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

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

#71

Post by slantyyz »

smartician wrote: post #70
slantyyz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 freemiu…

>> They should have just sold the new game for $4.99 up front.

Yes. I think the tough part when you have a higher priced game is getting the word out there and getting written up in some major blogs.

Personally I consider $1 or $2 games to be disposable. It's not much of a loss if they suck. Once you go into higher price points, I base my purchase decision on name recognition/reputation or word-of-mouth.

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

#72

Post by ctdonath »

ja27 wrote: post #46
ctdonath wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Users hate in-app purchases

Yup. For what little it's worth, "IAP" is a big red flag to me, a warning that the "free" app will prove annoying and/or expensive. I'll usually not download any with it, having learned the hard way (right or wrong) that at these prices it's better to pay the couple bucks up front and get the full clean app, than get "free" and have to wrangle with brokenness and intrusive ads and still end up having to pay.

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

#73

Post by Geee »

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…

Apps on App Store are not commodities, and never will be. Commodity is something that isn't innovative and the only way to compete is with price. Like lightbulbs. And Android phones. That's why software matters, that's where the innovation is. If you create an innovative app with real value, you make money. If not, you end up as a homeless developer.

As a sidenote: 'developers become homeless' is a story guaranteed to go viral. Brilliant marketing.

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

#74

Post by ctdonath »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #69
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…

What's wrong with the article, again?

A whole lot of emotive verbiage burying two salient facts:

1. The "buy" button was hidden. People who wanted to pay couldn't find it. People didn't even know there was anything to pay for.

2. The app has been out a week. Users haven't had time to play thru the free content and develop any desire for [unknown (see #1)] paid content.

Made near all users sound like Scroogeish tightwads. Unfair.

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

#75

Post by awolf »

revorad wrote: post #66
pjbeardsley wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>The market has settled at $ZERO.

You're wrong. There are plenty of paid applications sold on the App Store that make decent money. One of my paid applications is bringing in enough to live on, with little maintenance, and without being on any of the App Store charts.

Aside from blind Apple hate, what exactly are basing your argument that the App Store is filled with hopeless developers and un-sustainable business? Do you have any evidence that the ratio of unsuccessful business ventures is any higher on the App Store than in any other walk of life?

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

#76

Post by alanfalcon »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #69
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…

The article would be vastly improved without creating any offense to the game developers by simply adding context. 200,000 downloads is a meaningless number, presented as though it's a huge success. Is it really? Over what time period? How does that compare to other apps? How does it compare to developer expectations for the time period? Same with the conversion rate: The 0.67% rate is presented as a huge disappointment. But is it really? How does this rate compare to other free-to-download, pay-once-to-unlock apps? Some of this information will require some actual research, but it's necessary if you're actually trying to write something worth reading.

I like a good information article that lacks editorial slant. I also like a good editorial as long as the facts are there to support the angle. This article has is labeled an editorial but the only slant seems to come from the subject of the article and isn't supported by anything more than comments by the article subject. Most of the important information can be found somewhere in the article, but that's no excuse its confused and poor presentation.

Beyond the time it took to conduct the interview, I'd be surprised if the author of the article spent much more time writing it than it took to type the words and hit submit. Because that's how it reads, and that's what makes me unhappy.

The article doesn't live up to the promise: "Our focus will be on longer form journalism with in-depth research, interviews and data, highlighting aspects of the gaming lifestyle that many would miss at first glance. Reviews and previews of games and hardware will certainly be a part of the content, but the discussion will be less on specs and more on experience. We want people to not only see new aspects of the industry, but think about games in a different way."

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

#77

Post by rganguly »

larrys wrote: post #49
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 co…

"the point of business is to make money" - YES YES YES. Couldn't agree more on this. In the midst of all the noise about how focusing on revenues and profits is besides the point because you need to get tons of user adoption, it's nice use the word BUSINESS over and over and over. We're independent BUSINESS owners, creating BUSINESSES in order to remain independent, to work on what we love and believe in with people we respect and adore. Ignoring that we have to make money, that the math needs to work out favorably and that we owe it to our teammates and employees is not going to end well. Take responsibility for building a BUSINESS not a feel-good hobby.

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

#79

Post by btilly »

S_A_P wrote: post #9

I personally am pretty turned off to in app purchases. Most games are only getting worse. I cannot count the number of times that I have been approached by my 5 year old asking for me to "type in my name so I can have _______" while playing angry birds, jetpack joyride, or where's my water. The problem is that he doesn't realize that there is real money tied to that. To him, I just enter my iTunes password and the le…

Thank you for confirming my reasons for not letting my son play those games yet.

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

#80

Post by MrMcDowall »

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 wish I could upvote this 10,000 times.
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