Hi, This is a question of two parts that I would like peoples opinion on. 1. If you didnt like your day job, your girlfriend lived 200 miles away so you only saw her some weekends but you want to see each other more and your company wanted you to sign a new restrictive contract which you didnt want to, would you quit without having another job to go to in this current economic climate? 2. If you were of average intelligence (say IQ 100), worked in the creative side of apple mac IT (with photographers/design agencies) but never programmed but thought that making apps for the Iphone would be a good way to make a decent living (decent for me being about $50,000 a year before tax, etc) is that possible? I have read the success stories and the disaster stories so its difficult to judge. I have bought and so far browsed "Learn C on the Mac", "Learn objective C o the mac" and "beginning iphone development". I would be able to take a maximum of 8 months off any work to learn C,Obj C, Iphone programming, any design programs (Im very familiar with photoshop already), and create whatever apps I come up with before I run out of money and HAVE to get a job. Basically it seems the apps would have to be downloaded 100 a day every day at $1.99 each to make a go of this, so realistically i would need multiple (5-6?) apps at the same time I believe? Is this all a realistic possibility or am I just being a dreamer? Please comment. Thanks.
To be perfectly blunt, the iPhone millionaires yacht club's membership has been closed for months now. An amazing number of people caught wind of success stories like Rolando, iShoot, and many others and think that they can get on board the gravy train after reading a couple books and buying a $99 SDK license. Needless to say, it doesn't work like this. To compete in the App Store economy, which is becoming more and more saturated with every passing hour, you need something seriously innovative. If you don't have a hat full of ideas that you can honestly say don't exist on the App Store, you're really going to be in trouble once you start relying on app sales to pay your bills. On top of all this, you're looking of at least a couple months of reading, studying, and practicing until you're proficient enough in objective c and cocoa touch to be able to produce more than "hello world.app" and simple games. The thing is, learning objective-c, cocoa touch, and experimenting building different games can all be done in your spare time. In today's economy, passing up on an existing paycheck to live off your savings and learn how to program for the iPhone is really not the best idea. Keep your job, work on becoming an iPhone tycoon in your spare time, and if you ever get to the point where your app sales are making you enough money to live off of, then quit your job. Anything is possible, and I don't mean to shatter your dreams, but being able to make $50k a year as a freelance iPhone developer within 8 months of buying your first objective-c book is a tall order. I'd bet we have developers posting here who came to the iPhone as obj-c veterans with decent games/apps on the store who would love to be making more than beer money off a few random app sales here and there.
Be careful and try to do both things at the same time and see how it goes. The App Store is full of apps and if you want to make some money with this, you must create something innovative, never seen before. Your IQ is just a number, the main thing is to be creative, innovative, talented and smart. As you said, you need more than one app to make money. It means you'll have to keep developing innovative apps with potential, in order to make a living out of this. One more thing: there are more than 27.000 apps out there. Before to start developing, try to find out if what you want to create has been developed already or not. Good luck with this, it might be hard, but someone will succeed with this and it could be you.
As has been said, it's still possible to make good money on the App Store, but you have to either have something really innovative and creative, or you have to have something that fills a popular niche that hasn't been properly addressed. Were it me -- and it will be, actually -- I'd keep my day job and do iPhone development in my spare time. I may not have the time to devote to iPhone programming that I'd like and it would hinder my ability to put out apps in volume, but it will give me a good idea at the outset how well my apps are receieved and whether or not the consuming public think my stuff is good enough to eventually make me consider taking it on full-time. As has also been said, this isn't like 6 months ago or before. Just any old app won't cut it anymore. People aren't hungry for anything they can get their hands on anymore -- they're glutted and choosy now. The App Store has enjoyed unprecedented success; it's well on its way to having 30,000 apps and the SDK has only been available for about a year now. To my knowledge no other platform has ever seen growth like that. Competition is therefore commensurately fierce. If you think you've got the ideas, the talent, and the chutzpah to bring something new, different, interesting, and well presented to the table, test it out first. Design it, develop it, release it, and see how it goes before you go telling your boss to take this proverbial job and shove it.
You don't how good he is. If everyone thought like you, we would live in a very retrograde world. Developping apps is a like being a classical composer. everything has already being done. Only those who master their art and have great creativity can make it. Study a lot. Show your work to a master coder. Do something outstanding. Wait. Then, quit your job. Or, you just go for your dream, but you have to know that it is not going to be easy and that it might not work.
It's not true that everything has already being done, even for music. I have many ideas both for music and iPhone games, but it would be pretty hard to compose/develop them for me. What about a game like Rolando, but with weapons and both 2D-3D style like Paper Mario? What about a well done Reactable for the iPhone? Ah, this is OT, but I'm tired of people who come out and say "I have an idea for a new game...". We have thousand ideas for new games, but that's not what we need. The point is that you have to be very talented to succeed now. Very talented means that you have to keep developing cool apps and probably you won't be able to do this by yourself. It sounds like it's going to be hard for individual developers.
When I said everything has been done, I meant the progress of tonal music. Tonal music was so saturated that the had to find a new way to do music. Anyway,what I mean is that you have to be very creative and really know your thing because there many chances that someone else has already done.
You need: 1) An innovative idea 2) Good execution that make the app fun/useful 3) Luck A firm knowledge of coding is needed, an extreme amount of creativity, and hoping the enough people will pick it up to give it momentum.
For me i'm giving the iPhone a shot before finding work since I been in education all these years, might as well give it a try before finding a 9 'till 5.
