Agreed, you can't get too excited about it. It's discouraging when you see 100 buyers and 1000 pirates playing your game, but they weren't potential customers. And if jailbreakers are something like 2% of all phones then they're a small market anyway - 2% of your potential customers. Other games are selling thousands a day in spite of piracy - you need to figure out how to be like them and ignore the pirates.
yup, yup, yup.. you guys are all correct in what you say. i guess my bigger issue has to do with the ease of piracy in general, and the fact that it is so readily accessible - much more now than it had ever been (at least when it requires a modicum of effort then the barrier to entry is a little higher). I am not so concerned with it now, as I am down the road- anyway, the only way I can think to fight it is to put as polished/quality a piece of software out there as possible, and hope to appeal to enough of the paying masses with it - getting a good name amongst the pirates is a fair enough side-effect if it is gonna be a no-sale otherwise, anyway.
Maybe I'm a big minority here, but I think as a smaller indy dev, piracy would totally help my game get more popular. There's millions of iphones out there, and only a small fraction are jailbroken. If people like playing my game, that's wonderful, and the more people play it and like playing it and talk about it (no matter how the got it), the more of those millions of iphone users will hear about it and decide to buy it. Same with music. If it weren't for indie bands and musicians giving away their music for free on myspace, on their websites, and even on bittorrent, no one would hear about them and they wouldn't be nearly as successful as they are now. If everyone had to actually buy their copy of Windows, I don't think there'd be nearly as many Windows users out there, and Microsoft would have a lower market share and suffer in sales for their products. Or maybe I'm just crazy...
Micah, you hit the nail on the head my friend. Headcase, I understand entirely what you're saying about piracy. I understand paying bills and eating ramen noodles for an existence. The reality though, as Micah points out, is that piracy is just another form of marketing, at least, for small Indie games. There will always be those who steal and want and never give back, and you can't get yourself upset because of their actions. They represent a minority, and had no intention of giving you anything. The least you can do is rest assured that they're showing the game to their friends. If a game gets popular, that's the ticket to success.
Wow. 80k lines of code is a lot. I can see why the development time took you guys 9 mths. For us, we started out with a really proof of concept game that took us 2mths to develop. We've been doing updates since then. I see that you have a huge crew working for the studio, is everyone full time?
I know, we were sort of "happy" to see crackers making the effort to post the cracked version of our game on torrents/sites.
(I'm going to write a bit longer reply. Before I write too much, I must stress that anything I write here is just one man's opinion. I try best not to say something and act as though it's fact even though it's just an opinion, so take the things I say that are good and go with them, and the rest, ignore me, take it with a grain of salt, I'm a crazy coder guy like that. I admit up front that I'm probably wrong on most I say, but not everything I say.). Well, as far as iRis goes, we wanted to push the technological limit of the Indie world, and, well, with Doom Resurrection, GI Joe, and half another set of highly polished games from high class studios, we got too much into the technological warfare game. Part of being in business is understanding business is a battlefield, and if Supreme Commander and Warcraft III taught me anything it is that Indies can't be carrier whores. Release quick, release often, have a product that sells within 5 seconds of it playing (e.g. iBeer, iFart, etc.). You have to go the horde route to win the battle. You have to take on changes away from the status-quo and the risks big companies won't take. And you have to do your marketing homework. To the author who wrote iNsane, this can't be stressed enough (I have to agree with one of the other postters: simon-says is not a viable selling point these days). You have to be very very different, you have to be truly unique, you can't get stuck in the same old with a slightly different face. Remember, a video game is just a means to generate an experience. This is game design 101. You design the experience first, then the game comes as the vehicle to deliver that experience. If you don't start a game by building the experience, in terms of emotion and feeling that you want to generate, well, you won't have a basis to build the rest of the game up around. And absolutely that is harder said than done. That's the difference though between success and failure. And yeah, 80,000 is a lot of lines. Seriously. A lot of stuff going on there. We actually had made an engine for it and will re-use in a next title, which is on the order of 56k lines. We wanted to take that and put it out there as LGPL, and then post a technical manual on Lulu.com for 50$ as a means for income (so basically, the Doxygen manual would be online, but you'd have to pay for the technical documentation). Like Carmack, I don't want to get into the middleware business either, but if I can help make other developers realize their dreams, all the better for the gamer. Of course, I am the kind who hates C++, having spent several years coding C++ professionally. As far as full time, I know I worked full time for the past 9 months. Living off savings basically. I was lucky to find an excellent artist who was Indie as well, out on Blender forums. Also, OCRemix forums lead me to some peeps that knew how to really arrange music. All in all, I have several people I work with, and each one of them have friends and people we can market our stuff to. Add in that the primary motivational factor is profit sharing, well, everybody pitches in to make the best out of what we got. Like near every article ever posted in Game Developer magazine, in the post mordem section, team is #1 when it comes to these things. I am a programmer and a producer, a team manager, but I am not an artist, am not a musician, and am not a lot of things. People who have the experience and understand what needs done, and are willing to pitch in, well, that's the ticket. You can't handle everything just by yourself. You need help. It is never a negative thing to declare that you're only human. We had gone through actually a few different people in different spots, but I'm not the kind of