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

#61

Post by AznHisoka » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:55 PM UTC

revorad wrote: post #56

rscale wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Ah yes, I wrote about that yesterday - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4378546 Tripit and every other VC-backed company is in a completely different business than indie devs making apps. The product that companies like Tripit are selling, right from the beginning, is the company itself, not some free or cheap app. The app is just a marketing vehicle to increase the price of the company. The amazing thing is that…

patio11 always has some of the best advice -- sometimes I think he's a black hat SEO disguises as a helpful expert :)

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

#62

Post by ljd » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:56 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…

Google Fiber is a very recent example of a company commoditizing a complement. The more people on the internet (their free tier) the more people that can use their ad generating products. The more people on high-bandwidth connections mean the more they can lean on YouTube for ad generation. Larry Page recently told Charlie Rose in an interview that he feels ad revenue from YouTube will surpass search ad revenue.

As internet access is commoditized the price of internet ad space will climb.

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

#63

Post by phatbyte » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 8:57 PM UTC

I'm going to be honest here, I look at IAP games as spam. I don't care how much time you game took or how well it's designed, as soon as I see that I must buy coins/points to upgrade weapons, levels etc, the little 10 year old nes kid in me dies a little.

Everybody is so worry about monetization and get rich that they forgot the fundamental rule on a game: Let it be fun and enjoyable, let it be immersive.

How would you feel when you were young playing atari, nes, etc and something kept asking for your parents money to continue to play the game ?

TBH I rather play 5-7 dollars straight away for a game that includes everything then 0.90 cents where everything is locked up.

If DLC's are getting ridiculous on consoles, IAP is the apple store game cancer. It should go away.

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

#64

Post by icebraining » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:03 PM UTC

briandear wrote: post #59

This isn't a sad story it's another example of developers being good at code but terrible at business. If code is your livelihood, treat it as such. Misplaced idealism is dangerous. Besides, doesn't giving someone a free game feed into their game addictions? Game pricing shouldn't be subject to some moral code. It's a game: if people don't like the price, they don't have to play. This illustrates the problem with pir…

It doesn't actually illustrate anything because the app's only been out for a week.

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

#65

Post by dirtyaura » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:08 PM UTC

jonhendry wrote: post #55

franzus wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 developer…

"Those guys are the typical case of the "free" brainwashing. They see taking money as something filthy and immoral to do." I don't think that's quite the case. They went free because they saw a lot of profitable apps using the free + In-App-Purchase model. The problem is they didn't think through what their own IAP model should be. They just focused on not being exploitative (the part that makes many of those free ap…

And the thing that they also missed is that most of the Top Grossing free IAP games don't have a ceiling for IAP spending. This is very important, as spending follows power law curve, which is very well known fact among free-to-play game developers ("rich oil sheiks subsidizing the game for poor kids")

It's requires a bit of a game design ingenuity to make it work so that you can't just buy your way to victory, especially in multiplayer setting, but is doable.

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

#66

Post by revorad » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:09 PM UTC

pjbeardsley wrote: post #53

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'm in no way saying that Apple's business practices are above scrutiny, but I think it's unfair to claim they are "making developers fall over each other". When the App Store debuted, prices started out in the $5-$20 range, but the market has settled around the $1.99 price point because that's where it ended up. They're not going around telling developers how to price their apps. It may be Apple's petri dish, but th…

Exactly! $5-$20 was the peak! And the market hasn't settled at $1.99. The market has settled at $ZERO.

I quote from http://www.apple.com/iphone/from-the-app-store/ :

Over 500,000 apps.

For work, play, and everything in between.

The apps that come with your iPhone are just the beginning. Browse the App Store to find hundreds of thousands more. The more apps you download, the more you realize there’s almost no limit to what your iPhone can do.

There's no limit to what the iPhone can do because we don't even need to tell developers how to price their apps.

There are hordes of 20-somethings subsidised by VCs to extend our platform for free forever. No wait. They pay us 100 bucks a head for the privilege. Every year. And there are thousands others who follow suit, even without funding, because they have selectively read all the chapters of Steve's biography talking about the importance of beautiful typography and minimal furniture.

There's no limit to what the iPhone can do because we don't even need to tell developers how to price their apps.

