How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness • Hacker News Board

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#41

Post by rscale » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:00 PM UTC

revorad wrote: post #32

"It makes me sick to my stomach as it so transparently preys on the weaknesses like addiction and compulsion." You know what makes me sick to the stomach? Developers starving themselves to death because of a complete disregard to basic business sense and a misguided sense of righteousness. 5 easy steps to homelessness: 1. Spend years building products for a platform, where $1.99 is a high price. 2. Avoid doing even t…

It's awesome that they didn't want to engage in predatory behavior, but what they did was self-predatory, which is no better! The opposite of exploitative game design isn't a life of asceticism; it's value for money.

I'm not a big gamer, but on the first page of my phone's springboard I count $300+ of apps, some of which have ongoing subscription costs. That's money that I paid because I got value. I'm happy with every one of those purchases, no developer starvation required!

One objection I take to your post is that I don't believe the narrative that the App Store is just a lottery. As an example, Tripit raised $7m, built an app that makes my life better, charges me $40/yr, and sold to a corporate buyer for $120m. That's a fantastic, real business.

On the flip side, these guys built an app with ARPU of $0.013.

Tripit didn't win a lottery; they provided big value and got paid because of it.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#42

Post by picklefish » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:03 PM UTC

juddlyon wrote: post #31

alanfalcon wrote: post #13

Such a confused and poorly written article. The developers aren't homeless because they had 200,000 downloads... They're homeless despite 200,000 downloads because they're game developers and not salespeople and so didn't even consider that they have to actually make the sale! Apple and Google and Amazon provide the big parking lot where people show up and have money in-hand, but if you give away the goods and never…

The title was fishy, and within a paragraph I thought the same thing: "confused and poorly written."

Not only that, but I thought this was a crappy no-name blogpost until I took a second look. I thought the Penny Arcade column was supposed to be some a well-researched column, with a higher standard than most game journalism out there. This is not that.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#43

Post by coryl » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:04 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

coryl wrote: post #6

1) Don't spend two years working on your iPad game before you ship it. Far too long a cycle. 2) As an indie dev, you're suppose to attack the easiest, lowest hanging fruit to build your income base. After you're past a point, you can take on ambitious long-term projects. Otherwise you are always depending on a "hit" title.

That's basically what they did. They lived off the profits from solipskier ( http://mikengreg.com/solipskier/ ) while building this game.

But it wasn't enough, which is one reason they're in the predicament now.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#44

Post by ctdonath » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:05 PM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #38

The app was released seven days ago. I'd say 200,000 * 0.67% * $2.99 ($4,000-ish) is a nice first week for an indie game. Now I guess I know how I can get Penny Arcade to feature my next app. http://appshopper.com/games/gasketball http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/gasketball/ranking/history/#...

What? All that whining over one week? Sounded like it's been out there for months! Of course conversion rates are low - users haven't played thru the free content yet!

This is really gonna sour sympathy for future stories of actual failures.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#45

Post by TillE » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:11 PM UTC

larrik wrote: post #23

1) Depending on writing games for your income is foolish. Very few people make real money from games. 2) In-App Purchases come in 2 flavors: The kind that are permanent, and the kind that aren't. Apple doesn't tell you which one you are buying, which means that I just don't buy any, generally. 3) The few times I experimented with IAPs, my conversion rates were also total crap.

There are tons of indie game success stories. Even more so if you count modest success from niche games. Jeff Vogel has been doing it since 1994, when finding an audience and taking payments on the internet was much, much harder.

Making niche games actually strongly resembles more "serious" software products, because you have a group of potential customers who have a decent idea of what they want and a market that isn't providing it. If you're lucky, you'll find pages and pages of forum posts describing the sort of things they like.

Expecting to make the next Angry Birds is stupid. But making games with the expectation of a decent income is entirely realistic, and just requires the same marketing skills as anything else.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#46

Post by ja27 » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:12 PM UTC

ctdonath wrote: post #44

ja27 wrote: post #38

The app was released seven days ago. I'd say 200,000 * 0.67% * $2.99 ($4,000-ish) is a nice first week for an indie game. Now I guess I know how I can get Penny Arcade to feature my next app. http://appshopper.com/games/gasketball http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/gasketball/ranking/history/#...

What? All that whining over one week? Sounded like it's been out there for months! Of course conversion rates are low - users haven't played thru the free content yet! This is really gonna sour sympathy for future stories of actual failures.

