101–110 of 129 posts
This smacked of RIAA logic. It doesn't matter what your conversion rate is when your game is free - non-converts don't cost you money.
Where did they say it cost them money? They said they weren't getting any from selling anything.
There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 mo…
There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 mo…
Have you considered that maybe these guys want to develop iPhone games? Telling them that all they have to do to make more money is simply stop developing games, and choose a different platform might be true, but it's not very helpful if they want to live their passion.
"amateur hobbyist artistes (who have "that vision thing" and are willing to starve to deliver it for free)" - I'd say that Mike and Greg are already in this category. If you check out their site (http://mikengreg.com/), you'll see that they release most of their stuff as free. They live in Iowa because it's cheap. They want to be able to make their own games and not starve or be homeless while doing it.
Software isn't necessarily the best way to make money period, if all I cared about was money I'd rather be managing a hedge fund or something.
There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 mo…
Have you considered that maybe these guys want to develop iPhone games? Telling them that all they have to do to make more money is simply stop developing games, and choose a different platform might be true, but it's not very helpful if they want to live their passion.
They wanted to live their passion and they wanted to support themselves off the app. ("We wanted the game to be free but also we want to make a living off of it since we’ve spent 2 years on it.") But they only fought to service one of those goals.
Thankfully, most of us here on HN do things where our passion is something that has enough monetary value to support a family. But nonetheless, "live your passion" is just bad job advice. "Find a way to make your passion work" is much better.
There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 mo…
This.
The money in the App Store for the vast majority of developers is not from the App Store directly but from building apps for organizations who want to be in the App Store . Sometimes it's just all about influential/powerful people and their ego [1]. Yes, the apps have to look good (but Apple makes it easier than Android to make apps look good - remember the bar keeps going up and up).
As a sub-contractor, we would handle everything from the initial Apple developer account (for the company) to TestFlight betas to code/content updates. Complete outsourcing. The customers never know (or care) that XYZ company/national non-profit or Fortune 500 brand isn't writing their own apps - they just see "XYZ Brand, updated 08-Mar-2012' in iTunes.
[1] I recall a conversation once with a museum marketing person. They were basically like 'Well, did you look at the MoMa's app?'. I tried to remind them that MoMa has a basically unlimited marketing budget to spend on slick, polished apps - but they all want to bragging rights - for the museum president to be able to show his/her peers (other museum presidents, board members) the app. Really.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered that maybe these guys want to develop iPhone games? Telling them that all they have to do to make more money is simply stop developing games, and choose a different platform might be true, but it's not very helpful if they want to live their passion.
This... Mike and Greg are definitely game developers first and businessman second (or 3rd, or 4th or whatever). "amateur hobbyist artistes (who have "that vision thing" and are willing to starve to deliver it for free)" - I'd say that Mike and Greg are already in this category. If you check out their site ( http://mikengreg.com/ ), you'll see that they release most of their stuff as free. They live in Iowa because it…
Well, then they succeeded and we should be happy for them. They don't have a business, but they've got a great game.
If and when their priorities change, they'll move business skills up the priority list. I guess they could get a publisher, or something?
There's multiple aspects of this story you can tweak such that the business becomes successful. Pick any one of them: 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. Giving that living on a couch is presumably not momentum-enhancing, a two week consulting engagement would buy them another 6~24 mo…
> 1) There is an extraordinarily lucrative market opportunity in iDevice contracting right now, which they allude to but mentioned that they avoided doing to keep momentum. This. The money in the App Store for the vast majority of developers is not from the App Store directly but from building apps for organizations who want to be in the App Store . Sometimes it's just all about influential/powerful people and their…
I actually ended up working on a completely different project but I had to periodically build a useless calculator using jQuery Mobile in the corporate colors and present it to our completely useless VP of IT.
He had sold the company's leadership on the absolute necessity of a mobile presence, that this effort needed to be completed post-haste and how it would dramatically increase sales (most of the company's business was selling insurance to other financial firms, almost no consumer products in their portfolio).
In my first meeting with him he told me he wanted "MSN Mobile for an insurance company" and offered no other instruction. He literally pulled up m.msn.com on his iPhone and said to make a version of that as their mobile presence. After that meeting I just hid in my cube and laughed for a few minutes. That was when I realized what a farce this effort was.
Basically the entire development team knew how pointless this was but the VP had sold it to the rest of the execs and now they needed to build it. No one wanted to put in the effort. The created the internship position so they could foist the actual coding off to an unsuspecting college student (me) while actually having him work on an unrelated but useful project.
Didn't learn much about coding (VB.NET, ugh) but the experience in how a bad company works? Invaluable.
1) Bitch about not making enough money because you boned your conversion funnel.
2) Get an article written about how you don't make enough money
3) Make money!
Don't try this at home.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it is worth, I have historically taken pains to avoid selling on HN.
At this point you are the product Patrick. The second you decide to monetize the patio11 brand (maybe by writing a book?) you're going to print money. PS: write a book.