manager to lightly take those who aren't producing. But, I'm also the kind of manager who understands one needs to earn the respect of those that work with me, and so I think I've just simply been blessed with strong work-ethic & talented individuals. It takes an insane amount of maturity to work through all the crap that goes on, but, you do it because everybody loves the work we're involved with. Of course, there will always be a part of every developer that says "They could have bought my game and I would have had much more money to develop further games with". But, you always have to keep in mind, they never had intended to give you a dime to begin with. It's not a lost sale, it is a no-sale, and nothing you say or do is going to change that. That's why I, and RPNi, always subscribe to the belief that while IP holders have a right to protect their IP, you can't get too crazy doing so. There is always going to be somebody out there who steals everything they have, and, well, they aren't going to give you money to begin with, so no use in making them part of your target demographic. Plus, if you pirate Indie games, that's a hell of a lot worse than pirating mega corporation games. Shunnnnnnnn... SHUNNNNNNnnnnn.....nnnnn.... At any rate, thanks for listening to me dribble on. Carry on now. =)
Wow, that's a really good and heartfelt post Johannes! I don't want to say too much until my game is released, but it's been quite a journey so far. And although there have been some really rough times during development, and I have no idea how sales will go, I'm glad I went through the process. The experience was well worth the price of admission so to speak.
I lost my job in 2009 02,I spent two month to think what to do in the future,I love making game,and app store seemed to be a such wonderful place,then I found my partner,started shark's treasure in 4.1, upload in 7.16,ready for sales in 8.1,and frist day,only 25,within a week, just down to 5. I was dreaming to earn enough money to open my own game company,but even been featureed in what we are playing,in 8.16,till now my game totally 1300+sales.and don't know what will happen when it fade out of featured page. so I have to find a day job,and keep making game a part time work. but I think I will continue to do it,and wish someday,my dream will coming true. also,I learned a lot from shark's treature's pormotion,the frist look is so importent,just like some friend said above,so my secend project,I hired someone really good to do the art work,you can find it here.hope this time,will give user a good impression。（hope I can earn enough to cover the cost) anyway,if you want to this,do it in your spare time，just don't quit your job,it's too risky. good lucky everyone.
There is something I see that hasn't really been brought up and it deals with a few of the companies and games I have seen posted in here (mostly on the first page). I am saying this purely as a consumer because that's all I am. I think some of you developers needs to be able to take a step back and look at your game from the eyes of a consumer. I don't mean to single out anyone this is just me picking one at random. But we will take Art Thief by Digital White Knight games (karlth). When I opened your website from your link in your signature there was this kind of immediate eye roll that went on in the back of my head. It looks very simple and amateur. There is no style, there is no flair, there is nothing to make the games look fun, or even tell you what they are. The little pictures for them look pretty poor and if I wasn't looking to see some of the apps the people here were making I probably would have stopped there. But I clicked through to Art Thief. Once in the app store window of the game I sadly again had an eye roll. The Icon looks too plain and simple and makes the game look lifeless, it's not selling a thing and barely could even relate to the theme of the game. If you showed it alone to someone they might think it was a game about paintings or an art collector who knows. I went over to the Description and the very first line gave me this mixed gag and laugh. I understand you might be very proud of your work, that's fine, but it's not "the Smoothest graphics on the iPhone yet!", it's just not. The rest of the description isn't much better, it doesn't really tell me that much of what to expect, instead it's bulletpoints that should be commonplace in a game like "30 frames per second" and "smooth screen scrolling". It looks like you are just reaching for things to say. And then the final part of course is the pictures. Again the art comes into question. The characters looks good enough, but the background and other objects just look bad. The repeating background the boring looking controls, the floating doors, you get the point. By now I would have left the page ages ago, but I decided to then look at the price. 3.99! I'm sorry if you don't want admit this to yourself but on the app store that is considered a premium considering the alternatives people could get with their 4 dollars. You can blame other devs for being cheap and try and fight it, but it's not going to help your situation. You need to know and understand your market. I know this sounds like a lot of bashing but it's what I see when I go to look at your games and many many many many many others. If you were shopping the app store and you stumbled across that seeing that would you plop down 4 dollars for it? That's the point of this whole post. Would you honestly plop down 4 dollars when you saw that on the app store? I'm not going to, unless I am TOFTT. You can tell yourself "I would because I know it's worth it!" And yes, it might be worth every penny and then more. The reviews are pretty good and there could be a ton of work put into it and it could be the greatest game on the app store. But I and many others on the app store will never know because we are shallow and can't really see the value in it from what you show us. That's the problem I see, again not only with Art Thief but with so many indie apps. Not all hope is lost though. There are tons of Indie apps that are still doing great even in the face of the big name games. Just look at the top 100. Heck, Geared is #1, Alive-4-ever is #3 and Sheep Launcher #7. Those are pretty good numbers when you have contenders like a fully licensed NFL game, Bejeweled and more in the mix. It's about making your game easily understandable at first glance, priced right, and visually appealing. Again, this isn't an attack on your game personally karlth so I apologize if I somehow upset you. That was not my goal or point. It was ment to be an honest critique of the work you, and so many others, are doing from the consumers view point.
