I hope it helps! If it doesn't you can always pull it, and re-evaluate. You're making a heck of a lot more than me right now, but I think you're right in holding out for more success!
Yes, your model has worked really well for you. I'm a big fan of TanZen, by the way. I think we'll be make the jump to Lite with Imangi Word Squares soon. Since it's based on individual pre-generated puzzles, and we may model it a bit after your Lite version. We'll see how that goes. And as to your first comment, all families are different, with different financial circumstances. All wives are different, and different people have different risk tolerance levels. I encouraged my husband to go into game development full time while I was the primary earner. It was his dream, the potential was great, and we are lucky enough to be able to afford it. I hope to join him full time soon. We weighed the risks and the benefits, we know the worst case scenario, and we are going into this with our eyes wide open. Plenty of people have told us we're crazy, but, hey, what else is new, right?
Back to the subject, if I had iShoot sales it would be tempting to quit, but I'm a more cautious type and would probably wait a month. Of course I have a wife and daughter (with another baby on the way!) so I can't take such risks. It's a great story and Ethan better get ready, sounds like he's the next app dev celebrity!
Divided by 5 people though Honestly, I don't need iShoot kind of success. I would be happy to be make games full time and still support my family if I can be guaranteed longetivity of current sales. I worked on Xbox and Xbox 360 games for some years before this, and I can tell you that this iPhone stuff is so much more better. It truly is a work of love, atleast for me.
Thanks! I'm glad you're enjoying it! It sounds like you have a good Lite candidate with Word Squares. Get 'em hooked, and make the full version upgrade an attractive and painless process, and the downloads will come. You're right, all families are different. It sounds like you both were in the right situation to have a fair go at it. If I were in that situation, I would certainly consider the same thing. Currently, I'm the only source of income, and I have a kid that'll be in college in a few years, so security is my chief financial concern right now. I have no doubt I'll make a lot of money on the App Store, over time, and spread across many games. But TanZen's five month success is not enough for me to throw away a steady job.
Ah yes, there is that! I think the answer is volume of apps, not the success of any single app. Having a major success is great, but very rare. But 10 medium hits is much more appealing, to me anyway.
Hi guys, this is Ethan Nicholas. I must admit that it's somewhat odd to see a five-page thread regarding my decision to quit my job... I'm a little baffled by some of the reactions here. Honestly... if you made $200,000 in a week, you wouldn't quit your job? I don't mean to lounge around the Caribbean, I mean to continue working on your app and try to get another successful one out there. I can now afford to go a solid year without another penny in income. That would require iShoot to go from $35,000 a day to $0 tomorrow. And even if that were A) possible and B) actually happened, I'd still be fine for a solid year. If I can't either keep iShoot doing well or get another app out there making some money in the next year (iShoot took six weeks, start to finish), then you're damned right I'm going to have to give up and find a real job to pay the bills. But I'll have plenty of warning and plenty of time to find a real job. Realistically, assuming iShoot holds the top spot for at least a couple more days and doesn't immediately plummet out of the top 100, I'll probably make enough money off of iShoot to last me for a couple of years with no other income. And iShoot was a hack job thrown together in a few weeks by a novice iPhone developer in his spare time, with no artistic or design assistance. Maybe lightning will only strike once, maybe I'll never have another hit. But with more experience, more time to work on an app, and the confidence and money to secure art, music, and such, I'm absolutely confident that I can make enough money to keep my family fed. And really, are the odds of my app store income vanishing overnight really higher than the odds of my job disappearing without warning? No source of income is certain.
$200K in 1 week? Wow. Good job. All that matters to me is that you knocked out iFart. God I hated that thing being #1. Good stuff. I hope you make a more in-depth game next time instead of just doing another fast job. But then again as long as people like your games thats all that matters.
Congrats Ethan! It's great to see fellow indies do so well. Arn made a good point a few pages ago - having a day job definitely gets in the way of getting the next game out the door. Those kinds of sales definitely help the decision process! Looking forward to your future titles,
I forgot to mention...don't forget the tax man (or tax men depending on where you live). I saved roughly half of my earnings & that was pretty close for 2008.
Nope, sure wouldn't. Now, if I made that every week for a solid month, then you're speaking my language. Just don't forget all the extra expenses of going it alone. The taxes are a killer. I wish you the best of luck though, and I'm happy a real app has displaced the fart app!
I set half of mine aside as well. The estimated taxes were the most painful checks I've ever sent. Anyone know if Apple is sending out 1099 forms for 2008?
I guess it's ok to quit your job like that if you're not totally dependent on the health benefits and such
Hey Ethan, welcome to the forums. I have to agree with you on all points. Especially the last one, on the perceived stability of a day job. Plenty of people going through layoffs right now know just how unpredictable a "real job" can be. As to the whole successful indie dev phenomenon, a pet peeve: how about we stop calling it "quitting your job," and instead call it "starting a business." It's ALWAYS risky. But hey, plenty of venture cap funds are willing to shell out millions of dollars for a business idea that doesn't even have a revenue model (Twitter, I'm looking at you). If you compare iShoot to how people usually start a business (borrowing, bootstrapping, getting venture cap), it's already incredibly successful.
I really want to make games but have zero experience other than knowing photoshop and some BASIC BASIC javascript...can someone tell me what's the best way to learn from starting an app fo finish? Books? Can you recommend any? Do you even think I SHOULD or is my head just in the clouds after hearing all the success stories? thanks to all in advance!
Haha, I showed iShoot to my gf and she didn't like it because gorillas and bananas were missing. So we downloaded DOSBox, qbasis and the .bas file and played it a few times on her Mac. With sound . A few month ago I played Cannon Challenge, which was nice, but the enemy did not fire back. Then iShoot came out and at some price drop I bought it. It was an ok game, but the menus, especially the weapen selection screen, were ugly and buggy as hell. They are still ugly as hell . They have to fix this. And their update frequence is too low - I had no hope that these bugs would be fixed and thought that the game had been abandoned, but then the lite version came and now THIS. I hope that he learns something about visibility in the AppStore and what he has to do to promote his app.
