Universal News
0+0+0+0 = $500,000
by RevStu (October 26th, 2010 at 12:35 pm)
The staggering degree to which the App Store has rewritten the entire economic model of the videogames industry was illustrated in spectacular fashion today with the revelation that Backflip Studios (publishers of games like Paper Toss, NinJump and Buganoids) is currently raking in over $500,000 a month in revenues from the free ad-supported versions of its games alone.
In an interview with Mobile Entertainment, Backflip CEO Julian Farrior claimed that the company’s revenues had tripled since March this year, and that the huge numbers of players of the free versions of the games (according to Farrior, 15 million “active users” every month) was generating 600-800 million ad impressions and the half-a-million bucks that translated to, on top of the money Backflip makes from people upgrading to ad-free versions.
Speaking as someone who can’t stand ads and happily paid for the (59p/€0,79/99¢) ad-free versions of Paper Toss, World Tour and NinJump, these are truly staggering figures to have produced from a modest stable of very well-made but incredibly simple games. It’d be intriguing to know how the paid-version revenues compare to the cash the ads are pulling down – something Farrior didn’t reveal – but clearly freemium works, and works bigtime. That’s one hell of an amount of money to be making from games that people can (legally) choose whether to pay for or not.
Is this for Iphone of Facebook social games or mixture?
Personally, if I were a small developer (sadly, the diet isn’t taking), I’d find it far more attractive to work on an iOS game at this point or instead for example an Xbox Indie game.
Simply, I’ve heard plenty of stories like this about iOS devs raking in cash, and far too many about Xbox Indie developers getting a pittance.
And if I were a typical large developer, I’d be looking at my middling sales for my middling traditional console game and wondering if I hadn’t missed the boat.
There does seem to be two sides to the indie dev story, at least as far as the reporting goes. It’s either “X makes a bajillion quid; there’s gold in them thar hills” or “Y makes feck all; don’t quit your day job” but seldom anything in between.
I don’t think there are many people in between.
As it’s so hit driven, each game is either in the charts and a hit (lots of cash) or not and not (no cash). There isn’t a middle ground to shoot for, yet.
There is evidence that the App Store is changing that, although I’m not so sure “Indie” has the same meaning given there is a single publisher/distributor on which devs are utterly dependent. But anyway.
There’s undoubtedly a big drop off past the top 25 but not to zero and may be significantly above that. Even things like Run! which hasn’t really charted at all (http://podgamer.com/154/an-infinite-distance-left-to-run/) has still sold* 380,000 copies in just over a year mainly because it’s a good game.
* based on, erm, OpenFeint leaderboards which is probably not too reliable admittedly.
There are plenty of people in that middle ground, some of which are making loads of cash. This report from the iTeleport guys (high-price, low-volume, no charting) shows the opposite extreme to the 59p chart hit, for example.
With games, this issue is that we either hear about megahits or from whining devs who’ve made nothing, despite—in many of those cases—doing little or nothing to try and make anything (i.e. no marketing, not even contacting review sites, and so on). Admittedly, there is something of a lottery situation about iOS, but that’s no different to any other platform or market. Your product is ‘lost’ without marketing in the App Store, in the same way your product is ‘lost’ in the shelves of Tesco if no-one knows about it and goes looking for it.