If I'm right, this was a fantastic job of link-bait. Users, especially parents, hate in-app purchases. But that's the way the app market has gone for now. So far I've been able to resist but except for educational apps (schools have the worst time paying for IAPs), I'll likely be doing a lot of freemium apps. So this hits a sweet spot to vent hate for IAPs and the freemium model. Great job guys.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#47

Post by phil » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:13 PM UTC

ja27 wrote: post #38

The app was released seven days ago. I'd say 200,000 * 0.67% * $2.99 ($4,000-ish) is a nice first week for an indie game. Now I guess I know how I can get Penny Arcade to feature my next app. http://appshopper.com/games/gasketball http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/gasketball/ranking/history/#...

Whoa, yeah. These guys have the #2 free iPad app and have been gained in sales rank every day the game has been available.

Freaking out because conversion rate on their IAP is lower than expected seems a little premature. If they keep getting 30k installs a day, they will end up with plenty of options for monetizing the thing.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#48

Post by franzus » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:14 PM UTC

rscale wrote: post #41

revorad wrote: post #32

"It makes me sick to my stomach as it so transparently preys on the weaknesses like addiction and compulsion." You know what makes me sick to the stomach? Developers starving themselves to death because of a complete disregard to basic business sense and a misguided sense of righteousness. 5 easy steps to homelessness: 1. Spend years building products for a platform, where $1.99 is a high price. 2. Avoid doing even t…

It's awesome that they didn't want to engage in predatory behavior, but what they did was self-predatory, which is no better! The opposite of exploitative game design isn't a life of asceticism; it's value for money. I'm not a big gamer, but on the first page of my phone's springboard I count $300+ of apps, some of which have ongoing subscription costs. That's money that I paid because I got value. I'm happy with eve…

> and sold to a corporate buyer for $120m.

That's a great business plan and not lottery at all!

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#49

Post by larrys » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

revorad wrote: post #32

"It makes me sick to my stomach as it so transparently preys on the weaknesses like addiction and compulsion." You know what makes me sick to the stomach? Developers starving themselves to death because of a complete disregard to basic business sense and a misguided sense of righteousness. 5 easy steps to homelessness: 1. Spend years building products for a platform, where $1.99 is a high price. 2. Avoid doing even t…

"because you're a nice guy"

"We need to make a conscious effort to be good at business."

Part of being good at business is resisting the temptation to listen to some of the things that are written on HN which highlight how wonderful sharing and giving away things are for free, and scorning anything that looks like profiteering at the expense of the poor users, developers or Aunt Jane.

There is what appears to be a consistent "don't be evil" meme where "don't be evil" takes on whatever the group think is jealous of that they can't do but perhaps makes money for companies and developers.

I've run several businesses and make money in many different ways. All above board. But I'm sure if I highlighted some of the things that I do I would be roundly criticized and downvoted on HN for, in the opinion of the group, taking advantage of people, developers, programmers who expect perhaps that everyone dedicates countless hours to helping others for the good of society. One example might be anytime I attempt to highlight how I've sold or help sell domain names for people. The hate comes out in droves from HN'ers who don't believe there is absolutely any justification at all for someone being able to sell a domain name. Of course if I tell the same story to regular business people I get looks of envy - consistently. While it is true that they don't have a horse in the race, they also appreciate the point of business is to make money.

Re: How an app with 200,000 downloads led to developer homelessness

#50

Post by franzus » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:18 PM UTC

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #36

revorad wrote: post #32

"It makes me sick to my stomach as it so transparently preys on the weaknesses like addiction and compulsion." You know what makes me sick to the stomach? Developers starving themselves to death because of a complete disregard to basic business sense and a misguided sense of righteousness. 5 easy steps to homelessness: 1. Spend years building products for a platform, where $1.99 is a high price. 2. Avoid doing even t…

I honestly can't fathom the thought process behind burying the link to your sole source of income . And why aren't they considering fixing that, and reducing the amount of free content, to solve this? In fact, they say normal IAP is exploitative, but the fact is, they can still learn from the technique to make money without violating their ethics. The question they should have asked is "at what point are we crossing…

Those guys are the typical case of the "free" brainwashing. They see taking money as something filthy and immoral to do.

It's how you start thinking if you grow up with everybody giving away their $product for free on the one side and the opensource/libre software hippies who give you a hard time if you try to make a living with software products on the other side.

Now if the results were just some homeless developers that wouldn't be a big problem. But it's far worse because the customer base has been miseducated and now awaits almost everything for free or for $.99.

/rant