Phoenix Spirit is a little Metroidvania game for iPhone and iPod Touch. It is a nice mix of Aquaria and Super Metroid (or Metroid Fusion if you’re way too young to call yourself a gamer)
Unitl May 28th the game is out at the introductory price of €0.79 ($0.99), so get it now! 🙂
As the average populace of TouchOS users that actually browse the AppStore, I rarely buy an App. The reasons are a lot: most of them are frankly stupid, not many are good past the free trial period, most aren’t good at all and, in some cases, there are free alternatives that are better. When I read that an average AppStore user spend a mere dollar every month on it and doesn’t use a game for more than one hour, I’m inclined to believe that because even an hardcore gamer like me follows that pattern.
Today I received an E-Mail from Free App A Day that, from a developer perspective, is disarming. FAAD was basically patting itself in the back because two of their sponsored apps are now #3 and #4 in the Appstore free top 100. Good but… These Apps were developed to make a profit! Being listed in the free apps list is not an achievement: it’s a defeat. The moment they will cease to be free, they will be back to nobody’s land once again. I can’t even consider it as effective advertising, since users can’t give money to the developers!
That’s the problem for the AppStore landscape: the only people to profit from apps are attention and marketing sharks, not developers. There’s not such an effective way to get noticed without investing on marketing or beign lucky: in fact it’s more than a year that we can’t read a real success story coming from developers or publishers on AppStore.
The thruth is that Apple is happy with the 1$/month/user achievement, even if it means that most developers can’t live with it: users will be happy for a shiny new freebie and Apple image will be stronger.
FAAD is happy to be able to place an app on the free top 10: someday someone will even hire them to market something that isn’t a giveaway!
Developers shouldn’t, because nobody is really interested on make them stay. Apple is educating them to be just another category of users: someone that will happilty ditch several grands in development tools, hardware and licenses and quietly fade away, leaving Apple with a couple of new apps to inflate their alarmingly opaque stats.
Apple did a very great result this trimester, and I’m pretty happy, too (read: stock trading was good).
The iTunes store performed pretty well, reaching $1Billion (gross profit). This allows me to disclose some confidential numbers without breaking any NDA from other analysts and consulting firms.
We’ll try to quantify the average income of an AppStore application to see if it’s convenient or not. It’s not a fair way to quantify things but at least helps to see things in perspective.
We start with a great simplification: music and other medias has no influence in the iTunes store. That’s not true, music and other medias are a big deal on iTunes, but let’s consider a very best case: everything they sell are Apps.
The AppStore has 91.000 active applications as now.
We can further simplify things, saying that every application can earn about $1.000.000.000 / 91.000 a year. That’s about $11.000 a year, rounded up. Those are gross incomes and still includes the 30% Apple takes for itself due to their uselesess priceless marketing. So you will end up with an average expectancy of circa $7.700 a year. That’s a gross profit, man!
Now we’ll think about how much time you have to invest to make an application.
In average, an application takes about a month to build for a professional, full-time staff of about 3 people. A game usually takes about 3 to 6 months for a team of the same size.
The estimate doesn’t count the approval waiting time, that can be very long. Since the approval process almost always asks you to fix stuff and resubmit, you should keep some the staff around. Outsourcing development to a sweatshop may seem smart but it’s a bad way to lose expertise and to candidate your app to be swamped by clones. A smarter way should be to start to develop another application. The smartest is to have at least three titles in the pipeline, for multiple platforms. It will help in case one of them busts or is lost in the quirks of Apple (or everyone else) approvals.
Another wrong assumption is that your app will be able to net $7.700 a year. AppStore doesn’t know honor the long tail rule typical of shareware and indie sales, it honors a special and very interesting sales model that sees spikes of about one or two days every time your app is updated. Chance and sheer luck play a fundamental role in this model. Being the last published title between a pause of several hours can be better of any paid advertisement! Be realist and consider that you can’t support every application you launch indefinitely. The approval is still time-consuming, so supporting an app will be costly. It’s up to you to invest in new titles or promote the older ones. Remember that newer titles can advertise older “hits”. Another nice way to keep your Apps fresh is to hire a marketing firm to keep the buzz going. They are not cheap, though. They come in the hundreds of thousands.
Believing that your app will stay afloat due to pure quality is naive, there’s simply too much noise to hope your app will be profitable because it’s good. Nobody will brave the backlog of AppStore to reach your App: chances are that he will find something similar before reaching your six-months old title. And it will be probably free!
Don’t be influenced by iPhone success stories. Despite the huge quantity of applications, individual success stories are almost always confined to the early days of AppStore. Just remember that, more than often, success stories are marketing stunts to attract customers and investors. Even when they happen in respectable newspapers and website. You aren’t iFart.
Be wary of the Apple (or other publishers) success: it’s not yours. Success stories of publishers with hundreds of titles under their belt aren’t necessarily encouraging for developers. That’s called shotgun strategy: produce and promote a lot of different stuff, since every copy sold is an earning and the development risks are taken by someone else (YOU, in this case). To be more clear: an application that sells only one copy is a catastrophe for you but it’s just another 30% gross income for Apple, strong of thousands of other titles. You can’t win this war.
My evaluation is, of course, purely instrumental to quantify how big the AppStore is and how difficult is for anyone to emerge. Despite music there’s no way a start-up can promote something sold only in AppStore outside AppStore. That’s why most indie games are coming to AppStore after they reached success in more accessible marketplaces, like Steam, WiiWare or Xbox Live and AppStore game developers pretty much stay and die inside the platform.
Just look at the weekly iPhone top tens: estabilished brands pushed by strong publishers sell well. But they’ll sell pretty much everywhere! 🙂
Since I’m involved (with different degrees of depths) in three XBLA titles and a couple of Community Games projects, I can’t fully comment the topic that surfaced on Slashdot a few days ago and that Team 17 backed up (intentionally or not). The rumors say that there are unwritten rules that seem to favor mainstream publishers against indie studios on the XBLA release schedule.
My official statement is… maybe. When some projects are put on hold for months after acceptance, you’ll start feeling a bit uncomfortable and you can start to lend an ear (or two) to conspiracy theorists.
On a more wider scale, I can safely assume, after supervising dozens of DLC projects that any DD platform has its own share of pain. AppStore is too crowded, so crowded that you need to pay TripleA marketing to see a real ROI (unless you are a University student and you think that six months of your free time are worth less than a couple of euros/day and that’s ok to let your expenses on your mom & dad), PSN is deserted, X360 is too valuable to publishers to let the cool kids play with it. Steam is.. well, Steam.
Most of them requires a lot of bureocracy and supervision (AppStore is the less paperwork-afflicted, even if their acceptance tests are jumpy at best), they often lock you in for several months (even for unreleased project), and they aren’t very clear on what to expect after launch (most of the time you can’t even say your words for pricing and release date).
Since the future lies on Web-OSes, I can’t really agree to the vision of several competing DD platforms. To be honest, I see more potential in the less tightly integrated web technologies. You can put your app on Facebook or Kongregate in a matter of days and its the community (call them customers if you prefer) that will determine your success, not corporate strategies.
Rockstar Gamer 