Introduction
Some of you might remember how I started my indie-career earlier this year.
With the new year ahead I guess its time for a little retrospect / post mortem / whatever. At the end of this post I will inform you about the money I made so far. I will try to do this on a monthly schedule, pretty much like KreCi does on his website.
But first I’ll have to go into greater detail and tell you a bit about how I planned and funded this whole “operation”. The planning part is rather short. I was fed up with working in the video-games industry without being able to carry out my own ideas. My latest try, a browser-games company that I founded together with some former colleagues, went out of business as our financial backer lost confidence in our ideas and skills. I started working for another company but soon realized that I wanted to try it all on my own. So I:
- quit my day job (which was one of the best jobs I ever had until then)
- started coding
to get a grant for a business start-up which consisted of the unemployment pay I would receive plus some bucks for health-insurance and stuff. It would last for 9 months (from mid may 2011 to mid february 2012). After that time I had to earn enough money to keep going. Shortly after, my wife and I got the news that we’ll be having a baby in december. Even though that was the best news I ever heared, I had to consider if it is possible to get my business up and running until the end of the year and make enough money for my little family. I still decided to give it a go. I knew I could switch back to a paid job if I wanted to. So I grabbed the Corona SDK which I already evaluated some weeks before and started coding. I only owned a Samsung Galaxy S and no Apple-Hardware at all, that is why all of my early releases were available for Android first.
I released Old Fart as my first product. It was available for Android in an ad-supported, free version and a paid version. The paid version had about 40 downloads after two months. Nothing to get excited. The game was later then rejected by apple due to its theme. As you might know, they don’t accept any more fart apps. First I wanted to argue that it was a real “game” and not just a “press this button to fart” app, but one thing why I started my own business was because I did not want to mess around arguing. I wanted to code.
Considering this the typical initial difficulties, I started working on my second game Bloo Kid.
Bloo Kid
Being a retro-style-games lover myself, I thought there are enough people out there who would appreciate an 8-bit style, chiptune-fueled platformer. I read a lot about making money with apps and decided to make Bloo Kid available for free from the beginning on and place ads in the game, since I did not have a mac yet and could build for Android only. I first chose AdMob since it was the one that most people talked about. One of the main reasons why this did NOT work out very well was the placing of the ads. The game had quite a lot of downloads (currently 46k total, 13k active installs). But since you get paid for ads being clicked, you need to display the ads long enough for people to be able to click them. I however placed the ads only in the start menu (and level selection) as you can see below, so that nobody gets bothered by ads during the game. But starting the game and getting to really play a level takes players only some seconds. Not even enough to properly load an ad, let alone click on one.
The Bloo Kid title-screen displaying an ad for … Bloo Kid :)
Placing the ads only in the startmenu gave me really low fillrates and click-through-rates
Another downside was that for some reason Bloo Kid never really managed to get the CPC I saw other developers had. I switched from AdMob to InMobi as soon as Corona supported inmobi ads. It turned out to be a good decision since in relation I got a lot more money from the ad impressions I created. (infos on my monthly income can be seen below.)
I bought my mac mini from an online store that, as I later found out, sent the hardware from Thailand. It had something to do with duty-fees. The mac was a bit cheaper than the one I could buy directly from Apple, but it took aaaages until I got it. At some point I thought I got cheated, since I had to do a money transfer to a thai bank account. I even could not do it online but had to go to my bank and fill out a form. The lady at the counter must have thought I bought a woman in Thailand or something like that. On the left you can see the transfer protocol from FedEx that shows the odyssee my mac had to go through until I held it in my hands. It went from Cologne to Paris and back to Cologne for no comprehensible reason.
I then created an iOS version of Bloo Kid and started making some noise. But even though the game got featured on some websites and was even reviewed in magazines, downloads were not close to what I hoped (and needed to pick up steam). The game sold 50-60 units a day for about one week after the release but then dropped to 10 sales a day. Priced at $0.99 you can imagine that I was not satisfied at all. One good thing is that the downloads are STILL 10 a day even though I did not do any marketing at all for the last months.
