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He implies that this happened organically, without paid installs. And his price point is $.99 at the time of this writing. And he doesn't use IAP.

Those are choices he's made that drastically limit the upside he could earn. I respect the hell out of those choices, to be clear. But they are choices.

It's well understood that the way to actually strike gold in mobile gaming these days is to get to a point where you're arbitraging paid installs. You've got IAP hooks up and running, you've got quasi-addictive mechanics dialed in, and your blended CAC is less than your LTV on converted installs. You spend a boatload on installs every week, which are recouped by the revenue you earn from your casuals and especially your whales. Now you're in the shitty IAP/P2W business, alongside everyone else. Now your game kinda sucks. But now you're minting money.

That's pretty much the BigPublisher playbook. Indies can run it, too, albeit only to a point, and with a lot of soul sacrifice.

All of that said and done, I am impressed and inspired by what the author has been able to accomplish organically. And, while his earnings may seem depressing from an outside perspective, they are respectable, and to be respected. If he wants to build a larger business from here, again, he'll have to make some Faustian choices as outlined above. Or he'll need to raise his price points and/or adopt a high/low versioning approach.

This is the way the world is going to work until Apple and Google decide to put the smackdown on paid installs. Which they won't, because their big publishers make them so much money, and their big publishers have optimized a formula reliant on paid installs and drowning out the small guy. (Theoretically, feature placements are supposed to counteract this phenomenon -- but, as the author points out, they accrue most readily to the big publishers, who can afford to invest millions in production values, and whose games are big enough to be itemized on the App Store's monthly earnings statements.)

I think P2W has ruined IAP for most people. I highly like IAP when it's stuff like paying for chapters of a game that you then own permanently and pay for when you want. Admittedly that's a less exciting business model, but I'm a lot happier paying $5 for a chapter of a game 4 times with the possiblity of new content in the future than $15.00 up front without having played the game.

What sucks is the IAP are business models where you pay to win, have a limited ability to play the game on any day, and the advantage from paid goes away if you don't play on any day. Those models basically create crappy but addictive games that are essentially legalized lottery systems for minors without the cash winnings.

Agreed. IAP for additional content is totally cool. Hell, even IAP for things like rare items or what have you are fine with me. We're just starting to toe a line at that point, but we haven't crossed it yet. We cross that line when we bury basic game functionality behind an IAP paywall: paying for "gems" to keep playing, or paying for items necessary to beat certain stages. Now we're in P2W Land, and the clouds above our heads are choked with grime and soot.

IAP done in a player-friendly way won't earn you P2W-level megabucks. But it'll do slightly better for you than a pure pay-once model will.

Sorry for the (probably) stupid question: what's IAP? I can't grasp it from the context.

In-App Purchase

and how about P2W? All these abbreviations need a cheat-sheet!

"pay to win"

P2W is pay to win. I had to google it too. But basically, requiring IAP in order to win -- not possible (or maybe extremely difficult) to win without making some in-app purchase(s).

> Hell, even IAP for things like rare items or what have you are fine with me.

Unless those items are purely cosmetic, that's pretty much the definition of P2W.

Agreed, if I see the equivalent of "coins" or "gems" or other point mechanism displayed in a ladder pricing in a game, despite all the hype that may be going for it, I lose complete interest.

It's a huge pain in the ass to dig through games, find ones that are IAP but not P2W (e.g. Ascension, Carcassonne, etc) and enjoy/support them, but that's how I use the app store.

It's sad that Amazon promotes a platform-wide "coins" system that just smears the whole platform with taint.

Who uses Amazon's app store? Is there some killer niche which makes it worth it over sideloading Google Play?

> I respect the hell out of those choices

Why? What's noble about leaving money on the table?

I don't begrudge people who are in it for the art, or for the love of the game. Some of them are naive, sure. But plenty others make that choice intentionally. For reasons of game design, or reasons of personal ethics. And good for them.

I have several very close friends who graduated cum laude from fantastic schools and chose to become high school teachers instead of lawyers or bankers. Should I begrudge them that choice, as well?

That money will fundamentally change the nature of your products. Others will have different thoughts, but I didn't get into the business to run shady F2P pseudo-casinos. (And it looks like neither did the op.)

