How is this working for you? How much is apple taking from your bottom line? Is this a hobby or a job? Is the competition to get noticed pretty fierce?
It looks like your dev team is 5 people, which is really cool. It's nice to see a return to the Atari days, where dev teams can be very small numbers of people.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
How is this working for you? How much is apple taking from your bottom line? Is this a hobby or a job?
Well, I am working for our company as my payjob. These iPhone games are a bit like small side projects (ie. not expected keep a whole company afloat all by themselves). You can read Apple's conditions on their website; IIRC they take 30% of the sales profits. (One could argue how fair it is for Apple to have a monopoly in selling iPhone applications. It's not like they haven't got in trouble for similar monopolies in the past, eg. with the iPod and its DRM scheme.)
Is the competition to get noticed pretty fierce?
It certainly is. Last time I checked, about 50 new game apps are published in the appstore every single day. I haven't checked lately, but I wouldn't be surprised if the number wasn't even higher nowadays. Standing out in the crowd is pretty tough. The only way to achieve that is to either be a known brand (such as eg. PopCap or one of the "big" game companies such as UbiSoft) or to get extremely lucky (there have been cases where someone had made some small but addictive/funny app, and without any special advertisement or any other promotion work, but by pure chance, it got so noticed that it has sold hundreds of thousands of copies; needless to say, the vast majority of apps don't get that lucky). You could try an advertisement/promotion campaign, but that's always a huge economical risk, because advertising is always costly, but it might not improve sales significantly nevertheless.
It looks like your dev team is 5 people, which is really cool. It's nice to see a return to the Atari days, where dev teams can be very small numbers of people.
Many people are developing such apps alone. Of course it requires a multi-talented person to do that (iow. you need to be good at programming, graphics and music, and depending on the game, also storywriting and level design), except in the cases where a laughably simple game (which looks like it was designed with MS Paint) gets immensely popular for whatever reason (as said, that sometimes just happens). Many games are made by two people (one programmer and one graphics artist).
You can read Apple's conditions on their website; IIRC they take 30% of the sales profits. (One could argue how fair it is for Apple to have a monopoly in selling iPhone applications. It's not like they haven't got in trouble for similar monopolies in the past, eg. with the iPod and its DRM scheme.)
Strangely, XBox Live takes the exact same amount, and has the same limitation - it is impossible to sell Xbox games any other way. I wonder if that would be considered a monopoly give the precedent set by apple...
Warp wrote:
Many people are developing such apps alone. Of course it requires a multi-talented person to do that (iow. you need to be good at programming, graphics and music, and depending on the game, also storywriting and level design), except in the cases where a laughably simple game (which looks like it was designed with MS Paint) gets immensely popular for whatever reason (as said, that sometimes just happens). Many games are made by two people (one programmer and one graphics artist).
Unfortunately, this, along with the previous issue (the flooding of indie games into the iPhone/Android/XBL/etc enviroment), means that getting noticed as an individual or small team of game developers is extremely difficult. In other words, unless someone gets lucky like you with your company, keep your day job.
Sage advice from a friend of Jim: So put your tinfoil hat back in the closet, open your eyes to the truth, and realize that the government is in fact causing austismal cancer with it's 9/11 fluoride vaccinations of your water supply.
Joined: 11/23/2010
Posts: 14
Location: Peotone, IL, USA
That is awesome! Coders often do not get the credit they deserve; and, perhaps as aforementioned, it is nice to see small dev teams making a splash on the gaming scene. In a way, I see smartphone/other device gaming as a renewal of the old "Wild West" feel of gaming development. Exciting stuff, for sure.
www.NintendoLegend.com -- One gamer's quest to play and review every American-released NES game!