Being a bit frustrated I started coding several prototypes, some of which can be viewed on my YouTube channel. But I considered none of them to have the potential to turn the tables for me.
Now starts the good part where you all should listen up…
It was a mere coincidene that I created a kids application on the weekend. I already knew there are tons of apps available where you have some pictures of animals that make a sound when you tap them. My niece and nephew (3 and 5) were always thrilled by those apps. But somehow it needed yet another impulse for me to do something similar. A friend of mine saw his little daughter (one year old) with one of those mentioned apps and the joy it gave her just to hear those animals, and he said: Why not give it a try and create something like this? So I gave it a try and created something like this :)
Farm For Toddlers
I decided to make it a bit more fancy, since I considered pictures with animals on it too sleazy. So I came up with a farm that has certain animals on it. Tapping an amimal would make it wiggle its head and make a noise. I also added some funny stuff like a moveable barn door, a hidden frog, a pond with a fish and a chimney that could spit smoke if you touched it.
I released that app for free on iOS and got 20k downloads on a single weekend. All I did was release the app and use the IDRTG to spread the word.
I immediately enhanced the app to feature two more locations that could be unlocked via in-app purchase for $0.99 and released an update. Sales on this app were like Bloo Kid in its first week, except the fact that they STAYED at 50-60 a day and did not drop after a week. Given the fact that it took me about 1,5 weeks to create the app with all its three locations, this was a blast.
Animal Puzzle For Toddlers
I then started making another kids app, Animal Puzzle For Toddlers. It features some basic puzzles with increasing difficulty sporting cute animals and rising balloons that you can pop with your finger once you completed a puzzle. That app has some crazy 80 – 120 sales every day since its release, priced at Tier 2 which is $1.99 for the user and a whopping $1.40 for me.
Dino World
Needless to say I created ANOTHER app in the vain of the other two, this time featuring dinosaur puzzles and some very basic trivia about prehistoric animals: Dino World was born. It is not yet as succesfull as the Animal Puzzle, but also has some 30 – 50 in-app purchases a day.
The Android Market
All my apps are available for free on the android market featuring ads. The market is now changing so that you can also earn some money with paid apps, but for now the “free and ad-supported” strategy seems better for my apps. I might change this as soon as Corona supports in-app billing for Android apps.
Since I got some nice download-numbers by now, the ad income from InMobi every month is not bad at all. You can see this below, too.
I recently came up with an idea that sky-rocketed the ratings for my android apps. Where you have to pay on the iDevices to unlock all the content, you are asked to rate the game instead on android. It simply opens the market page and unlocks the game in the background. Most people really rate the game, and many of them even write a small review, mostly positive.
Current Income
As I promised I will tell you about my current income or rather the one for december. I will keep you updated how my income evolves in the coming months.
Ads income December 2011
iOS: $72.46
Android: $601.5
Appstore Sales December 2011
iOS: $3.766
Total: $4439.96
In EURos, that’s roughly my old salary! And January is looking even better than December did.
I am currently working on another Kids App. If it has only half the success of the previous ones, and sales keep as constant as they are, I will start working on a “real” game again. Maybe I’ll pick up one of my prototypes or start something new. I’m not quite sure at the moment. But that’s exactly the point where I wanted to be: have enough income to work on whatever I think is best. Without too many people around me who tell me what to do :)
Phew, this is a hell of a blogpost. I hope it can motivate you a bit. I am sure there are a million question right now and a lot of things I missed in this post, so please write anything you want to know down in the comments section. Good luck to you all!
I played around with Corona a month or so ago but I was completely turned off by Lua. The syntax, for some reason, does not feel natural to me. I stopped using it and decided to look at other platforms.
Your blog has inspired me to jump back into Corona and give it another go. My goals are pretty low, in my opinion: develop a game (or games) playable on iOS and Android that will pay for the Corona SDK license. If I can achieve that small step, I’ll set a loftier goal.
Back to you… I have some questions if you don’t mind.
* From the looks of it, you have ad-supported versions of your kids games. I’m sure this is common practice, but was that a difficult decision, and was there anything special you had to do to make sure the ads were age appropriate?
