starting iphone development

[Faille]

Man, seems like forever since I've posted something productive that I'm doing here. Hopefully its worth the wait! What I'm doing that is, not the post...


Anyway, hoping to start up developing iphone games in the near future but have some things that I wouldn't mind getting some feedback on.

Firstly, what sort of web presence is needed. I initially thought that I would do a simple web page for them, it's going to be a series of games set within the same 'world' so having a page that links that together seemed to make sense. But having read up on how important marketing is to boost iphone game sales, it seems that something a bit more fancy might be needed. Not to mention in this day and age, maybe twitter, myspace, facebook etc, are required to help support everything. Unfortunately I have no experience in those since they are stupid and evil. I mean, potentially great tools for connected people together...

Anyway, what sort of setup should I aim to build to support my little franchise of games?

The other thing is pricing. Seems that games have pretty much bottomed out and $1 is the only price you can sell for as entry level indie developer. I did read that ads make up potentially even more money so that is promising. Even though I'm not looking to strike it rich, not in the first year at least, I would like it be self sufficient and have some growth so that it can expand. So I'm left with the following pricing options:

-selling it for some amount, most likely $1
-having a lite version supported by ads.
-having a lite version with ads to buy the pro version
-having a real version supported by adds, possibly with a purchase option to remove ads.
-Any combination of the above.

I'm not a huge version of crippled lite versions, but if they have a proven track record then that's something I would look at.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback and insights you can all provide!

[Ferr]

I actually work @ iTunes, so I can probably offer some opinion from experience on what customers will and will not like. I've never touched developing myself, so cannot give much input on that regard however a few things:

3.0 provided the addition of in app purchases. IE Your game has guns, your gun shoots bullets - if your a whiny bitch and suck at the game, you can use RL coin to buy more bullets. If you can in any way throw this into your game, I recommend it, as @ 99cents people often don't hesitate to take the quick way out (Just look at gold buyers). This costs you literally nothing extra, and is infinitely renewable and causes little problems for customers and maintenance.

Full version supported by ads is a nono until later versions. They piss people off, then they write iTunes and complain. When they complain and ask for a refund, that is taken out of your pocket. If you are going to use ads, make it something applicable any way you can. I tried out some game for a guy who worked at our location, and his fuckin app popped up ads to buy the new kelly clarkson album. I do not dig Kelly clarkson. I threw his app the fuck out.

Make it cheap, or free for a certain time (Full version). Downloads and hits get you featured on the frontpage. You get frontpaged from tuesday to tuesday, and it doing so will make you more bank than you can believe vs advertising elsewhere etc. Considering the rediculous shit I've seen FOHSS pull off, I would recommend preaching to them with tits to get a fuckton of hits on your app while in free status.

There are many app/game review sites that will get you business as well. I'm sure someone here is connected to at least one of them (I can't really recommend any, however take a look at the top games / app lists and read their summarys for an idea of where to spew). You get some shit that provides you with free download codes for your app, so they trial etc.


Oh, if your doing anything 3d, take my advice and if you make a digital joystick, fucking tweak it until its perfect. It will single handedly make or break people going from lite/free > paid. I cannot count how many games seem great but the control scheme is too touchy that I just want to throw my phone after testing for 30 seconds.

Also I know it may be a ways off, but once you get it on the store if you can let me know (full version) or hit me a few keys for a free full version, I can give it to some of the junkys at work for really indepth feedback. Prettymuch 50% of the staff use an iphone, and we have a lot of kids who play this shit nonstop.


If you have any questions along the way PM me and I'll see if I can dig you an answer.

[Drajakur]

I have been involved in developing a few (ultimately un-released) apps recently and one thing I'd like to say comes as a result of a pretty intensive market analysis conducted by one of our potential partners.

This report claimed that even though Apple constantly touts the $1 price point, the price point which currently has the best return for indie developers is $2.99. Obviously, the point is that you will sell less apps, but earn more for each of them sold. Apple loves and markets $1 as 'the standard' because THEY make higher profits from it - i.e. they know that people are more likely to make uninformed purchases at this point than at $2.99. However, the difference in volume does actually not turn out to be in the developer's favor (essentially, because they still don't sell enough at $1 to make what they would make if they had been selling less at $2.99).