well,this website is really great. got a lot of tips and… i saw, that we are not alone with low downloads. in the moment we have 1–3 downloads a day, and meanwhile i think, that`s not too bad for our little special game. of course, it`s too less to pay anything. i think we spend much more money for beer while develope this game that we will get for it. ^^ but on the contrary to much others we didn`t have to earn money with our game. we both (the progger and me) have jobs and we make this stuff for the iphone for fun. oh, i would like to earn enough money with this, so we can spent more time into gamedevelopement, but this isn`t what we expected. for the others like fwish, it`s very hard and i`m really sorry, that they couldn`t earn enough money of there work. i don`t think, the situation will be better in the future, it will be getting harder for independent devs. but the iphone platform is really nice. it`s fun to dev games for it. but it`s no fun, if you want to earn money for your work. the prices are just too low. just have a look on some of the 0,99 games. month of hard work. and if you haven`t the luck of a hit, you maybe will have 2000–3000 downloads. on the other side. if nobody wants your game, nobody buy it. that`s capitalism. sure, marketing can push your game, but this won`t catapult you into incredible heights. ehm, what do i try to say? iphone dev, fun, but hard earned money. ok, back to work. edit: please regard, that english isn`t my nativ speak, so anything sound weird, it`s just because of my bad english.
Rule 1 of marketing, consumers only see things from a "what's in it for me" perspective (aka they only listen to WII-FM). It's not the developer who has to understand the branding or imagery, it has to be the consumer. Rule 2 of marketing, you have 2-5 seconds to pitch your idea. Within that time frame, if you can't sell your product, you've failed. See above two rules. Rule 3 of marketing, you have to finalize the deal with some sort of flair that will capture the consumer and ensure them that their money is being well spent. There is a lot of psychology at play here. A lot of developers do not understand marketing principles. They aren't trained that way. It's not the it's understandable at first glance, but that it's immediately obvious what's-in-it-for-you, and it catches your eye within the first 2-5 seconds. Priced right is just an offshoot of the psychological marketing the App Store is known for. And it's not that it's visually appealing, but finalizes the deal in a way that satisfies your expectations in a product. Nonsense, you've made an excellent post, I just translated it into marketing talk. =) So Tesio, now, let's try another experiment: go here: http://www.roguepirateninja.com/games/iris and give the same review.
This is turning into a most interesting topic. I hardly dare to ask, but Tesio, as a consumer, could you also review Lunarcy? I'm really looking forward to your point of view.
