I agree with headcaseGames. (BTW headcaseGames gave a talk at PAX and they do know what they are talking about). It seems like you have never made an iOS game so I do recommend you make a very simple game like tic tac toe or card match game by yourself or with a team. But make sure to complete it. I don't mean a prototype, I mean with all the levels, polish, saving, everything -- a game that you would release on the app store. This will give you an idea of what it takes to make a game and trust me, everrything you learn in making that simple game will be very useful when you make your next game. I run Enlevel Studio and finding a good programmer is very hard, I'm a programmer myself , unless you have alot of money. Expect to pay at least $40 an hour for a decent programmer. There are probably good programmers just coming into the iOS business, try to catch those guys to save money.
programming I have to agree with the developers here. Even though it might not sound positive , they are right. You should try different game engines and see which one you learn the quickest. When I mean quick Iam talking about 6 months to a year to make a decent game. You will be surprised how complex a simple game is to make. Alot of people I know who want to go into programming think oh I can make super mario bros or castlevania in 3-3 months after I learn programming. Hahaha to learn coding that deep will take a while. Soon I will start promoting my new game , which has been in development for a while. Its a bit more complex , and actually was being developed before the 1st game that we released. When I do start promoting , I will come here open a thread and break down step by step the process and length in which it took to make the game. That will give you personal insight into which you can decide if this is for you. Goodluck in game making!!!
I think a profit sharing structure is possible but very tough to implement. The going rate for a marketing person on the agency side is anywhere from $75-125/hour and that will vary depending on the geographic region. While a lot of the initial time will be attributed to the engineering/development side of things, a good chunk of time will also be spent on the planning, artwork and marketing. I wouldn't discount any of the other parts outside of development, and you'll need to get all departments working together to get the game out the door and into the masses successfully. And, on top of all that, you better have an entertaining and solid game (and be realistic about it).
It's very rare for profit sharing schemes to be successful. In all my years of making games, I've noticed that these teams flounder and never finish a product fully. Also, things tend to get very ugly when money starts to get involved. Usually what works is a programer and artist decide to work together - 50/50 split and no one else involved. But good luck if you go down this route
Being more of a marketing guy myself, I tend to agree with Big Albie and disagree with the others more. It can't be 50/50. For a few reason, because the coder ends of investing more time and more effort then the artist, although both are equally important. Second, whose doing the sound in that scenario? I guess making a crappy one track soundtrack isn't hard (most devs do that) but it lowers the strength of the game. Finally, marketing is so important! How many times have you've seen a dev posting that they have 5 sales, or 10 sales and they know everyone who bought the game. You can make the next Angry Birds, but if no one knows about it, then it's gonna bust. Most devs are just devs, they no nothing about marketing and they just assume that if they release their game in the AppStore, and make a thread on TA, it's going to be a hit. Tbh, I've never heard of any in the devs in this threads game, it's probably my own fault though.
i find 100$/h quite steep.. i don't know where thoose programmers come from, but definatly not from a "ordinary" game studio like ea, gameloft. i find that actualy quite shocking.. and i thought german labor is expensive.. i don't know a single game programmer (and i know alot) who even earn close of this number.. 16k a month?! impressive.. if that is what the average programmer in the game developmenet earn this is quite impressive.. let take a known example 180, can you disclose the developmenent cost of programming for this game? this game i personaly would consider a bit above an "entry" game.. but cost i would charge would be below 5k(us$) for a fixed price package on programming. what would did you come up there? just for comparsion sake what you guys charge in the us.
for Headcase, the company is split down the middle (Ben = programming, me = everything else). He provided the overall design for the 1st game (iFist), and I did the 2nd, 180 (although both were collaborated on). I found someone to donate a little help in the sound FX/music dep't (promised to give her some $$ if we actually made any, and bought her plenty of beers & chickenwings in the meantime ) As you probably know my main job since the development ended ages ago has been marketing and promotion, which has been a monster to deal with. Anyway Ben and I have got a 50/50 profit split which seems fair enough (especially since I have done the lion's share of the work in this venture, whereas the coding time amounted to a couple of months) We could have probably outsourced the programming for 180 for something "reasonable" (around the number you suggested) but I haven't any experience in that field so far, and it's always made sense in my case to "go with someone you know," in the future I would consider otherwise however. I'll always want to have a programmer that I am partnered with, though.. Talking things over during the process, we decided that the game could be built from the groun-up code-wise by someone who knew what they were doing in about 8 weeks fulltime (probably half of that if they were more senior) and then, probably using an existing engine (cocos2D was our base). At some point we considered our game, if we chose to sell it to some company, would be worth maybe about $30k between the art/coding time invested at that point. Does that answer your question? __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Get 180 for FREE until 2011! - Contest FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
8 weeks full time to get a match 3 game done codewise sounds a bit excessive, but I won't dispute it. You have way more experience than me in that. However on the $30k value... My job is in corporate finance and valuating businesses is a big part of that, so I can say with pretty good authority that VERY FEW iphone games are worth anywhere near that upfront (and almost none of them are 2D). Not even Angry Birds would have been worth that much before release. Assets are not valued on how much they cost to make, but on the expected cash flows they'll be able to generate in the future. I've seen you speak many times about how the gold rush is over, so did you really expect 180 to be generating over that much cash? Given the extreme risk on an iphone game (how many of them are flops) I would think investors would demand a return on equity of at least 50%. So a game like 180 would need to generate on average about 65k of sales (you have to take into account Apple's cut) and I'm not even counting marketing and taxes which should push the number even higher. Not many games can do those numbers, much less in the puzzle field, no matter how good they may be. Sorry, but I don't think the actual game was worth anywhere near that. I get that the opportunity cost of your time is much higher, but once you chose to spend it on developing the game, it's pretty much a sunk cost and not relevant to the price anymore. That's why I can tell you right now, if you're paying someone $100 an hour to develop iOS games, you're doing it wrong. There's pretty much no way you're gonna recoup that investment. You have to keep costs down and if that means outsourcing overseas, using premade engines or whatever, then so be it.