* Did you run into the Lua roadblock that I did, at any point? The two languages I feel most comfortable in are C# and Python, and transitioning to Lua was awkward for me.
* There seems to be two models you used. One was a free app that had an in-app unlockable, and the other model was an ad-supported version with a separate premium app. Which model was more beneficial to you? Do you think that it is easier to convert a freemium user with an in-app purchase, or does the lite vs. premium model fare better?
* You took a bold step of purchasing Apple hardware so that you could expand to the iOS platform. I call it bold mainly because I assume your family relied on your income to survive. The move obviously paid off immensely for you, but was there any part of you that considered only going with Android?
* What devices did you go out and purchase so that you could properly test your games? I’m sure most would assume that you would need at least one iphone/ipod touch and one ipad to test iOS, and at least one phone and one tablet for Android. Is that assumption correct?
* Post-release support is something that many devs can easily overlook. They often forget that supporting users after the final product is released can be time consuming. What were your experiences with this? Any funny support issues to tackle? Were there a lot of needy people?
* In regards to the question above, which was more time consuming to support: iOS users or Android users?
* As far as graphics go, did you need to make many variations of each image in order to support the multitude of devices, or did you go with a one-size-fits-all approach? I do know that Corona SDK has an API for making this easier. If I recall, it involved renaming each variation with a different identifier in the file name and then using some code to do the selecting. Did you utilize this function?
I apologize for all of the questions, but you have earned the right to be able to answer them, and I wish you nothing but the best of luck in the future. I’ll be keeping an eye on you.
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eiswuxe Reply:
February 3rd, 2012 at 11:26
@brdma,
I myself had not problems with LUA so far. It took some days to get used to it (I used Java and C# a lot before, as well as ActionScript3). It surely lacks some sophisticated stuff from C#, but it absolutely fits my needs.
As for Bloo Kid, the “conversion-rate” from free to paid was about the same rate as it is for my in-app purchases. So for my apps it does not seem to make a difference which model I pick. If a user wants to get the full version, he does not mind to download another app.
As you can see from my reports, most of my money comes from iOS. I dont know how my apps would SELL on android if I made them paid. Chances are that I would sell as much as I have inapp-purchases on iOS. But with the current model of “free with ads” on android, I would not be able to make enough money only on android.
I started developing Corona with my Samsung Galaxy S, which is still my only Android device and the only one I do testing on. I will buy an android tablet soon if my income stays this high. But I have some friends with other android hardware that do some testing now and then for me, mainly phones. I am not able to test on tablets that often :(
I bought an iPod 4th gen as I started developing for iOS. After many complaints that Bloo Kid would not run on older iPhone 3 and iPod Touch 2nd gen, I had to buy a 2nd gen iPod touch as well. Its insance that these things still cost nearly as much as 4th gen!
After my first success, I made the step and bought an iPad. So on the iOS side I now have enough devices to test. On Android I will buy a tablet soon. But for the start I think its sufficient to have ONE device for each platform. Corona makes you “view” your app as an iPad, so that was a good benefit for me to see how the graphics would look like and which parts of the screen would be cropped on the iPhone if I make the images fit for the iPad.
I have quite some support issues, mainly in the support section of my website, but also per email. Most of the complaints were about my puzzles freezing on the iPad though. Its roughly about 1-2 support-requests a day.
I think that a good support is crucial to prevent bad reviews in the appstore. Plus, I want all of my users happy. Its impossible to achieve this, but I’ll keep on trying :)
iOS is more time consuming. Many android users are surprised to see that I really answer their support questions. But iOS users really demand an answer. It reflects the attitude that users have towards apple and google :D
I made exactly ONE version of the graphics which are used across all platforms. It would cost me too much time to make multiple variations. I always create the graphics with the iPad resolution (1024×768) in mind. So on the iPhone, it looks the same but the edges are a bit cut off, and on android it scales.
Sorry if I did not go that much into detail for the answers. If there is still something that you want to know, just ask. I will answer it then in my next income report, so that everyone gets the info!
