the success of the Kickstarter may have generated some
additional buzz because of how much they beat their goal. But the reason they
beat their goal was that their game had already been discovered and
appreciated (even in its early form) by a community of people passionate about
games. Without organized marketing on their part, aside from showing the game
to many of their colleagues.

~~~
seanflyon
In the case of FTL, the Kickstarter campaign was a marketing campaign and a
very effective one.

------
dustinlakin
Thanks for writing this up, it is always interesting and saddening to getting
a deeper look at indie development on the app store.

It seems like more simplistic puzzle games like these have potential to
completely blow up, but the market is also completely flooded with them. And I
have found that it can be difficult to find quality in the genre. I would
imagine that games that have heavier focus on art and polish can make a world
of difference. It seems it gets attention from blogs/review sites and more
probable for Apple to feature them.

Regardless, it is frustrating that your hard work that goes into these games
didn't get the attention they may have deserved. Keep up the great work and
hopefully we hear back from you soon about a monetarily successful game,
whether that be in the app store or elsewhere.

------
james_hague
The App Store is EXTREMELY clogged on the low-end. If it's your first game, if
you use "puzzle" to describe it, if it's a spin on Tetris or Threes or Snake
or match-3 or anything well-known, if someone could clone it in a
week...that's the low-end. Not only will you have trouble getting customers to
notice you, but you'll also fight just to get any kind of review.

What's also happening is that developers (myself included:
[http://appstore.com/daisypop](http://appstore.com/daisypop)) think "Wow, I
shouldn't have spent so much time on that; I need to make something simpler
and more rapidly so I have a better chance of turning a profit." This
accelerates the problem.

------
randall
The thing is I want to know about these fun new games. I feel like discovery
is the actual problem.

If I had a random app installed on my home screen every day and I could say
"more like this" or "this is horrible" I think it'd be cool. But it would have
to be passive.

~~~
kacy
Apple acquired one in 2012.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_(search_engine)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomp_\(search_engine\))

~~~
robterrell
Been expected app discovery to be a solved problem since the acquisition...
since the Chomp founders left Apple recently, I would love to hear what
happened.

------
apptoss
My iOS Indie-Nongame Numbers

First published app (an educational niche): $1,832 in first three months.
$1,360 in past 30 days.

Second published app (a semi-educational game-related app): $49 in first three
months. $6 in past 30 days.

Third published app (an educational niche): $360 in first three months. $385
in past 30 days.

I now have over a dozen apps. Three of those earn less than $100 a month and
I've all but abandoned them. Four more also earn less than $100 a month but
are part of suite of clones that address different niches. Together, the suite
earns over $200 a month now. My top 4 apps earn more like $100, $300, $400,
and $1400 a month now. Over the past year, those iOS apps earned me just over
$40,000. Not enough to live on alone but it's not a bad start.

~~~
afro88
I would be interested in more information regarding your marketing for these
apps, if you would be open to writing about it

~~~
apptoss
I barely market them except for a lot of ASO lessons, keywords, iterations on
the icons and screenshots. Got a few good media mentions but nothing I chased
down. All the app review blogs, forum posts, tweets, Facebook, Pinterest,
Reddit, etc. that I've spent so much time on? When I look at my PHG affiliate
sales stats now, I can see that they're a tiny fraction of sales.

The best marketing I do is cross-app links. So each app has a "more apps"
list. I get 80-140% conversion when people visit the app store from those
links. (140% because they purchase more than one app in the affiliate window
time.) I also have a free version of one app that's useful on it's own but
then steers people to purchase other apps with some in-house ads. (I don't run
ads for any other apps except mine.)

~~~
afro88
Nice, thanks for the summary

------
imkevinxu
I wonder if there could be a Kickstarter for indie iOS apps (no companies
allowed). Seems like an awful lot of time invested to design and build an app
without really knowing if it'll be popular or make money.