I'm going to stop now. This is too painful to write about.

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

#67

Post by ijobs-ly » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:12 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…

Well said.

Developers are severly exploited. Even the ones who become millionaires. Hello VC.

The way out of this situation is quite simple but not obvious to many. And of those who recognise it, they get it wrong.

I'm talking about platform development.

Platforms, the kind that let everyone benefit, need to be simple, low level (ultra reliable) and flexible.

Few people can get this right. Because the lure of complexity (features) and lock-in (greed) is so great.

An OS is not such a platform.

A website is not such a platform.

A protocol, that anyone can implement just by reading the spec, is a platform.

IP (Internet Protocol) is a platform.

It's dead simple. It's free. It's old! And you are all using it.

What can you subtract from IP? Not much.

What features does it have? Not many.

And that's the beauty of it.

True platforms in this sense do not require you to jump through hoops.

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

#68

Post by slantyyz » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:13 PM UTC

smartician wrote: post #28

So their first game sold for $2.99 up front and earned them $20k-$40k for two years. I would call that successful. Then, for their second game, instead of sticking to what works, they made the decision to switch to a freemium model, and made the mistake of making the "free" mode too good, and neglected to advertise in-game that there even is a premium version to unlock. Many lessons to be learned here, but rather stu…

>> So their first game sold for $2.99 up front and earned them $20k-$40k for two years. I would call that successful.

Depends on the context, especially considering the opportunity costs of having a higher paid job.

The problem is that everyone thinks that you have to price games low to sell them. I regularly pay more than $5 for iPhone/iPad games if I know they're good. Hell, after years of paying through the nose for handheld console cartridges, even $15 is cheap to me.

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

#69

Post by mechanical_fish » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:22 PM UTC

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…

What's wrong with the article, again?

You seem to have learned the facts, and you seem to have gotten the point, and it seems to be the same point that I got, which suggests that the message is getting through clearly enough. So what's wrong?

Are you unhappy because the article doesn't have a strong editorial slant, as your comment does? Do you wish the journalist had come right out and said, in paragraph one, "These developers are homeless because they have lousy sales skills"? I'll say three things about that.

One: Some articles do have that style (ahem Zero Punctuation ahem), but others simply try to state facts and let the readers draw the conclusions.

Two: The two styles work well together. The interviewer lets the principals tell their story, states some numbers for perspective, and politely adds a few important factual observations ("It took me a few minutes to figure out how to pay for the game, and I was specifically looking for the menu. There’s nothing shocking about the low amount of paid sales; the value proposition is never made explicit.") and then someone else - like you - draws a conclusion and drives the point home. It's a team effort.

Three: If one makes a habit of using the stories one hears to overtly and publicly ridicule the storytellers, one's career as an interviewer won't last. People will clam up. This is a fact of human nature. Don't expect more from journalists than is possible.

(There are journalists who are so talented that people happily visit with them in order to be ridiculed. This is a miraculous skill and I suspect it's particularly hard to pull off in games journalism: The people building the games have no need to appear in public at all, let alone risk ridicule. They're not politicians or celebrities.)

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

#70

Post by smartician » Wed, Aug 15, 2012, 9:28 PM UTC

slantyyz wrote: post #68

smartician wrote: post #28

So their first game sold for $2.99 up front and earned them $20k-$40k for two years. I would call that successful. Then, for their second game, instead of sticking to what works, they made the decision to switch to a freemium model, and made the mistake of making the "free" mode too good, and neglected to advertise in-game that there even is a premium version to unlock. Many lessons to be learned here, but rather stu…

>> So their first game sold for $2.99 up front and earned them $20k-$40k for two years. I would call that successful. Depends on the context, especially considering the opportunity costs of having a higher paid job. The problem is that everyone thinks that you have to price games low to sell them. I regularly pay more than $5 for iPhone/iPad games if I know they're good. Hell, after years of paying through the nose f…

I fully agree with you there. It just makes the decision to sell their new game as free with IAP even more questionable. They should have just sold the new game for $4.99 up front. Even if only a fraction of the people who installed the free game would have bought it, they'd still have most likely made tens of thousands of dollars in a week. If it hadn't sold at all, THEN I would have started thinking about a freemium model.