All or nothing? You know, it really doesn't have to be all or nothing. There are plenty of ways to leverage making an iphone app (or a web site, or a flash game, or a comic book, or ...) into something more than just the face value of that product. Make it and put it on your resume, use it to connect with people, and find a different job that helps you do what you want to do. Two things to note here - being an indie game developer is going to take a long time, and to be honest, if you start now, you'll probably go through a couple of technologies (iphone, itablet, etc) before actually getting enough momentum. That is ok, not many people make it at their first shot of anything. The second thing to consider is that "freelance" usually refers to building out other people's ideas. If you want to get paid you usually have to show competence through a portfolio of past work and examples that show you can finish projects in the right amount of time with the right amount of quality ("right" is of course subjective). To go from never writing code to freelance iPhone dev overnight is going to be a hard sell to potential customers if you want to make any sort of money at it. If your end goal is to relocate 200 miles, your best bet is finding a different employer rather than trying to make it on your own, and the best way to do that is to have a deep and broad portfolio.
Don't like your job? Don't like living where you are? Why are you even there?.. Go move nearer your gf and do what makes you HAPPY, not what might possibly one day could make you rich... what are you going to do if you do get rich? If your main focus is MONEY then stick with your $50k (Is this a lot in the US?) secure (I assume) job and stick out the rough economic climate and learn some iphone stuff in your spare time if you WANT TO MAKE iphone games/apps. If you want to run a business making big iphone games, then do that, but think of that as a business (and aim for profit after a few years - maybe in 15 years you'll be rich) Money comes and goes.
I program for a living but it is not game programming so I probably have a leg up on a lot of people. I have been studying iPhone programming for a few months now and think I am starting to get it figured out. If I had a complete mental BREAKDOWN, maybe I would quit my job! I am just hoping to publish a game soon and maybe make a tiny bit of money or at least have some bragging rights among my friends. It's hard work to program and you need to have a certain way of thinking to understand programming so not everyone can do it. But you also need to be able to devote enough TIME to it which is why I'm taking a week of vacation time from work to just focus on programming in May. I think it depends on what you have to lose and who is counting on you for financial support. So don't burn any bridges and don't buy a ferrari on credit, but maybe give it a try. You can always quit your job AFTER you get your #1 game published.
I hope to make decent money from app sales myself, but there's no reason you can't experiment with iPhone dev while you work at your real job. Get a few games out there and get a feel for things work, then decide if you want to make a go at it fulltime.
Wouldn't recommend it. You're initial cost of investment might be low (at most, a Mac, the license fee, and iPod Touch or iPhone if you don't have one). But then you might have to add artwork or music fees. After that, you will have to rabidly promote your game because there are just too many of them and not enough tools to sort out what is good and what is bad. Then the question would become, how many sales do you need per day to have a viable lifestyle and at what price? And finally, do you really want to quit a job in the current economy? It is possible to become rich as an iPhone developer. But it is not typical, and I imagine most people who would try will have problems turning it into a viable means of support. If you want to do it, I would write your game in the evenings and work during the day. Then if you don't turn out to be a success, you won't have cut off your means of support.
I'll tell you coming from a programmer that a learn C in 21 days crash course isn't going to cut it. Especially if you expect to develop the higher end apps that people are demanding these days. The iphone is limited platform so you need to be a sneaky programmer to squeeze needed performance out of it. If you make something basic someone more talented will copy you in no time. you need talent either programming talent or artistic talent to make something worthwhile.
The media like to focus on the spectacular successes and the spectacular failures but they ignore everything in between. There are 27,000 apps out there and most have probably made little or no money. There is no reason to assume that the iPhone will be any different to PC casual games. You will need to produce 5-6 apps and be around for a couple of years to start generating enough revenue to live off.... unless you have one of the lucky fluke hits. I think it is unrealistic to think you can learn to program well (the quality bar is rising rapidly for iPhone) and produce 5-6 apps in 8 months. I would suggest that you learn to program in your spare time before you quit your job. If you must leave this job then get another to pay the bills while you learn. At this point you don't even know if you will enjoy game development. Liking games isn't the same as liking game development, in the same way that liking food doesn't mean you would enjoy working in a hot kitchen night after night. Game development can be hard, boring and frustrating and it is often just your passion for actual development (and pig-headedness) that gets you to finish a game.
Just to echo what everyone's already said: *do not quit your day job* unless you have something lined up near your girlfriend or she's willing to support you for a lot longer than eight months. I think you'd have to be well above average, and already been programming in some manner for several years prior to taking this up in order to be fairly assured of success in a short period of time like 6 to 8 months (and for those who think it's easy to code: HTML is not a programming language)! Rogue Touch took me over 4 months to finish while working on it part time- evenings, weekends, and whenever I didn't have active consulting work I could bill out... My experience with xcode and cocoa prior to that was zero, however I have been programming for over 25 years and already know how to run a business (been self employed for over 10 years). The first 30 days of sales have been pretty decent, but it's certainly not enough to live off of, and I'm nowhere near making back the amount of time and money put into it yet. I'll be working my "day job" consulting for years to come You're talking about doing this all yourself, so you need to be the programmer, artist, musician, sound effect guy, PR/Marketing guy, and support. Not a lot of people are cut out to wear that many hats. If you need to pay anyone for any part of that your $50K living desire just got blown out of the water. As others point out the graphical and quality bar is raising daily. My wife and I did all the work for Rogue Touch but I'll probably be hiring artists for my upcoming games just to compete with what will be out by then! I've said it before here and elsewhere- programming for the iPhone/App Store is exactly like playing your local lottery. Thousands will play, but only a few will "win"
Posting to a public forum to say you are replacing your wife - man are you gonna get it in the neck when she sees this
No he's promoting her to Art Director. She'll be in charge of the art but someone else will be doing all the drawing (you have to be soooo careful when working with family )