It seems counter-intuitive at first, but if you work the math through on development costs, Apple's cut, and projected volume it does start to make sense.

I should add that I recognize that this is the Internet and you have no reason to believe me, but the organization responsible for producing the report is a major broadcasting company looking to shift its interactive division away from the (floundering) model of ad-supported web content. My bet is that they know what the hell they are talking about.

Just something to consider, and good luck with your apps!

P.S. I'll also echo one point made previously: tweak the control scheme until it is awesome! Our control scheme for our first game sucked and we never managed to get it right, and our testers constantly hated and complained about it. We ditched the game before resolving the issue but it haunted us throughout.

[Faille]

Thanks for the feedback! Microtransaction isn't something that I had given any thought to, though I must admit to be somewhat against it simply because I hate them as a gamer! I guess luckily I don't think it would be suitable for any of my foreseeable projects so not much of a decision to make.

Personally I like the idea of an ad supported lite version, with a more feature rich paid full version, and I much prefer having a higher price point then $1, as long as it still represents good value for money for the consumer. In any case, I would want the ads to be as unobtrusive as possible, so definitely no pop ups. Preferably just a banner on the top or bottom, and possibly a full screen ad between rounds. fyi,first project is going to be a tower defense style game, so I think having an ad between each wave might be doable, or even ever couple of waves.

Launching does seem like its almost a make or break endeavor, much like a movies opening weekend, so I'll definitely get back to you on strategies and help as it gets closer to being launch ready. That also goes back to the advice I wanted about having the website, facebook, etc stuff setup well ahead of time also to provide whatever assistance to the launch I can.

As a slight aside, I'm also not decided wether to pursue games or apps. Seems like games sell for half what apps do, but its hard to get a good idea of which will provide better turn.

[Ferr]

Originally Posted by Faille

As a slight aside, I'm also not decided wether to pursue games or apps. Seems like games sell for half what apps do, but its hard to get a good idea of which will provide better turn.

Thing with Apps is that theres pretty much an app for everything possible by now. And while I have had access and insider knowledge of a ton of the 'hot' apps, I think I use about 4? whereas I have probably 15 games.

Biggest reason to stick to games is that you may find a niche that hasn't been touched yet (whereas apps this is probably impossible). Also heres one other thing to think about:

When I had my iphone non jailbroken, I would occaisionally buy games for anywhere up to 6$, because thats all I used it for. It wasn't really any skin off my ass for a couple bucks, and some did OK (I would play this baseball game on the bike at the gym). However I didn't buy any apps really (Had facebook, thats bout it). However, once I jailbroke my phone, it was app heaven. I couldn't really justify some of the prices for the apps on the store previously, because they seemed nifty, but anything that didn't look like shit cost more than 10$ for something I didn't even know I would use. Once they were free however why the fuck not eh?

Point being - Games are bought by kids with gift cards, or daddys stolen credit card - and they don't really care about spending a couple bucks. Apps are generally more criticized and people are less willing to let shit slide in an app as they are in a game. For example if i spend 3 bucks on a game, and it sucks, the odds are I'll just suck it up and delete it. If I buy an app for and expect it to do something and it doesn't, I'm going to ask for a refund, which I'll probably get and that comes out of the devs pocket.

[Buckaroo Banzai]

I released a game a few months ago with some moderate success, both full and lite versions, called Kids vs. Zombies.
Ultimately though, I was extremely frustrated by the entire process. Maybe because I'm a gamer and not a marketing numbers person, I couldn't figure out why people loved our game, but weren't finding our game.
Maybe I just thought too highly about it, and it wasn't as great as I thought it was? Not sure. Although for a buck, I thought it was really quite good.
We tuned the hell out of it. Controls are tight, multiple settings so the user can choose how they want to play it, no FPS hits, doesn't crash, saves your game if someone calls, etc. All sorts of bells and whistles 99% of the games out there don't have. We wanted it really polished.
We originally priced it at 2.99 but felt people weren't buying it because every game out there now is .99 and they felt it was too expensive.