As you'd expect, there's a lot more to this story than just "we set out to make a game and expected X amount of dollars back." I knew long before 180's release that this was absolutely a money-losing proposition, but I was more concerned in what it could get me in the longer term than how much money I could get upfront. Anyway I don't wanna derail this thread going on about the politics of my own project too much, so you are invited to email me about it personally if you like, or otherwise continue discussion in the 180 thread. I have no qualms about publicly discussing any of the stuff that went on behind-the-scenes. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Get 180 for FREE until 2011! - Contest FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
Actually I was already aware of that having read the entire ~200 pages of your thread before releasing my game (and cursing the 10 posts a page format on TA). For this thread I just wanted to make clear the distinction between something's COST and WORTH (and price for that matter). Those are all very different things. If you were to say your game cost 30k to make factoring the cost of your time, then that's perfectly valid. However I think it's very dangerous to say the game is WORTH that much and to them imply it could have been sold for that PRICE (what something is worth and its price are often very different). Just like you continuously point out how hard it is to make money in the store, making money by selling finished games to publishers seems even harder and not something a new team should count on IMO. I might take you up on your offer though. I'm always interested to learn more about the market.
Depends what your talking about... A programmer in full time employment I doubt would be on $100 per hour. But for freelancers $100 is reasonable as they are only working when you actually need them... If all I need is 2 days of AI work doing I'd much rather pay $2000 for a freelancer SPECIALIST AI coder to do a solid/ quality job, than pay an in-house programmer who will do a lesser job (due to not being specialized in the area) and take twice as long as a result... Not to mention then having to pay that in-house programmer when I happen to have nothing for him to do... I've switched over my entire business model to utilizing freelances as it's far more appealing business wise... I know exactally how much things are costing and I'm not burning profit in between projects.
well what you say is different.. a specialist in ai or any other area is something different.. but a generic ios programmer for an average of 100$/h ... this average joe you need for a couple weeks on/off todo your stuff.. and if a simple game ends up with 10k+ on the programming side you need to have a tough time getting that money back from the appstore. you don't pay someone 100$/h to make some simple menues or implement general logics. thats the same here.. a network of freelancers.. having employees just kills your flexibility as the contracs vary alot from size and needed manpower.
wowwww.. I am glad someone read all of my rambling and found it useful Agreed. That is a clear distinction (worth vs price a project could be sold at), and I apologize for glazing over it/not being very clear. I'll kind of blame that one on our inexperience at that point (and still being new to this market when we had such discussions). Of course, a lot of things were different a year and a half ago, in general.. I do think that seeking a publisher/partner is something many devs should do, more and more these days.. and it is still something I won't rule out myself, after all that has happened. As with anything, it is something that must be treated delicately as it truly is another can of worms to open, but one that can be beneficial for all parties concerned if you know what you are doing and dealing with the "right" people. At the very least, it involves not jumping on the first "sounds too good to be true" offer, which many of us end up doing anyway.. Note that I am not saying this is the route for everyone, but at least examine the options and see what makes the most sense. If you are a developer and hate posting in forums/"heavily" marketing and promoting your own game by lots of means, you might wanna seek someone to help you handle that __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Get 180! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
The main problem is that people thinks that a game can be made with 500$ and a quality game with 2k$ and maybe for a tetris clone this will be possible, but for any "normal" game you need at least 10k$ to hire a programmer and around 5k$ more for the 3d artist. Of course you need to hire someone for the music/sound effects. To give you an idea I'm gonna share some numbers from the last game I was hired "iBeach". The game tooks 3 months to complete it, so 6k$ for my pocket and the artist charged 4k$ more for his work, I don't know how much they pay for the music/sounds, but this little company made this game for no less than 12k$. So there's no cheap games out there, you can't expect a normal programmer working one month for less than 2k$ and I saw a lot of stupid job offers on odesk trying to hire someone to make a 3 months game for 2k$ or even lower, 2k$ including assets......
mannnn $16,000 dollars in a month, just for 1 programmer making an iPhone game :/? i have NOTHING to do with game development but... most of the games in the appstore dont even sell that much, do they? I mean the prices on the Appstore are just to low with games mostly on the 99c side of the spectrum.
That makes no sense. One, because it falls under marketing. Second, the website needs to be good. Third, because you would literally just be pressing a few buttons, then get paid?
I remember reading one time that the average revenue for an app was somewhere along $700 in its lifetime. That's probably much lower now.
I'd be surprised if it was half of that, now! Anyway without sounding exceptionally bitter, there's still a lot of money to be made in this market, it just requires a lot of readjusting of one's expectations and methods. I'll stress what I mentioned earlier in this thread, find someone (and pay well) to market your game properly, and make sure that you have a quality product up-front to sell. __________________ twitter - HeadcaseGames.com Puzzling has Evolved - Get 180! FreeAppTracker.com Win ANY app you want, daily!
