Congratulations to Feral for passing 100,00 sales, as a gamer hoping that passes the targeted sales and green lights further AAA ports (as well as Tropico and Total War)!
Obvs great - I’m genuinely surprised that £1m (let alone $1m, let alone $1m before apple’s cut) was enough to make this viable, though. By the time salaries, facilities, overheads etc are taken into account, that isn’t a whole lot of time or £££ for a top notch port.
True but don’t forget that’s only a million so far, it’s still available to buy so will be continuing to rack up sales over time
Do you think? 10 months, initial excitement spike long gone... seriously, what’s the weekly sales? Enough to keep occasional updates ticking over? Enough to keep a subset of a studio going? Hmmm. Where are the future prospects for sales spikes? Release of next gen products, people upgrading and being able to finally run the top end games? (Tbf, Grid is a large part of the reason I went from a 6+ to an 8+ this Xmas). I mean, it’s great that they’ve hit 100k / £1m. But it does beg questions (IMO) about what might have happened with eg an intro price of £3-5. It’s hard not to see how this is... a mid-point sales result? IMO. I’d be really interested in knowing how this fit with Feral’s expectations.
I hope that feral comes out good on this. I mean they made this great port and now there making tropico. They really deserve ut
Their mobile stuff is a TINY fraction of the work they do. If they weren't happy with the results of GRID's sales they wouldn't be blasting PR emails out about it.
Next gen products/people upgrading their phones are one area of additional sales, the upcoming release of the Android App would be another. On the pricing its tricky to know if a lower price/higher sales would have balanced out the actual price/lower sales situation. I think that £9.99 was and is an absolute bargain for a AAA game, plus it allows them the option of running a cut price sale at some point in the future which would make sales jump again
Hello people, maybe it has already been posted, but what happend to the apple TV version? Is it still coming or it is canceled? I want to buy this game but my Iphone (6) and Ipad (Air 1) are not able to handle it. So my only chance is to play it via Apple TV.
OK, so from your perspective the most interesting thing about this story is that a big company has put out a press release which means they’re doing awesome whereas, tbh, from my perspective I find it much more interesting / insightful that a whopping great company can be happy with £700k, tops (before tax, staff & other costs, licensing, etc), from one of the most spectacular releases of the last year. Apropos of nothing, I was browsing a Godus story earlier today and came across this: And, you know, salary ain’t the half of it. In a bog standard cost effectiveness evaluation we’d be adding 40-50% for overheads and costs of delivering a funded service (pension, national insurance, HR). In my institution’s “full economic costing” (ie, estates, ancillary services, printing, hardware) you’re looking at closer to +100%. What’s that? A team of 5-7 people @ £40k for a year? To break even? Yeah, I’m amazed that’s doable / financially feasible. And worth it for a huge org. Aren’t you? Perhaps this is related to this being a port (lower costs, developed assets, established processes or machinery), but even then that strikes me as remarkable. Idk. This is an industry you’re obvs far more informed about - viewed with a critical eye, and based on the size / scale of other gaming studios, that seems pretty standard for a game / port of this scale and polish? @stelph’s point about android makes good sense (Though even then, imu, most game income tends to come from iOS, particularly on more expensive titles!) I’m not grumbling about the costs - I own all of Feral’s iOS titles (and a fair few on Mac). Im just deeply surprised by the economics.
We're getting pretty off topic here, but all I'm saying is they're happy with the number of units they've sold. I don't know the financial side of it. Feral is a pretty big company that's been around more than twenty years. Their main business is porting games to Mac. That's the business model they've been able to sustain their business with. Their mobile stuff feels like a slow dipping of the toes into a new market. The Rome games translated super well to touchscreen and I'd imagine it wasn't too expensive to develop those ports, so that means the number of units sold to break even would likely be pretty low and anything beyond that would be gravy. Based on all the extra options and stuff for Grid, it seems like it was more effort but still in a similar position. Not to say it didn't take effort to port these games because I'm sure it was still a lot of work and a challenge, just that the vast majority of the costs were already sunk by the original developers of these games, and with Feral already having ported them to Mac and the code bases likely being very similar. So I don't see any of them as being super expensive projects. A lot of the work was already done, so you just need to figure out the touchscreen controls and then optimize for the various devices. I feel like I'm diminishing the work they've done, and nothing drives me more crazy than people thinking you can just push a button and port a game to a new platform, there are SO many factors involved in all of this. So don't get me wrong, Feral are rock stars for the quality of ports they put out. I'm just saying because of who they are and the work they already do it was likely a much less risky venture and almost all of the costs had already been recouped through previous ports, meaning they were pleased with 100k. The Molyneux quote was for an original from the ground up product, and yeah those circumstances are way different. I'd be very curious to know the size of the team at Feral who does the iOS stuff. I'm guessing it's just a handful of people. Then there's games like Rush Rally 2 which is very close to being something you'd call a "console quality" racer and that was just one guy selling his game for four bucks. He'd probably be over the moon with 100k unit sales. So it really all depends on the situation, but if Feral is happy enough with 100k units sold to be boasting about it, then I think that means it was a success on their end. Maybe not a "support the entire studio on this alone" type of success, but more of a "this was worth doing and shows us we can do more in the future" type of success.
Plus with the news they are now porting Tropico means they must find the iOS market is profitable for porting
We are engineering a significant upgrade for GRID Autosport on iOS. Coming later this year, the free update will boost performance and visuals for all supported iPhones and iPads. Here is a sneak peek of the hypercharged GRID Autosport v 1.2.4... Keep an eye on our Twitter/Facebook feeds for further updates.
Wow that’s fantastic news. This is already, but with this update, it will be the most beautiful game for iOS. Can i ask if there are any plans, also, for custom control scene (movable buttons)? I’d like, for example, to have buttons for brake and acceleration on the lower right side, because on the big screen of an iPad Pro the brake is far high and it’s a little bit hard to reach it with thumb. Or to be able to move the arrows (on arcade mode) on the left side near together and buttons for gear-shift when not on accelometer mode (so don’t to have move back and forward the whole device for shifting). I know that i am the minority but with the iPad pros, tasks that’s super easy and clever for iPhone, are much more harder to do. All in all for me (as a premium gamer) this is the best racing game on iOS and one of the best on my MacBook.
Thanks for the kind words. That's a cool idea - we don't have any plans to implement that kind of feature right now, but we'll certainly look into it.
Hello, do you have any plans to bring the game to apple TV? Unfortunately my Iphone 6 and Ipad Air are not able to run your game.
Nothing to say about Apple TV right now, but we'll let people know via Twitter/Facebook announcements if that changes.