I was also frustrated by the way the App store displays games. I don't know all of the numbers under the hood, but it seems that the ONLY way to make a decent amount of money is to wind up on a featured page or the top 25.
The only way to wind up on the featured page is for someone at the App store to randomly find your game and like it I guess? And the only way to wind up on the top 25 is to price your game at .99

We did everything we could to promote the game outside of buying ads. For 2 guys who created the game in our spare time (although we both work at game studios) we did so much grass roots marketing, it felt more like a job than creating the actual game did.
Created a website linking directly to the game, pages on Facebook and twitter, youtube videos, digg, just about every form of interactive ratings out there, we put our name on it.
Ultimately we wound up on the 'Featured' page in the iTunes store, not the App store. And that's where the bulk of our money was generated, that one week. I think had we been in the Featured page of the App store, we may have gotten enough hits to be on the top 25. Since we got into the top 100 just from the iTunes feature.
In the end, I don't feel all of that really did much good though, because when I go look for a game to play on my iPhone, I go to the app store and look under Featured, or the top 25. And so does everyone else I know.

Ferr, if you know of any secrets that we can still pull out, I'd greatly appreciate it. About 3 weeks ago we made the game free for a week, and got crazy amount of downloads, and people loved it. However I assumed that those download numbers would just put us in the top 25 'free' games and the minute we switched it back over to paid, we would lose our standing?
Pricing it differently? Updating it again? Somehow getting it on a featured list?

[Ferr]

I'm honestly not sure if changing from free to paid would change your status now that I think about it. I can see what I can dig up tomorrow at work but I'm going to guess that it will really.

After something has been out as long as yours I really don't know what sort of advice to give you. There aren't really any games with sales longevity (other than the ones that made the top 20 or w/e from last year according to apple). They basically release, blow up, and die, or release and die.

[Desx]

I've got some solid ideas for phone games, but I don't have the programming experience for it (only php/js). They are extremely simple and focus on gameplay instead of graphics.

[Faille]

Originally Posted by Desx

I've got some solid ideas for phone games, but I don't have the programming experience for it (only php/js). They are extremely simple and focus on gameplay instead of graphics.

That should be the motto of these boards! 8)
Personally, I find the ideas to be fairly easy to come up with, but its the implementation that is important.

[Fattyfat]

programmers make the world go round!

[Faille]

Originally Posted by Fattyfat

programmers make the world go round!

clearly the world is stuck in a loop!

[Kindnugs]

Are their still issues with the Iphone using Ajax, or has that been fixed? I have been developing a monitoring product for Windows Home Server and now want to include ajax stuff, but was reading that the iphone had issues with the update controls in ajax.

[Faille]

Anyone know how the itunes regions work? I seem to only have access to itunes australia, but I wonder what I am missing by not using itunes USA. I know there's a couple of apps I've looked for that weren't available here in aus for example. The bigger question is how this effects me as a developer.

[Ralphus]

Like Desx i have (what I think) is a pretty neat app yet lack the programming knowledge. Went so far as to check websites to go with it, but most are gobbled up like Iwarrior.com Ispy.com etc.

Since I have zero shot at creating this I'll toss it out there. Basically, my idea is a passive app that at first responds (probably best for new units) to simple phone usage. This could be anything from completing 10 calls or receiving 10 calls to adding 5 new contacts or sending certain amounts of text, etc. Come to think of it, this would probably be ok for existing units as well.

Now what this usage does is change an avatar that the owner of the phone decides to go with when they first begin using the app. The character pics would probably have to be prerendered like picking a Baldur's Gate character picture, but they could be near naked. At any rate, as the phone owner uses the phone more and more they unlock upgrades to their character. Titles, Weapons, Stats, Armor...whatever. Perhaps even hitting certain usage points would trigger an event where the owner could control the outcome or at least help their phone avatar win.

Later stages could perhaps involve other people directly. I'm not sure but I think cell phones send out a signal intermitantly when they are on. Would it be possible for phones to be setup to detect other people using that app? Then there could be random pvp (consentual I think or maybe something like mybrute.com). Otherwise, friends who have the same app may be able to work together somehow to complete otherwise impossible events.

Oh and the reason for Iwarrior and Ispy is that the core programming would be similar so if someone did not want a fantasy type app they could maybe do a spy one where only the art and content would need changing.

Meh there it is.

[Ralphus]

Oh I meant to add that I'd tried searching to see if something similar was already done, but came up empty. It's tough to search for apps and what their content is without an actual phone

I think the people who hold iwarrior.com and ispy.com are just sitting on them and not using them /shrug