The "pre-funding" model would be able to give indie developers 1) early fan
base, 2) early revenue, 3) early validation instead of working in the dark

I remember reading how Threes was made and IIRC it was on the order of many
many months and redesigns before users saw/heard anything. But they hit the
lottery jackpot I guess

~~~
monkey_slap
I think there needs to be more thought and research put into validating that
your app idea is worthwhile. There have been traditional means of finding your
market and using surveys or engagement to get a good feeling of whether or not
people will actually want your product.

I make side-project apps all the time, but I'm aware that they are basically
just scratching some itch I had. If you go into it expecting to make the big-
bucks without doing market research and not having a marketing budget, you're
going to have a bad time.

------
asperous
Here's yesterday's blog post he was inspired by:

[http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-
look...](http://blog.jaredsinclair.com/post/93118460565/a-candid-look-at-
unreads-first-year)

Here's an infographic with the sales for a much larger indie game
[Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP]:

[http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-
infographic/](http://www.capybaragames.com/2013/07/a-sworcery-infographic/)

------
incision
_> 'I am not sure how to break into the App Store today except by winning the
lottery.'_

I'm not sure I follow.

It's a trio of side-projects, none of which have been available for even a
full year yet, entering into a 'total bloodbath' marketplace.

Is it typical to expect immediate success and profitability doing this?

Traditionally, 'breaking in' is something people might spend years if not
decades on and likely without the benefit of employment at a successful start-
up during the week.

Things take time and persevering for longer than a year while refining and/or
generating a fully original title would seem to be a good start.

------
m3mnoch
like others have said, absolutely, thank you for writing this up.

a few observations for my fellow hope-laden game developers.

tl;dr: anyone can use today's tools to make crappy, me-too games. you need to
make good games to succeed. to do that, you're going to need your 10,000 hours
of game programming (not the same as web programming), 10,000 hours of game
design (not just playing games), and 10,000 hours of all manner of art.

1) the marketplace is a "bloodbath"

while, yes, there are tons and tons of other apps out there, to be frank,
that's just fine for quality indie developers, because the majority of those
games all look like your apps. you cannot with any serious expectation, for
example, think to sell like hotcakes something like "wordgrid" or "letters". i
mean, the reason "tetra" got any traction at (i would bet as i haven't read
the reviews) all was for its multiplayer component.

you cannot expect to have sales numbers like incredible-art-having sworcery or
the incredible-paradigm-busting papers please with average-looking, average-
playing, average-genre games.

if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you
can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a professional.

just because you can't throw a rock without hitting an amazingly easy toolset
does not mean you'll build amazing games. it just means that everyone without
the talent to build such games has an equal chance to show off the fact they
can't build amazing games.

2) marketing is everything.

no. no it's not.

i'm part of the zynga/playdom facebook games generation where we instrumented,
measured, and then poured on users. we thought virality was king and users
were something you bought. push that k-factor through the roof!!!

come to find out, retention was king. this is why zynga is ... um ... having
issues. come to find out, you need a good game.

if you have a good game and that game is easy to share, you'll get users from
both channels -- app review sites and word of mouth -- without a lot of dough.
you'll grow more slowly, but give people a reason, the method, and the content
to share and they will.

that's not to say marketing isn't important -- it is. it's just not the most
important thing by far.

3) it's a lottery.

only for simplistic, easy-to-copy games. take the "threes vs. 2048" conflict
as an example:

awful 2048 grossing data:
[http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-
history/...](http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/840919914/rank-
history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-03-19&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f)

still substantial threes grossing data:
[http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-
history/...](http://www.appannie.com/apps/ios/app/779157948/rank-
history/#vtype=day&countries=US&start=2014-02-06&end=2014-07-29&device=iphone&view=grossing&lm=f)

if you make something that anyone with a keyboard can make, you'll need to
have an extrodinary amount of luck (2048 from ketchapp, flappy bird, etc.)
that looks like a lottery.

if you make something interesting that people want to play, you'll be just
fine. especially these days when everyone is looking to discover the next
minecraft or spelunky.

so, if you don't have the ability or team to make a good game, yes, you will
need the lottery. and every time i hear about "the lottery" that is the app
marketplace, all i can think of is nate silver's "the signal and the noise"
book.

if you think it takes a lottery to succeed on the app store, you have a
massive blindspot and that blindspot is: you don't have the ability -- yet --
to make quality games. you only think you do.

don't give up. keep going. you'll get there eventually.

~~~
exelius
> if you want to succeed, you must-must-must differentiate yourself. if you
> can't, yes -- it's a hobby. and, unfortunately no, you're not a
> professional.

This, in a nutshell, is the biggest problem with the solo game/app developer.
Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death
by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?

Marketing.

>> 2) marketing is everything.

> no. no it's not.

Unfortunately, it is. See, it doesn't matter how novel and awesome (aka
differentiated) your product is, you still have to sell it. In order to sell
the product, you have to have the _right_ product. This is why _traditional
marketing includes product development_ (look up the 5 Ps of marketing).
Marketing as a function can tell you where your users are and what they're
looking for. Then you design your product based on that, and find the optimal
way to sell that product to your target users. The pricing/promotion piece (or
what people usually think of as "marketing") comes at the end.

Promotion in and of itself is not a differentiation strategy unless you have
deep pockets. But promotion is absolutely required to launch a successful
product: I don't care how differentiated your product is, if your users don't
know about it, it might as well not exist at all.

> 3) it's a lottery.

It pretty much is a lottery at this point. Any game with a unique concept that
is doable by a single person is pretty much immediately copied 10 times over
by a Chinese/Indian sweatshop. Why develop your own new game when you can copy
someone else's? Throw 10 copies of the app up with slightly different graphics
in the hopes that one of them catches fire. Good luck trying to sue a foreign
company as an independent developer; even if you win they'll never pay up.

App development has become a portfolio game specifically to deal with the
randomness. If you view the costs for developing a product as encompassing
both SW development costs AND marketing costs, the marketing costs would
easily outstrip the development costs. Underperforming apps are
unceremoniously killed, and more marketing dollars pumped into the ones that
start succeeding.

It's hard to play that game as an indie developer, which is why we've seen so
many of these posts pop up recently. People were sold on this vision of an
egalitarian, meritocratic app economy and it's just not true. In a maturing
market like mobile gaming, the one who shouts the loudest commands the most
attention. For an indie dev with no capital, that can be really hard to do.

~~~
suby
>>Any concept simple enough for one person to implement has been done to death
by hundreds of other people already. So how do you differentiate?

I don't believe this is true. I think Paper's Please is the best recent
example -- we've had the technology to make this game for decades, and it's
never been done until now. I suspect there are quite a few concepts out there
that are able to be realized by solo developers that just haven't been thought
of yet.

In regard to the author, the type of games he made are a dime a dozen. At this
point they're unoriginal and uninspiring, and it shouldn't be a surprise that
they failed to catch on. I think marketing is extremely important, especially
in the app market, but you need to have a product that you can market. This is
the biggest problem.

edit: Also, naming. Naming is extremely important. Why would you name your
game Letters? Are you trying to make it hard to find on search engines? For
anyone making an app or game out there, spend a lot of time on picking a name.
Make sure you're the first result in google if someone types in
"your_game_name_here game". "Letters game" returns 208,000,000 results on
Google, it's not feasible for someone to find it that way, which just hinders
word of mouth. It's also hardly rememberable.

~~~
m3mnoch
indeed. you're totally correct on naming. that's been a pet peeve of mine for
a long time.

and, i would love for someone to bring out the counter example -- we've got
lots of examples of poorly done games with and without marketing that don't go
anywhere. does anyone have the counter example of a brilliant game with no
marketing going nowhere?

~~~
tomjen3
Eh few people would know that game, by definition.

My best example would be Chronology
([http://store.steampowered.com/app/269330/](http://store.steampowered.com/app/269330/))
which did have a bit of marketing that went absolutely nowhere. It is a pretty
good game though.

~~~
m3mnoch
hrm. i think you're right and that's a pretty good whack at it.

they've got a pretty solid environment artist, so it looks nice. concept is
interesting. great potential. sophomore-seeming execution. beyond that, the
mixed metacritic [1] reviews + the $10 price + the non-sharability are
probably why it's not going anywhere.

for what it's worth, my advice for the devs if they happen to see this: add in
multiplayer where you can play as the snail or the inventor. get some more
content in there even if you have to sell it as iap because two hours of
gameplay isn't enough for long-term sustainability. drop the price to between
$2.99 and $4.99 and make it an impulse buy.