Rule 4 of marketing: No amount of marketing can make a poor product sell well, but no amount of marketing will make a good product not sell at all. Guten tag, herr Nick. Deutsche ist nicht meine Muttersprache, aber es ist sehr gut deine hailz auf Deutschland. =)
I stumbled across this thread and thought that as a small business owner I would share my insights. I am not a game developer but many of the same issues that you guys seem to be struggling with I have and continue to encounter in our business as well. Presentation is critical, sure, and it looks like a lot of the devs on here are struggling with that. But I would be surprised if you weren't. There is a reason that a lot of people's career's are centered on marketing, and even then many of them are not successful. It is difficult to do correctly and even more difficult to do effectively. You need to think about your customer and what their needs, wants, and motivators are. We are all guilty of pitching our ideas or products based on what WE think is unique or desirable about it. But often times we color it with our own perspective and knowledge. For instance, a game was referenced that highlighted "30 frames per second". This may be a key selling point for you because of the time and effort spent developing an engine that can produce 30 fps, but to a customer it is virtually meaningless. Many people when selling their product try to hype the things it does right, i.e. "smooth animation" or "tight controls". The thing is, those are an expectation that the customer already has. If you went to buy a car and the salesman said "it drives" or "it steers well" would you be impressed? Of course not, you expect that it already does that. This is where being able to read the market and really understand what is expected and what is unique really comes into play. Which leads to the second point, how well do you know your competition and market? Many of the indie games out there are very similar and use standard conventions. How many tower defense games are out right now? How many developers are trying to claw their way to the top of that heap? What about puzzle games, retro games, etc? Are you making the games YOU want to make, or the games the market is looking for? Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want to do, but if you are wanting this to be a successful business, this is something you need to be honest with yourself about. We ran into this same problem about a year ago. We had always prided ourselves on the quality of our work, but in recent years with the widespread acceptance of technology it became more about "having it now" then getting it right. As a business we had to decide whether we were going to retool and retrain to meet this change in demand, or sacrifice market share to do what we wanted. Ultimately, we are a business that's primary purpose is to make money. Sure we want to be able to help others, our community, etc., but our primary concern was profit. The more we stuck to what WE wanted to do, the less and less market share we would have until eventually we had too little to stay in business. There are plenty of things that we do because we enjoy it. I am a musician but have never made a dime off of playing music although I've invested thousands in instruments, equipment, lessons, etc. I'm restoring a classic car that has taken years and still isn't done, let alone all of the cost of materials. Are there people that make money at both of these? Absolutely. There are plenty of people that are professional musicians or own auto shops. I may have a passion for it, and maybe even a high level of skill (depending on who you ask), but I don't have the level of ability to make it into a career or viable business. I'm ok with that because it means that I get to do what I want all of the time. I don't have customers demanding that I meet their expectations on what something should look like or do or sound. I am my own customer when it comes to those things. So ask yourselves, are making the games that you want to play or that the masses want to play? If you are doing what you want to do but need to sell the end product in order to afford to be able to make it, then odds are you're going to end up disappointed. I've tried to launch other ventures based on what I wanted and inevitably all of them failed. The ones where I was willing to set aside my own opinion and listen to the demands of the market, I have generally succeeded. Sometimes you're just not able to meet the demands of the market with the resources you have, and that's ok. We've gotten out of certain lines of business because we simply couldn't compete and looked for more unique opportunities. I know that companies like Gameloft are bad for other devs, but they're good for consumers in much the same way that companies like Walmart are. As a small business, I could try to compete with those giant corporations or I can look to innovate and respond to customers in a way that they can't. Even in a market as large as the App Store, there is room for quality, creativity and ingenuity. Let that show through in your games and your marketing and you will be in a much better position to succeed. I'd be more than happy to offer suggestions to anyone on their itunes page, websites, etc. Like I said, I'm not a game developer, just a consumer, but I've been through my fair share of trying to get my business noticed in an ever-increasing sea of competition. Hopefully you can take from my ramblings some of the lessons I've learned over the years and apply them to your own projects. Best of luck to all of you.
I think you just hit the nail on the head here with enough force to send a few people into tears. I think your post nails the points down. When we went and designed iRis, we built it for the market. I had a whole slew of other games that _I_ thought were cooler, but we settled into something that we thought had more market potential, even though _I_ personally had a taste for a different genre. Sadly, a lot of new developers don't get that. It's the exact same type of thing you see at game developer clubs in colleges: everybody wants to build a game that they want to play, rebuild a game that they liked to play, etc., but never about what the _market_ would like to play. I'd be interested in hearing you out, send me a PM.
First off, joezero, I'm impressed with the elaborate, but very clear reply. Secondly, I fully agree with you. I myself did a marketing study, dedicated to "new" media. Your post is in a nutshell marketing 101. And I mean that in a positive way. Most issues you address should be a no-brainer and ignoring them are indeed a key factor in "failure" of a LOT of businesses. The examples that are repeated in this thread shouldn't be an interpretationable issue, but should be a given. Actually, I believe that for the most of us developers, this is not the problem. So, I would like to add to your post a couple of more insights: To begin, I believe there's a difference between marketing for the masses and marketing for a niche. A game or app (or any other business for that matter) can appeal to a very specific target audience without even being close on the verge of losing viability. Stress what makes your product unique. (unique selling points baby! ) Your target audience then picks up the message you send, see what you have to offer and buy the product. On the other hand, products for the masses have to be easy going, easy to understand in order to appeal to as much cunsumers as possible. Either way from a business perspective is fine. The problem with the App Store in my view is that "apps for the masses" flood the market. Large software houses litterly overkilled the store, leaving little to no room for niche products. I'm talking extremes here, because a lot of app aren't even that specifically targeted. But due to the amount of overkill even the "lesser" mainstream apps tend to get ignored. I believe that's the problem. Without trying to look like a self-promoting developer , we believe that our game agrees with the laws of marketing. Nevertheless, it doesn't breathe "EA" "Gameloft" "ngmoco" or whatnot, so chances of it being picked up by our target audience (gamers who like tough reto games) are low. EDIT: I'd like to add to this post that marketing for a niche audience in stead of the masses, is generally spoken a wiser thing to do. You find yourself in a harder (and way more expensive) position to reach out to a large public. Targeting a specific audience is easier and makes your product a stronger appeal to them. Due to the nature of the App Store right now, this "law" is broken. That's why a lot of developers - like us - suffer.
