Ask HN: How much money did you make from a mobile game you developed alone? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How much money did you make from a mobile game you developed alone?

24 pointsgillyb21 comments

How much of it was from ads, and how much from in-app purchases ? Did the game cost money to download ? And how much time did it take you to develop ?

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Neither of mine are in the app store any more, but apps with similar names are.

Santa's Last Stand - 3-4 mos - $250 since 4 years ago, free + 2.99 paid

Bank Defense - 3-4 months, - $100 since 4 years ago, free + 1.99 paid (approx--I don't remember)

mobile game market is _hard_ unless you're flight control/angry birds/candy crush. The market is saturated and Zynga (for example) has entire teams of people to make sure consumer dollars flow to them and not us (indies).

You might get lucky though! :-]

>mobile game market is _hard_ unless you're flight control/angry birds/candy crush.

Is there any angle to get around this, for even modest sales? Most people here seem to be saying that they barely cover cost, if that. Very discouraging :-( There has to be something that small guys can do that big guys can't.

Check out my post. I was definitely able to cover costs.

Made about £15 with dino sprint. It was never really about the money tbh, I just wanted people to enjoy something that I had created. It has 10,000+ downloads which im extremely happy with. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wockawocka...

I'm in same ballpark, I have ads from which I made about $20 with 26k downloads (and 1.4k current installs), and I have in-game purchases from which I made 0. It seems some people really enjoy it, and give a good review, others post something like 'garbage' and give it a 1 star review https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mildspring...

I thought I put together a decent game, but I didn't have any knowledge of how to market, and no real desire to put the time in on that aspect. It made a sale a week for the first 2 years and is tapering off to a few sales per year. I think I will just drop it to free and eliminate the free version some time soon. Perhaps I should even release the source.

If you want to make money selling games you need to be prepared to put a lot of work in. Otherwise you should consider it to be buying lottery tickets which rarely works well.

http://tactitionprogramming.com/oceancommotion.html iPad only

I launched a turn taking two player real-time board game in HN 4 years ago, with zero returns so far. It took 3 months to build the web app, another 3 months for android app. But, lots of PR for the stunt. It is still up. 30K game instances so far and 3K players.

Recently I am having thoughts like should I relaunch this ? But won't want to do it without someone to look it as a business. This game feels like Chess but it is quick to learn, setup and finish.

Play with AI here: http://obaghchal.com/computer

For discoverability you should make the rules accessible front and center on the game page.

I just clicked through and spent a few minutes clicking around ... I couldn't find the rules anywhere without clicking through to Wikipedia.

Interestingly, I do collect about 10% of my visitors from mobile on my sudoku webapp, which was NOT designed for mobile. A mobile version would be possible but since it doesn't make much I haven't bothered. Still, it's better than the zero some report for their mobile game :)

http://sudokuisland.com

App discovery was one of the main reasons I decided to learn webapp first. Unless you make a graphic heavy game, eventually HTML5 apps will perform on mobile :)

Made about $5000 from in-app purchases and about $4000 from ads across 3 games. All free games at http://mugalon.com/ .

I am doing this on the side while freelancing (or having a day job before) as income. Most games did not have any monetization for most of their life and I am sure I could get this up one order of magnitude if I put in some work.

My free game (with ads) hasn't made enough to cover the dev license.. I think mobile games are one of those things where you either make the top 10 or languish in purgatory.

Made it in about a week: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smashcorp....

Great job with the quotes in your promo video! :)

just checked, $5 since it launched a year ago :]

going to buy myself an ice cream.

Tried this as an hobby for a while, modded some with Corona and Unity, barely profitable, discontinued. Trailers still here: https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCUv8iB1TUHHulj0OdWVS3Rw

Here are some stats from the first couple months for my last game.

Highest Positions in US App Store.

All Games US #54

Adventure (Games) #7

Arcade (Games) #23

Board (Games) #4

Music (Games) #2

Revenue

$18,430 Interstitials - Static & Video

$5,180 Banner Ads

$1,515 IAP to Remove Ads

=============

TOTAL $25,125

What year was this? Recent?

June 2015 - July 2015

at a tangent: one thing I miss is "Under the Radar" from this Indonesian website. Here's a sample page. Google Translate works well enough. There's a bunch of good games scattered through those pages and most of them don't use horrible freemium models.

https://id.techinasia.com/game-radar-zeen-tiny-acrobats-dan-...

Does anyone know anything similar?

All 4 of my games/apps have netted me zero. Oh well.

...here you are with an opportunity to link to them, and you don't. You don't link to them here in this thread, or in your profile.

I would have taken a look at them (if they're on iOS).

Well, they're deleted/not acually games/terrible. Here's the least embarassing thing I have there: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.got.game.a...

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