Being cool is a big selling point. IAP and Ads are not 'cool' for users or reviewers.

Maybe this success needed a the lack of Cruft and Crud.

Sorry - what is a paid install? I am inferring its Someone who is paid money to install a game and play it? Presumably on the basis they will spend more on the In-App Purchases than receive for installing it? Or is it more sinister than that (which seems the same as asking people "excuse me, are you a sucker and do you have an iPhone?")

Seriously, Apple have not smacked this down? Or regulators?

Pretty sure paid install is just what it sounds like (and what you guessed) -- just paying some small fee for someone to install the thing.

Technically, you can think of any marketing or advertising effort in terms of installs and daily users (and that's usually how people do, or try to, in the new "data-driven" marketing/advertising world).

There is value to simply having crazy high install numbers (even if those installs aren't daily users) - press, recognition by the app store, etc.

I doubt apple can really do much to smack this down, it's kind of a cat and mouse game -- how are they going to stop people from installing something, when mobilized through some other avenue to do so?

It is arbitrage.

Publisher (him) pays a company $xx per install.

Company (ad network) offers this to its advertisers who get payed $xx-x per install.

Advertisers advertise this app with their own creatives and angles (normally have to be approved by publisher or at very least the ad network as well as their traffic source) on different traffic sources such as FB ads, Google Adverts, and other networks. The advertisers are media buyers - they buy media and sell media and use arbitrage to make positive ROI.

This is what paid installs is.

The arbitrage idea is that you generate positive ROI (return on investment) from your P2W or IAP making more per customer than it costs to get that customer playing your game.

His money was made in 2014.

This is not reproducible with the current App Store environment, IMHO.

Of course it is. ADR is a quirky viral smash. This will happen again.

The platform companies hire salespeople to promote and facilitate the "paid install" advertising business, it's part of their monetization strategy.

> after Apple took theirs, and the gov't took theirs, he was left with ~$150K in his most successful year...

You've left off the biggest deduction, $280,000 to his partner. 3x more than he paid to the government in taxation.

Well, let's just say that I think if you look at the top 10% of salaries in this industry, compared to other industries, it's probably not great.

Note I'm talking about salaries of people, not Supercell's income.

i.e. if you look at the top 10% earning doctors, lawyers, musicians etc, I don't expect the app store to look great.

And if you look at the median, the app store will likely be very, very substantially subpar.

And if you look at the bottom 10%, it's probably a complete joke.

All in all, I don't think the app store is an interesting place anymore for the average dev. But that's probably true of most entrepreneurs I feel. It's so hard to compete with big businesses, that you're either in a niche they can't conquer, doing something special, or you're losing to them. It's either great, or shit, and the great is a tiny percentage.

But also on the other hand (depending on the title/stage of development) you can possibly count it as passive income...in which case it's a very nice addition.

But I agree on the app store, the $1 market just makes it so that the average person will never make any real amount of money.

You've left out the 276,500 that the owner of the content got (about 1/3 of the revenue).

Curious, is your one man LLC going to be you doing contract work? Or do you have a product/service with a business model?

After reading this article (http://www.daedtech.com/im-a-business-man/), I'm increasingly interested in starting a one man LLC "just because".

Have you found any good resources out there for the developer who decides to go it alone?

I'm actually planning on doing both -- I plan on using the LLC to travel, and taking enough runway for roughly a year. If in that time I can't bootstrap some business that provides a livable amount of recurring revenue, I'll be contracting/consulting where I can.

Worst case, run out of runway, and start contracting for some big company where I plan to move (or come back to the states)

I dunno if starting the LLC "just because" makes sense -- you can report side-work on your taxes even if you don't make the LLC... I didn't really look for resources on going it alone, mostly because I just don't think there's that much in it. Maybe I'm underestimating the amount of effort here, but I expect some more stress around tax time, and maybe having to create a business bank account but other than that, I get the feeling I won't think about it much.

Have you played the game? A senior engineer could have ported this in a month, easily. It's a really really great game, but, he didn't create it. Just ported it. And it's just text.

His partner's calculations for their $280K-odd would look the same. Had he been working alone he'd have ended up with more like $300K. (But you tell me... I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of US tax laws.)

You're right, it's absolutely disgusting how much they take for doing essentially no work.