Is anyone making iOS games right now?

[MattCour]

I'd love to network and share what I've learned making iOS games over the last 8 months or so here.. I've been inspired by many here so I'd love to help others if possible. Anyone interested in the subject feel free to chime in here.


-Matt

 

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[Genium]

My brother is really into web and game dev. He is going to be purchasing a Droid/iOS development software this christmas and start working on games for both droids/iOS. He already has made pretty cool games so it will be interesting. Nor him or I have any experience in that market though

 

[MattCour]

I outsourced all of the work through Elance. It was an interesting experience! It's amazing how much of a difference your theme and icon/screenshots make.

 

[bombaytea]

I just read "App Empire" by Chad Mureta........published in 2012.
Make me want to go for that business model.
He is selling a course on his website for almost $2K which
I don't have right now.

He sure lays out all of the correct steps.

 

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[MattCour]

I read Chad's book and also took the course......... The book has a lot of gems but is getting a bit outdated since tech is constantly evolving. His focus is more on creating utility type apps rather than games. From my experience, photo apps or other utilities tend to have much stronger staying power once they become popular if that makes sense.. Every one I've learned from focuses on market research though regardless of what you want to create..

 

[bombaytea]

True,

But his new course teaches mostly about re-skinning code
and is almost all about games instead of utilities.

 

[Mike39]

Should have been on here 6 months ago, every other thread was about app development, haven't heard from most of them so we'll assume they all made millions and are to busy to reply (sarcasm).

I've built an app, it's not something I would do again without investor money and on a larger scale.

 

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[bombaytea]

Thanks Mike39,

I was kinda thinking the app Gold rush may be over...........still
researching; though.

 

[MattCour]

Reskinning is a great short term tool, but the games have almost no long term value unfortunately. I had 3 reskins done and one original game so far.

 

[MattCour]

There's massive money in the app business but I think for a newbie it's super difficult. There's really no guarantee that your app will be a hit even if you've covered every base before launching. You could def blow thousands very easily!

 

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[PopEmersen]

I've built an app, it's not something I would do again without investor money and on a larger scale.

Same here.

 

[bombaytea]

Thanks guys,

What are your thoughts on the gaming biz; i.e.: Grand Theft Auto?
Too much money to get involved?
Do you need to be a big player in this industry to make it work?

Any ideas of future trends in mobile, gaming, etc?

Thanks again,

Warren

 

[Swoop]

I made an app for iOS, a small game. Outsourced on Odesk.

It has done ok, but I havnt had the time to really market it like I should. Havnt made a profit yet, but I should in a few months. I let it sit idle for several weeks and have had some sales trickle in, but I have recently circled back to working on it again so I hope that I can get things to pick up again with some new marketing strategies over the next few days.

I have learned that it is pretty expensive and it does take a while to get your money back at .70 cents a pop (after fees), but with several apps going at once you could make pretty decent money, especially once you nail down your marketing strategies and cross promote your own apps within each other. When I get some more money saved up I am definitely going to make more apps. I have noticed some trends in the market that I would like to target some time soon.

Feel free to PM me any time if you want to talk specifics.

Swoop.

 

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[oddball]

Check out my biz, starting to come together nice.

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/sh...an-App-Company?p=309537&viewfull=1#post309537

 

[HarleyB]

I am wanting to invest a large sum of my money online, and need help doing so. I have heard of people profiting $180k a day from apps. Do you know anyone that is making that kind of profit I could talk to? I am probably going to be investing $50-200k over the course of December and the end of January.

 

[damien275x]

I programmed a Trivia game from scratch and launched it last month, and it has been ticking along well. An incredible amount of time and effort went into building it - I did all of the database development, wrote all of the application logic, all of the user interface, developed all the sound effects, and developed all of the graphics on my own. I had to tie it into Facebook, Google Analytics, Admob/Advertisement SDKs etc. I learnt a lot. It cost me $0.00, but took 2 months and a lot of staying up late after work, caffeine, and swearing my head off at 2am. Honestly I think I may consider outsourcing all of the 'dumb' work to get projects near 80% completion, then put all the "expensive" bells and whistles on myself. Marketing it is even harder. I've spent hours on FB, Twitter, advertisement banners and tweaking.

I am lucky I come from a strong technical background - I started as an IT trainee in 2008 and have been programming for 5 years in a workplace capacity - I've since quit because I got sick of constantly reinventing the wheel in terms of damn meeting room booking systems. Monetisation - Displays a full page ad at the end of each game. I don't really want to show ads on launch (everyone recommends it) - I hate pissing users off.

The app's page is @ https://www.facebook.com/TriviCup if I am allowed to plug products?! PM me if you want to know more.

 

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[Danax]

If anyone is interested in learning how to make iOS applications, Stanford just updated their free course for iOS7. It's on iTunes U.

Here's the link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/course/developing-ios-7-apps-for/id733644550

- D

 

[splok]

Thanks guys,

What are your thoughts on the gaming biz; i.e.: Grand Theft Auto?
Too much money to get involved?
Do you need to be a big player in this industry to make it work?

Any ideas of future trends in mobile, gaming, etc?

Thanks again,

Warren

GTAV - Around a quarter of a billion dollar budget and riding the back of a 16 year old franchise...

How big of a player do you think you'd need to be to put that together?


Future trends? inverted bell curve

Big games get bigger and more expensive to make, and thus fewer in number. GTAV probably could have spend more than double their budget and still been profitable. Consider how much money WoW could have spent on its initial development and still been in the black after a decade.

Small games get trivially easy to make (they already are really). This means there will be massive amounts of terrible games (just like web pages) and that marketing is more of a problem for game makers than content creation.

 

[bombaytea]

Thanks for the info Splok.
I sure would like to have that kind of budget to make
an awesome game for the masses.

 

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[MattCour]

Swoop,

Unless your smaller game initially had success, I wouldn't invest much more into it. Focus on making more games instead. See what themes are common in the category you want to go for then try to improve on what's there already.

 

[MattCour]

Harley, any apps that are in the top 50 Grossing or higher prob make that much $$$. The big issue is once you get in the top charts, you cannot stay there without massive $$$$ ad spending. I've read Supercell spends over $100k / day buying traffic. Who can compete with that?!?

 

[MattCour]

I agree 100% with Splok's comments. GTA V is in another world $$ wise!!

 

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[MattCour]

Check out my biz, starting to come together nice.

https://www.thefastlaneforum.com/sh...an-App-Company?p=309537&viewfull=1#post309537

Nice job so far bro! I've done 4 games so far under Two Ten Mobile, LLC. Here's one of mine

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-candy-jumper-free/id659451240?mt=8

check out www.bluecloudsolutions.com for some great info on making small games cheap.

 

[oddball]

Nice job so far bro! I've done 4 games so far under Two Ten Mobile, LLC. Here's one of mine

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/awesome-candy-jumper-free/id659451240?mt=8

check out www.bluecloudsolutions.com for some great info on making small games cheap.

Your game looks good, care to share download numbers and that kind of stuff?

 

[MattCour]

Your game looks good, care to share download numbers and that kind of stuff?

Thanks man, I can introduce you to the team that built them, you can prob negotiate the price to around $1K each. I'm at around 220,000 DLs or so right now. My best game by far is Sweet Candy Roller Coaster, it generated 75% of those so far. The ARPU(avg rev per user) on these small games is between 3 and 5 cents each, which is peanuts unfortunately.. The shitty part about these is that no matter how good your game is the DLs trail off really hard after the first few weeks.

 

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[MattCour]

Oddball,

There is also a really big demand for source code.. Most small game makers right now are buying source code then reskinning a million times to create new games.. I have Awesome Candy Jumper source code listed on www.chupamobile.com for sale now. If you own the code to your games outright, you should sell licenses for some nice passive income... Also try www.sellmyapp.com, I've had success there selling also...

 

[oddball]

Right now I actually purchased a bunch of app source code but just a licenses copy. Actually, if you could send me the developers info, that would be awesome. Are they in the states or overseas? If I could get it do around $1000 in the US, I would be happy. Right now I am doing one with someone in Vietnam and the time zone is hurting. Small project so I took a chance on it.

 

[oddball]

I'm not sure if you noticed but I have seen my apps fall to a level and hover there, I do no marketing and they just stay around the same amount of downloads and IAP's. So my theory is pick up source code for cheap, do a reskin which I've noticed is a lot cheaper than I thought, and throw them out there. I've been meaning to play with paid marketing and see what happens. I'd like to add 10-15 apps in 2014, that is my goal. I look for ones that have good IAP's, and obviously are fun. I'm going to start implementing ads in everything, but very few. Just one when you start up, and then after every 3 levels or whatever is equivalent. Then I will add a remove ad IAP for $.99 and see what happens.

 

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[MattCour]

Right now I actually purchased a bunch of app source code but just a licenses copy. Actually, if you could send me the developers info, that would be awesome. Are they in the states or overseas? If I could get it do around $1000 in the US, I would be happy. Right now I am doing one with someone in Vietnam and the time zone is hurting. Small project so I took a chance on it.

I used an agency and they did great work as you can see from the artwork. Snow runs the company and he's on Elance at Rich Forest. They're based in China so the time kind of sucks, around a 12 hr difference or so.. snow_pine1987 on Skype if you want to bypass Elance. He did a kick a$$ job for me and I found him to be trustworthy, but do your due diligence anyway bro... Mention Matt C sent you =)

 

[MattCour]

I'm not sure if you noticed but I have seen my apps fall to a level and hover there, I do no marketing and they just stay around the same amount of downloads and IAP's. So my theory is pick up source code for cheap, do a reskin which I've noticed is a lot cheaper than I thought, and throw them out there. I've been meaning to play with paid marketing and see what happens. I'd like to add 10-15 apps in 2014, that is my goal. I look for ones that have good IAP's, and obviously are fun. I'm going to start implementing ads in everything, but very few. Just one when you start up, and then after every 3 levels or whatever is equivalent. Then I will add a remove ad IAP for $.99 and see what happens.

I've absolutely found the same to be true with my games but they're slowly trending lower. Just an FYI 80% of my rev has been from full screen ads.. I use Revmob and Chartboost right now with some decent success. Vungle makes video ads, but I've never used them. Applovin and Playhaven also do ads for games as well. I make much less money with IAPs. If you dont use it yet, get the App Annie app on your phone, it's free and kicks a$$ for analytics!