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pretty good blog, actually an inspirimg story. i have the animal puzzle app for my two year old. its crazy how much it actually teaches him. also keeps him busy, looking forward to any other new toddler apps you come out with.
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 25th, 2012 at 08:19
@slo,
I’m glad your kid likes the app! My upcoming app will be finished in about 2-3 weeks, so stay tuned :)
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thank you so much for sharing.
besides coral draw, what other software/tools you suggest for art work?
thanks
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 17th, 2012 at 16:13
@mila,
Of course there is adobe photoshop and adobe illustrator. Those are more or less the adobe equivalent to corel photo paint and corel draw. But they are way more popular.
Then there is GIMP which is completely free. I bet there are many other free image tools out there, just google around a bit to find them.
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Thanks for sharing, really nice! Gives me the motivation boost that I need. I consider to become indie game developer but still worry about its future. So I step forward carefully (and still hanging on to my day job). What you do inspires me to do what seems to be impossible. Thanks again.
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Really inspiring post!
Curious, what type of grant did you receive? It looks like you are in Germany, however figured there might be something in the US as well.
Many thanks for sharing!
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 16th, 2012 at 09:41
@Aaron,
Since this has been asked several times now I will include the answer to this question in my next income report. So stay tuned :)
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Why do you think Bloo Kid isn’t selling better?
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 16th, 2012 at 09:43
@Ben Mc,
Looking at the downloads of the LITE version I realized that Bloo Kid has a conversion rate of about 10%, like all of my apps. But is has way more downloads of LITE version than my puzzle games.
I think the main reason is the lack of visibility. Most people that WOULD buy the game dont know about it. I think the hit rate for the search results is higher with the kids apps since parents search for words like “puzzle” or “toddlers” and therefore find my apps.
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Congratulations and thanks for writing this article! How is life with a new little one?
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 18:08
@Greg Hluska,
it’s as stressful as it is fun =)
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Hi,
How did you decide on Corona SDK ?
Me and my son are looking to learn this type of stuff and the choices are confusing. We are not sure what to go with to be honest.
We have downloaded about 3 or 4 different frameworks, IDE’s etc… and was gonna start going through them.
Also was you a developer already, I know you said you worked in Video Games before hand.
Dave
[Reply]
eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 18:11
@Dave Baxter,
I will write a blog post for ansca mobile (makers of corona) telling my reasons why I chose corona.
Like I said before, I chose Corona since it brought results instantly. You can just sit down and start writing your game logic, without having to worry about any low-level stuff or writing an imageloader or somehting like that.
The featureset was absolutely sufficient for what I wanted to do.
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Great article, I’m fascinated by the steps involved in developing and marketing apps for the Android and iOS markets. I am a Web developer but have been reading about mobile development and would like to try my hands at building a small app for both platforms, so this article is of special interest to me!
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Nice job! As an “old” game developer I suppose make games for you is a fast activity, related to someone doing it for fun in night time ;)
Well, your numbers look great and I hope to reach them in the future. Besides, I outta code for iOS too, Android is not enough to live with, at least for indie and poor developers like me.
I have a question: did you choose Corona SDK for some special reason? There are out there different SDK making the same job, one only code for different platforms. I’m starting using Marmalade (old AirPlay), others use Unity3D.
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 18:07
@Zappescu,
yes it defeinitely helps having a background as gamescoder.
I chose Corona since it brought results instantly. Nearly no setup. Plus, it uses LUA which is quite nice to work with. AirPlay is C++, and I never wanted to write C++ code again. I loose too much time tracking down memory leaks :P
Unity3D was a bit over the top since I wanted to focus on 2D games first.
I might look into unity in the near future.
Stencyl is interesting as well, since you can build for Flash and iOS. Android and HTML5 is said to come soon.
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Did you advertise / do seo? How does an average user find your apps? I guess it’s not trough top 25…
Thanks for the informative article.
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 18:03
@Merlin,
I mainly used http://www.innovatty.com/twitter/IDRTG/ to spread the word about my new apps. The only real “marketing” I did was that I took about $500 I earned with inmobi ads which I then used to start an own ad campaign, also with inmobi. So ads for my apps got displayed in other apps.
