Harry Tormey

In my spare time over the last couple of months I have been developing a concept for a game. I am currently in the process of preparing a demo for the upcoming casual connect conference this July in Seattle. As part of my demo I have been creating a business plan detailing how I intend on making money. Being a time poor indie developer (read I have a day job) a large part of my planning has involved trying to figure out what platforms I should support.

While researching my business plan, I came across a number of interesting articles. The following is a distilled list of points I found while roaming around:

The following juicy tidbits come from here

• Recent estimates suggest that Apple has only taken in $20-$45 million in revenue from App Store sales.
• Cross-reference the above figures with metrics on total application sales and you find that Some 40,298 apps have been released for the iPhone as of May 18. Presuming revenue somewhere between those two numbers, with total revenues of $108.3 million (if Apple takes 30%), average gross revenue of $2,688 per app. Apple takes 30% of that, leaving the developer $1,881.

Granted, the above figures are a little on the pessimistic side. I am sure that people still do make some money from selling quality products for the Iphone but it still makes for grim reading. A slightly more rosy picture is painted in this article where the author claims to have made about 10k in 6 months, not bad but not a living.

Another interesting report can be found here. The report looks at pricing for the 100 most popular iPhone apps and appears to indicate that prices are clearly going down. In April, the total combined price of all apps in the Top 100 decreased from $265 to $244, down 7.9%. A big factor in the average price drop was the increase of $0.99 apps, with 53 of the top 100 selling for that price. I have not come to any final conclusions yet but from what I have been reading it would appear that the Iphone may not be quite as lucrative as many people imagine.

Apart from developing for the Iphone I have been looking at the economics of flash games. A famous example of a game that is making serious bank is desktop tower defence. According to one article I read this game is making high four figures monthly, the article does not give any figure so I am not sure if this is credible.

A more detailed breakdown of how much money you can expect to make off of a decent flash game can be found here:

• Rough figures in Canadian dollars and taken from May 2008-April 2009.
• Gross Revenue: $35 000 Expenses: $5 750
• Author is university student, does not work full-time on making games all year round. More like 4-5 months out of the year.
• Money all from advertising, the biggest chunk being direct sponsors.

So developing a flash game may make more sense than doing one for the Iphone. At present my demo will run on Mac/PC/Linux. A core part of my strategy is to create a flash version of my game at some later date, this has the double win of both being an advertisement for my game and a possible source of cash. My overall goal is not to quit my day job but to sublement my income working on a fun little side project which won’t suck up all of my time.