[1]
[http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/chronology](http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/chronology)

------
plg
the game space is VERY crowded for mobile

if I were to think about mobile apps I would aim for some specialty market
segment, e.g. doctors, or lawyers, or construction, or weddings, etc. not
games. too crowded. too many voices.

------
funtober
My friend and I kicked around putting some effort into building an app a few
years back when people started publishing the "how to make money on the app
store" posts. So thank you for posting this.

My suggestion is to find a website with an established niche (outside of the
traditional app review websites) and audience who will promote your product
... and build something for that audience.

For example, my website has a ton of traffic in September and October. It's
new though, so we are still working out monetization. There's a couple games
in the market that would appeal to my visitors. I could probably give one a
significant bump. And not one of them has ever contacted me about a review,
provided a promo code, etc ... let alone a revenue share.

I didn't spend much time looking at Letters, but maybe it would do well on the
blog of a english teacher?

------
physcab
> This also means that 74 people out of 21,309 (0.3%) paid to unlock
> internationally compared to 112 out of 5521 (2%) that paid to unlock
> domestically.

I don't know how many of these are DAU (you didn't say), but these numbers are
not as bad as they might seem. 1%-5% is about industry average for % spenders
in games. Where you need to tune things is figure out who the spenders are and
raise your ROI. You state that you spent $700 to get $261 in revenue which is
about 37% ROI. Not good, but its a start atleast. Obviously you want to be
above 1. What I would do is invest a little in some analytics, figure out who
your spenders are and cohort them. Then see if you can reduce your spend,
become more targeted in your buying, while also increasing opportunities to
earn more revenue. Just my $0.02

------
passfree
$0.99 for an App is not sustainable pricing unless your product is mass-
marketed in order to make up the numbers. My company have several products in
iOS and Mac App Stores and none of them are near this price. In fact, one of
our products (Websecurify for iOS) is $16 which you may say is an expensive
app for iOS but this is a more realistic pricing. I doubt we would have
achieved any effect if we had priced it $0.99. Btw, the next version of our
app will probably cost twice as much because even $16 is barely sustainable.

I think it is time for iOS developers get their strategy checked up. I know a
lot of people want to get their app/game to a lot of people but unless you
have evidence that you app is reaching millions of people, it is not going to
work.

------
sjtgraham
The "Letters" numbers shock me, I follow Chad on Twitter, downloaded the game
and found it to be very addictive, especially the mechanic of solving the
daily word. Chad, I really think there is something there in Letters; it
definitely deserves some push.

~~~
jazzychad
Thanks. Yeah, I do too... I'm not sure how to push it. I just need a financier
:)

~~~
gojomo
As a non-expert reading this thread with some objective distance, the repeated
recommendations that stand out are the importance of a distinctive (&
searchable) name, and a graphical look/description that fights 'copycat'
impressions. (Otherwise, the game never even gets a look from players or
reviewers.) So maybe fresh eyes & new language/visual brainstorming would be
more relevant than a financier?

You've already got one possible alternate name – "The Letters Game" – in your
domain/twitter-handle, but I suspect something even more distinctive is
possible. You might also tweak the icon and color scheme to convey more
novelty compared to the famous category-leaders...

------
cix
Some people may say that we are in a Idiocracy, seeing games like Flappy bird
become trend setters while AAA titles are getting barely any downloads. Mobile
game developers need to understand the platform is more important than the
game. In that you develop what is best for the platform and demographic. Not
what you perceive as being high quality and pour millions of dollars and R&D.
The more you make the mobile game look like a job, regardless how difficult it
was to make, it will not be enjoyed because of such complexity. Although for
simple Apps that have little ways to differ from the crowd, then marketing
with some quirky difference to it seems to be the most effective.

------
blutoot
I feel that, in the long run, apps are meant to be user interface to something
bigger than being an all-encompassing entity for use cases outside of music,
gaming and a few other categories. In other words, the service being accessed
through an app will be equally if not more important compared to the app
itself. And I just don't see indie devs being able to manage and scale on both
fronts equally, yet. Maybe the more infrastructure as a code and web app
development get commoditized, the better will be the chances for indies to
shine/profit again? Until then, app is just gonna be a fancy (and in many
cases the only) endpoint for most sustainable business models.

