Lol nice topic ! I achieve a very impressive 100 bucks (in 4 years) mith my first game. Impressive ! It was nearly the same for the 6 next ones. The last one was my first "little success" but nothing big too perhaps 1k... To help, I always remember that I made them by passion first. And I printed this on my desk :
I like that diagram. I often think hoping to make money from a game unless you have had previous success is fairly silly as initially it is all about audience building. If you can't get people to download it for free they ain't going to pay for it. Currently I measure success in number of downloads rather than money made. If I wanted to make money I would make games for others rather than myself. Removes the inherent risk and although you don't benefit as much from a success you can use that momentum on another game. It is a good tax write off
Takes a few to get it right My First game was called Sharp Vs Chopper, a really simple game where you drag a chopper around to save people from the sharks. It made about $120, but taught us some good lessons. Our 3rd game was called Drop The Chicken, we spent some serious time about 2 years building it, and it did really well, we've had 5.5million downloads and a good portion of those were paid sales. My advice is to see your first game as a learning experience, and if you want to turn app development into a business target the top 2% of the app store, build top quality games with super polished gameplay and you will get cut through and sales. There are too many crap indie apps and clones flooding the market now to expect aevery game to be profitable and get noticed. You have to really work at it and you have to produce quality industry viable games.
Nexx Studio's first game I made my first game Photo Spot when I was still in college. I outsourced the project (with credit card debt) because I didn't know anything about objective-c programming at the time. I did the direction for overall user experience and graphical design. Thought it was a great idea to have your personal spot the difference game on this amazing new touch screen phone i have (iPhone was on it's first gen App Store was just announced) and delayed for 7 months (typical outsourcing story) and finally released on Jan 2009 for $0.99. Made the cost back within a month and by the end of that year I've made $33,000 in total. And I continued to reinvest my profit back into ecosystem to create the Nexx Studio today. Back then app quality were poor (the store was just a few months old), and the market weren't as competitive. You will do pretty well as long as your app have a decent concept with a good quality. It's easy to score reviews on websites, and everyone is desperate to fill their new phones with the limited app selection that the store have. I can't say the same for the market today. Things has changed pretty much since 2012. While it is still possible, it is definitely more competitive. In these 6 years, I've distributed 20 million downloads with 9 apps and made 6 figures, all from the return generated from these apps. My first 5 games are profitable (circa 2010). It certainly became tougher thereafter. Photo Spot (My first game) https://itunes.apple.com/app/photo-spot/id303513893 Nexx Studio (My company) https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/nexx-studio/id303513896
yes it is hard.. especially on Android/iOS where visibility is a very big issue. My first game "Air Soccer Fever" has crossed 30K in 2 years, but I developed it in early days of Windows Phone so lots of visibility. I have developed 6 games in total with 50K revenue over 2.5 yrs. I have ported Air Soccer Fever to Android and just released it last week on iOS (my first iOS game). It has online multiplayer gameplay and over 4 million downloads so that is a big factor of the revenue. Will see how it does on iOS.. I am a developer with no marketing skills though so will see. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/air-soccer-fever./id994351774 Subscribe to the TouchArcade YouTube channel http://danglingneuron.wordpress.com @danglingneuron
Have you yet launched your game? I am here struggling with the marketing? You seemed to have spent a lot of time thinking about marketing ideas. Any ideas what to do after launching the game if some one has not done pre-marketing.
I launched my first game, Cubix Challenge about three weeks ago. It started off looking ok (great reviews on the app store, steady downloads for a few days), but practically vanished within about 5 days. There's a trickle of downloads but nothing to get excited about. It's just really, really tough to get that exposure on the store and get your game in front of people without a massive influx of downloads. My experience with Google Play was slightly different, I found it much easier to get exposure because of the 'New Paid' and various charts they have. It sat at the top of the 'New Paid Puzzle' list for a good part of a month. Unfortunately after 30 days the 'new' status is revoked and the visibility on the charts plummetted (along with sales). That said it's at about 1500 downloads and a 4.5 rating. It's still early days yet, but without the money to spend on a campaign I'm not sure how to get the exposure.
It all depends on your game's quality and luck. If it's good and you're lucky enough, it can go viral like Flappy Bird. But that's extremely rare for a first game. 99.9999% it will not be profitable. But keep making more and more games, you will get better. That's one thing certain
i decided to not listen to everybody and went making a huge game as my first game that took 3 years to complete... i hope it doesn't fail that hard
I made a very small profit on my first game. But our team did all the work and didn't buy graphics/sounds/code from some outsider.
Did only one mobile game, I earned about 30% of getting back the invested money. But happy to have done a great game (imho )
I made about $1700 last year off my RPG...? I didn't quit my day job ($110000/yr) but it was nice Taco Bell money.
Finally Finished! Hi guys, it's been a while since I started this thread but I finally finished my first game!! We had to stop developing a few times due to work conflicts. My brother and I made Playnets in our spare time. It was waaaay harder to build than originally envisioned! It's out next week(January 21st)! I will write a post-mortem after launch.
We did, with our first game Captain Strike http://captainstrike.com/ However, we started another bigger project (http://hero.jskill.com) in parallel and it have costed it us more than the revenue from first game.
Not yet Btw: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/256997/The_top_10_games_take_25_of_global_mobile_app_revenue.php
