AppStore Games Not Selling?
Rick Strom, developer of iPhone games Spirit Board and Zen Jar, had some harsh words for the iPhone AppStore in the week leading up to E3. While everybody and their neighbor follows news of the iPhone app boom, Strom faults the AppStore's "race to the bottom" for pulling in disparagingly low profits, even for the top-selling games:
With two apps on the [Top 100] paid charts, one would assume I'm rolling in dough...The reality is much more startling. In order [for Strom's Zen Jar app] to place #34 on the social networking charts, you need 30-35 downloads a day. At the standard app store pricing of .99, and after Apple takes its cut, that means your app needs to bring in a little over $20 a day to chart at that position...
So what does this all mean? Well keep in mind there are over 36,000 apps in the app store. If the apps on the category charts are doing those sorts of numbers, what do you think the rest of them are doing?Nothing. Absolutely nothing. The aren't selling at all...
...The app store isn't a sane marketplace at all, any more than the lottery is...
Advertising your app may make it worse: with Apple taking a $0.30 cut on each $0.99 sale and ad click conversion rate hoodoo running at around 5% (according to Strom; I wouldn't try to verify that math with a gun to my pretty head), the bottom line runs anywhere from breaking even to spending $2.00 to make $0.60.
And with only a tiny fraction of App devs making it to the top ten, the odds do seem to begin to peter out into lottery territory. Niche products trump the odds, as do exemplary products - but those are rare exceptions. Will someone please correct this intelligent-sounding dev so I can revive my dreams of becoming an iPhone thousandaire?
iPhone Dev: AppStore Games Not Selling [GamePolitics]
tiny dancer
Posted to Miscellany, Video Games on 8 June 2009
Other stuff like this: appstore, games, iphone, rick strom