------
yeureka
Making it on the App store with games is extremely hard. I have 3 friends who
each developed a mobile game and made no money, basically the games serve as
portfolio for future work. I don't think the quality is the issue with what my
friends produced:

[http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/](http://www.whitebat.co.uk/fruitfrenzy/)

[http://gamewhizzes.com/](http://gamewhizzes.com/)

[http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php](http://ludimate.com/x-rainbow/index.php)

Most likely marketing failures.

That being said, I am working on one myself and have all the hopes that any
indie has.

~~~
m3mnoch
marketing failures?

how would you differentiate them with marketing? "yet another color bubble
popper!" "yet another side-scrolling shooter where you kill the undead!" "yet
another match three with fruit!"

i'm not sure i agree with your assessment as to marketing failures. if you
said me-too-market-fit, however, i'd say you were on to something.

their level of polish is pretty nice, so they should step out of the lottery
and make a non-me-too quality game. i bet they would be pretty successful with
it. in fact, if they keep with it, i'd put money on it they'll eventually be
very successful.

~~~
yeureka
I hope you are right - that a fun new gameplay with an adequate level of
polish is enough for moderate success. I guess that deep down I also believe
the same and that is what makes me keep on going to finish my side project.

~~~
skeoh
Are you comfortable sharing any details on your side project? Stuff like this
interests me.

~~~
yeureka
It's a game I have been working on for some time. The gameplay is simple and
easy to copy and that is why I have been reluctant to show it to too many
people. I hope to finish it in the next 6 months but It could take longer
depending on how much spare time I have for it. I am planning on showing it to
the HN crowd first - the support is always pretty good here.

------
hipjiveguy
I think you'd have more success if you twist your games a wee bit, and try and
turn them educational. That way you'd be able to put them in the educational
category, where this guy who has similar word styles games as yours, is doing
very well:

[http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-
educatio...](http://blog.lescapadou.com/2013/12/my-experience-in-education-
apps-market.html?hn%209/9)

Also, I couldn't find your contact info on your blog - is it there somewhere?
You'd want press to be able to find it if so....

------
jbverschoor
Same for us..

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-
thoth/i...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/damian-filigree-book-
thoth/id397757153?mt=8) This one had promotion through free app of the day.
Lifetime revenue was around $700. Paid around $400 in ads

[https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-
free/id5770998...](https://itunes.apple.com/nl/app/snap-together-
free/id577099837?mt=8) Spent ca $1500 on ads, made $20 revenue.

~~~
lukeholder
maybe link to the english version of the app store page for the one you spent
$1500 on ads for.

------
mkirsche
I spent 6 month developing a game in my spare time:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-
turtles/id892249118?ls...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/polar-
turtles/id892249118?ls=1&mt=8)

3 weeks after the launch the game sold 6 copies and made 8,95$. I sent out 51
promo codes to various review sites but only 8 of them got redeemed.

I can already guess how impossible it is to enter the iOS gaming market.

------
peapicker
I couldn't find 'letters' by searching on 'letters' in the app store... too
many other things came up first. By search for your other games, then going to
letters I was able to try it.

Pretty fun, would be nice if it had some of the 'hip' words used these days,
"Selfie" etc

(edit, had some stuff in here about would be nice if there was an undo)

~~~
jazzychad
Yes, searching for "Letters" is not great. The irony is that if the app was
ranked highly it would show up much higher in the results, so it's a double-
edge sword.

Regarding "undoing" a letter selection, you can't, and that was intentional.
It simplifies the UI (you can however reset the whole word by trying to submit
an invalid word), and even if you could undo, the time you would spend doing
it would pretty much wreck your score for that round, so overall it's no good.
I know this frustrates some people, but after several weeks of playtesting and
hearing this complaint, after the first few rounds that complaint quickly
vanished, so I stuck with my decision.

~~~
peapicker
After playing for the last 20 minutes, I agree, undo would get in the way.

------
gojomo
I hate in-game ads. But if paired with an in-game ad-buyout option, they do
tend to remind me that, if I'm going to be playing the game repeatedly, I
should do the buy-out.

So even if ads earn a negligible amount... are they ever worth trying as a
mechanism to boost in-game purchases?

------
Aldo_MX
Thanks for sharing your numbers, they were an eye opener for me, and now I'll
need to plan a better strategy...