I actually disagree. I've seen countless examples of Apps, as I was surfing the App Store, that simply don't grab my attention. Either through poor icon design, poor descriptions that don't immediately interest me, screenshots that failed to seal the deal, etc. These are all things that should be marketing 101, and for the 40,000+ apps in the App Store, a lot of them, at least just in my opinion, are failing badly in that regard. Plus, some games are just not that cool looking. Edit: In other words, Indie is one thing, but amateur is completely different. This is a key point though. Part of being in Indie is that, unlike mega corporation XYZ, Indies can take greater risk in attacking unexplored markets. Big corporations like to repeat and reuse the same game ideas because they know they will make them money. If an Indie comes along and finds wealth, you better bet the bigger corporations are going to flood in and suck every penny out that they can. The bad thing is that some niche markets have little to offer. Absolutely stress it, but make sure it is something that consumers can understand. Maybe the above App is the only App that has smooth side-scrolling, and in that case it would be unique, but the points you have to make have to be custom tailored to the audience. Agreed. Absoutely agreed. This has more to do with name recognition and branding, which is a selling point on itself. It's why the poorly adapted Tetris version on the App Store can _STILL_ be in the top 10, even though I could pick out easily a 100 different Apps that are a lot better. But, if a niche market hasn't much sales potential... well, that's the market. Scary stuff, truly. *sigh* edit: sp
I think we both agree with each other. There are A LOT of games that are fundamentally broken. That's what I meant with "Most issues you address should be a no-brainer and ignoring them are indeed a key factor in "failure" of a LOT of businesses. The examples that are repeated in this thread shouldn't be an interpretationable issue, but should be a given." I don't want to sound crude, but a poorly designed game without a strong message is bound to fail. For every 3 quality apps, there are 100 crappy ones, I give you that. The reality though is that those 3 quality apps (with good design, strong USP's etc...) have a frikkin hard time reaching out to their target. Then, I don't think that a niche market has a bad sales potential. On the contrary, as I stated above, niche products are generally spoken a wiser business model. I think that niche products in the App Store have bad sales potential because the current market is broken. And yes, very scary stuff. It hits me in my marketing heart.
This is where I think we're seeing things a bit differently. Before I say more, just need to make sure I say that I could be entirely wrong, so, this is just one person's opinion. Take it for what it is. I very respectfully am not in any way trying to start a flame war of any kind. I think there are some niche markets that have sales potential, but I think there are also some that have little or no sales potential. I agree that generally Indie should be about attacking those niches, because that's where there is money left to be sucked in, but a niche by and of itself does not immediately, again just IMO, imply sales potential. The App Store is crowded and has too many people just screaming for attention. I agree that for every 3 quality apps there are 100 crappy ones, but even if those 3 quality apps aren't seeing the light of day, that isn't necessarily a fault of the market, but of lack of marketing. Don't get me wrong, Apple is not going to do _ANYTHING_ to help Indies out. They are there for the money, and if the big names are brining it in, the royalties are golden for them. The better Apple can squash Indies out and bring in Id, EA, etc. the better off for Apple's profits. But seriously, to say it's Apple's fault is a bit, well, not accurate. Apple is doing great. We Indies are just being, as usual, pushed out of visible shelf space by products with better name recognition, branding, etc. The aspect of Indie game development has always and will always be this way. You have to build a name up around yourself, brand yourself, market yourself, and get the word out there. Failure to do so is not a failure of the market, but simply of lack of resources to the means to market a product. Edit: And this is of course considering that you have a "good" product. "Good" being defined very loosely. Besides, I played Lunarcy a bit more and getting the hang of it. It is indeed a niche game for the hard-game-loving arcade folk out there, but, just like iRis will do, won't get the needed exposure unless it is posted on every online forum known to man, show up on adverts in google, etc etc etc (and even then, consider a CTR of over 1% damn decent). Best of luck.
