Letters to friends

I spent the last 6 months writing games for the iPhone, hoping to strike it rich, or at least earn enough to cover my costs.

In that time I have released 4 games, plus lite versions, plus 1 quick free slide puzzle game.

The results are now in, and it has been a complete and utter financial disaster.

6 months after my first game was released, I have earned a grand total of $170 US from sales.

This would work out to about 25 cents an hour, or it would if I hadn’t spent $200 US on sprites for my first game.

So after 6 months I am $25 in the hole.

With the way the App store is going, I think things are going to get even harder, as more and more games are released, with a lot more development, artwork, music and marketing put into them than I could ever hope to achieve on my own.

I think the worst part has been logging onto the Apple developers website every day and seeing 1 or 2 sales across all 4 of my games. The statistics update at 10:30 am here, and it has been a daily compulsion of mine to log on and feel terrible about my lack of success.

Still, things could be worse, I got to spend a few month doing something that I enjoy, and although I didn’t make any money, I also didn’t go into debt.

The first part of my rehabilitation is admitting my failure, which I am doing in this post.

The second part is to lower the price of my games to free. I will lose the  $1.40 or so a day that I was earning, but hopefully it will break my depressing habit of checking the daily sales and getting upset.

Game development as a hobby is a lot more fun for me than game development as a failed business model.

Thank you to everyone who has supported me in this endevour. Your support has meant a lot to me.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 12:30 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.