I must apologize for my lack of blogging for the last couple of months. I had lost interest for a while. Since my last post the game has actually been released. It went into the app store on the 24th of Feb. It was approved in about 2 days which is much quicker than I expected. Which also meant I had to get the website up and running very quickly. Luckily good old DokuWiki and a nice template did the trick.
Since then I have started working on 2 more games while I waited for the sales. Part of the agreement with Apple is that you are not allowed to disclose sales figures for your apps to anyone outside of the people authorised to access your account. What I can say is that sales have been abismal. I mean really really poor. I had an average sales figure in mind based on the quality of the game and the little information I could get from the internet on other products sales. I then had a worse case figure in mind that would be disappointing but acceptable. Current sales per month are less than 10% of my worse case guess. The obvious question is why. I knew the game was an average simple puzzle game so I didn't expect much. I also knew that because of how the progression worked I couldn't release a free version which apparently helps a lot. I also didn't know how to market it so no one knew it existed unless they scrolled down a couple of thousand places in the game rankings on the app store. My brother started advertising for my by contacting many of the top review sites and giving away free download codes. All but one actually bothered to review it. Whether this was because they have a backlog or it was because it wasn't good enough to review I don't know. Either way the one review didn't see to effect sales.
But...... I've said all along, this game was the tester. Specifically picked because it would teach me all I needed to know about game dev on iPhone. So now I've learned how to write iPhone games I can bash on with my one game a month plan. Right? Well not quite. I got very disheartened by the whole thing and lost interest. I worked on stuff but it was all background code instead of just getting the two new game prototypes done and released. I've also accepted a job offer which meant I've been expecting to start full time work any day now. Unfortunately due to unforeseen circumstances the start date has been delayed. This has had the effect that I've lost motivation as I've been expecting to start my new exciting job any day.
So what now..... I've got back into the game coding and I plan to work flat out to release the next two titles asap. Now I have an idea of sales and marketing I expect more from these. I don't expect a lot more to be honest but I do expect more. I do now believe the only way I can make this work as a full time occupation is to either come up with a genuinely good game idea (yeah me and everyone else in the industry) or plan a larger scale game based on what seems to be popular at the moment and push it through a publisher. I've noted that the bigger better selling games often seem not to be self published, instead they have gone through a third party publisher. A third party has the funds to advertise and push the product and will know which bloggers to push to get the reviews out there.
Anyhoo, in other news I'm selling my Mac Mini. It's on eBay right now. As a replacement I have my uber setup for development. 3x22" monitors and 1x19". It's a joy to work on, and It's dual boot with Vista for when my proper job starts!
P.S. If you do have an idea for the perfect game please get in touch. I'm a coder, I should't be expected to be a designer too :)
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