App Store Myths and the Real World

tiny tower
There are a lot of great success stories on the App Store from people who made games in their spare time striking it rich to the small but determined company finally making it. When people see these stories and hear the market size of Apple’s growing iOS market they may think that they too can be a App Store millionaire.

Sure, they have the chance to have great success on the App Store, but if you’re thinking of throwing your hat in the ring then you’ll want to check out a great write-up on Money and the App Store.

Myth #2: Making an iPhone game is fast and cheap

Compared to making Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption, this one is actually true. Making an iPhone game shouldn’t cost $50M and take 4 years. (Well, neither should a console game, if you ask me.) But unless you’re aiming for a Doodle Jump clone, it’s still a bit of work. If you make it cheap, you’ll have a very small team (say 2 people), and it’ll take AT LEAST six months to get something polished out there.

A quick estimate of an iOS game budget:
2 salaries x 6 months

A freelance contractor for sound design

A trip to GDC or some other event to meet journalists

Hardware to work on (a new computer, or a hard drive, or an iPad)

Some software licenses, because software devs need to earn a living, too

Maybe a website or a Dropbox account

You’ll do the QA yourself? All right then…
All in all, you can’t be serious about making games and “earning a living” out of it without at least a $40k budget. (And I’m really being cheap here; I think to be competitive today on the App Store you need $100k.)

It’s worth reading the entire article – particularly the conclusion.

Link to the Gamasutra article.



February 1st, 2012 by admin

Mobile Flash is Dead

This was inevitable, Flash for mobile browsers is coming to an end and Adobe will be focusing mobile efforts to HTML5. Some guy named Steve Jobs got lambasted for pretty muchpredicting this last year, looks like he was right. Here’s my favourite part:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short.

For those of you who loved Flash on mobile don’t fret (you’ll still fret), Adobe will continue support for existing mobile Flash apps:

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

Adobe’s announcement of the death of Flash on mobiles can be found on their official blog.

Still, my biggest question is what will happen to the Apple App Store when everything is HTML5 why make it an app? There are many good reasons, but I do wonder if the app store’s days of monopoly on iOS app distribution are numbered. Ugh, maybe I’ll put more thought into this another day.



November 9th, 2011 by admin

RIP Steve Jobs

Jobs made Apple the company it is today and oversaw the creation of the iPod, iMac, and pretty much iEverythingelse. A great eye for design and here he is talking about his core approach to computers:



October 6th, 2011 by admin