A post before the end of 2008
Preface:
My mote-m experiment has effectively ended. Although it's still available in the store it has been superseded by team efforts from real artists looking to (and succeeding) at making it big on the app store. I wrote a postmortem about my experience about two months ago. I never published it because the iPhone App Store scene continues to change at such a rapid pace that anything written is immediately out-dated and irrelevant. In spite of that fact, I will share a few parts.
Introduction:
Let me say that these are my personal experiences and observations as an independent/first-time iTunes App Store game developer. I built Mote-M from the ground-up. I created the web site, wrote the code, created the art and answered everyone's kind emails. I consider Mote-M to be a success in it's original goals and a failure to achieve it's full potential. I might be wrong on any conclusions I make and apologise in advance for my poor grammar and inconsistent tense. You have been warned.
Development:
Mote Massacre, Mote-M for short, is a Tower Defense game in the style of the Desktop Tower Defense games. It started it's life in December of 2007 as a flash multiplayer game. When the iPhone SDK was announced the decision to port the game engine was made. After being approved by Apple in late-july (along with the rest of the non-special developers), I ported over the basic game and decided to launch the app as a fun toy-app for $0.99 in mid-August. The original goal was to build a fun game which would also pay for the developer registration. I really only expected maybe 20 people to buy the game. Since August I've watched the app store grow and evolve.
A Learning Experience:
Revelations I had as a complete n00b in the iTunes app store game business.
Quality of apps: The quality of apps and the relationship with an app's price and sales volume has been discussed elsewhere. It's still important to mention that with very low app prices a developer has to make money somewhere else or succeed in selling a very large volume.
Top sales lists DO matter: there are a set of passionate gamers who read the blogs and the forums and participate in the app store community but I'm willing to bet that the majority buy off the front page and the top paid apps lists. This is not surprising -- I probably wouldn't visit the forums and blogs if I weren't developing for the platform.
Rampant Piracy of Apps: The day you release your app for purchase is the same day anyone with a jailbroken phone can download your app for free. It's a fact of software -- you can't stop it, so don't try. The amount of time I spent trying to figure out the convoluted app DRM scheme could've been spent on developing a better app. To be fair the code signing stuff is pretty much a one time setup but from a goals standpoint it *just* fails.
The app store has huge potential: A developer can make a lot of money if they launch the app perfectly. Where perfectly in that sentence means: releasing an eye-catching, functional app which encourages impulse buys. Impulse buys fuel the app store right now. This may also be contributing to lower prices.
The Community:
This is one area where I was pleasantly surprised. The community of people who gathered around Mote-M are passionate and highly engaged. The e-mails I've received have been almost universally helpful and encouraging. Any developer not embracing their community is definitely losing valuable feedback.
Future Plans:
As I write this I have xcode open to a new super-secret non-game project for the mac. Once that project matures I'll return to the app store to see what sort of climate there is for indie game developers. Right now there seems to be a new flood of ports from existing games: SimCity (tm), TETRIS(r), Brothers In Arms(r), etc. Without users being able to demo apps they may stick to more well-known and bigger names instead of supporting software devs who create more original apps.
About gxjones.com:
Independent software developer Grant Jones started gxjones.com in late 2006. Grant grinds away creating another independent game with the experience he has gained from Mote Massacre and past applications he has written.