The impact was rather meager. I noted a slight increase in download numbers, but not as much as I had hoped for $500 bucks.
I think most users find my app by searching for “puzzle” or “kids” or “toddler” or someting similar. Search-results for “toddlers” (with s at the end) contain all my “… For Toddlers” apps under the first 25 results. At least in the german appstore.
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Great read and congrats on doing so well :) Do you find that you get more downloads from the iPad or iPhone for the toddler related apps – it would feel as though it would be more iPad focussed but would be interesting to see.
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 17:58
@Mike,
I’ll have to check to give a detailde answer and will include the information in my next income report. According to the stats from applyzer.com my apps seem to be ranked higher on the iPad than on the iPhone, which somehow validates your assumption :)
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Gahh. I absolutely have no clue in doing vector art and drawing..
This seriously puts me down a lot as it is impossible to cover costs if I am to hire an artist/ illustrator =/
[Reply]
eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 13:53
@WJG,
I did not have that much of experience in vector arts as well. Its all learning by doing. I started composing graphics for “Farm For Toddlers) out of basic shapes. Circles for the eyes, head and body, rectangles for the legs etc.
There are minimalistic art styles that still look good. Like in “Another World” or even Minecraft.
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Great post – this sort of transparency inspires me to work on my own stuff and be just as transparent! I actually think the early failures to generate a profit were just as interesting as the latter successes – it’s clear there are still niche markets where a new entrant can make a solid profit, which disproves my fears!
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I messaged you on Twitter and asking you here as well.
Did you have any prior experience of making games?
Being a web dev like me who never ever made games, how would you suggest to proceed to make a simple 2d Physics game? What re the steps involve.
[Reply]
eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 13:49
@Adnan,
Sorry, I oversaw that twitter message.
I have indeed a quite profound background in making games, since I worked in the german video-gaming-industry for the last years.
But the recent apps that I made, that kids apps in particular, are not quite as complex as most of the games I worked on. So they dont need that much of programming skills or that much of balancing and polishing. Most critical was the interface design (if one can call it that way) to make sure the apps are easy to use.
Most helpful was still testing with the target audience (my niece and nephew, 3 and 5). They provided the best feedback.
So most of my experience was rather subordinate.
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Great article, what ads provider are you using?
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 11:30
@Andre Carlucci,
I started using admob but was not satisfied with the revenue it created.
I then switched to InMobi (http://www.inmobi.com/) and am currently pretty satisfied with it. Yet I will experiment with different ad providers in the future and post about my experiences.
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Were all you iOS apps developed with corona?
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 11:26
@Cory,
yupp :)
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Did you do the artwork yourself or did you get an artist to do that part?
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 11:28
@Miles Egan,
Yes, I did all the art myself. Its mostly vector art I created with corel draw and then created pngs with corel photopaint. I started using a wacom bamboo pad for drawing more naturally. Works great, I can only recommend it :)
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Hey,
It would be interesting for you to share also the legal stuff. How much taxes you pay for example? It seems you are in Germany. I am too. Don’t you have to pay quite high pension and health insurance rates on your earnings too?
Thanks!
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eiswuxe Reply:
January 13th, 2012 at 10:24
@Alessio
you are right, I forgot about that legal stuff. I will write a separat blogpost about that in the near future, since it’s too much information for a comment and it has a better visibility for other people that are interested in it. I think I will include it in the income report for january, so you need to be patient for two weeks :)
cheers,
Jörg
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Very interesting, thanks for sharing!
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Thanks for pointing my income reports. Great post and numbers! I have learned some with it as well… Need to go write something for iOS. Good luck!
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Great to hear you’re doing fine ;)
Now everyone out there go and make some animal puzzle games :-)
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What a great article, I’m sure it will be very inspiring for all indie developers and people thinking of taking the path :) Thanks!!
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Must say:
Thank you very much for sharing HOPES with others like me!
Best Regards,
Rodrigo.
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Awesome read :) How great that you manage to get constant downloads on your app!
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Great ! Thanks for sharing your revenue details :)
Seems that indie dev life is still a viable way !
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