And when people say that Angry Birds has reached 200 million downloads, remember that this includes their Lite and Free versions. Think kids and teenagers with iPods, for instance.
A lot of iOS users don’t have a credit card.You just need to reach 0.1% of them with a $1 app and you’ll make $200k!” My warnings: “Okay, there are 200 million users on the App Store. This is an easy mistake to make when you try to do the math with your dev buddy during a coffee break. Myth #1: There are so many iPhones and iPads out there that any decent game can make you rich. There are plenty of ways to view the App Store, but my point is that you might be a bit surprised by what the App Store really means in terms of money. But first, I would like to quickly give my opinion on few of the App Store myths you may believe if you’re not an experienced iOS developer. In this article, I will present all of the post-mortems and figures I’ve found interesting, and I will also explain how SQUIDS fits into the overall picture. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be. Emeric Thoa is the creative director and co-founder of The Game Bakers, an independent game studio that recently released the turn-based action RPG SQUIDS on iOS.Įighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie.