Want to make money on a mobile app? Make a game | Hacker News Reader

Want to make money on a mobile app? Make a game

jaredblake.posterous.com

11 pointsjaredblake7 comments

My games are consistent sellers, both as free-with-ads or for 99c, whereas my utility apps that actually do something useful (such as True Shuffle http://bratton.com/trueshuffle/ which plays through all your songs with no repeats ever) get very few sales.

So yeah, I'm focusing on making games... Everybody wants to be entertained while waiting for the bus, but very few people go out of their way to search for a utility aside from a very few like Camera+/Hipstamatic/Instagram, which all being photography-related are somewhat entertainment as well.

The problem with any app, games included, is that designing , developing, and then marketing is hard. My wetwork game ( http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wetwork/id410170565 ) for the iPhone took a lot of time to develop, but hasn't really gone anywhere in the app store. I'll be the first to admit that it isn't the greatest thing since sliced bread, but it is upsetting that my dumber apps bring in considerably more money.

If anyone has any suggestions on how to market games, I'd really appreciate it.

maybe if you tried putting a better screenshot on your game, with enemies or something, live action fire or whatever you game does it might be more downloads? I don't have an app so I don't really know, just a guess.

You're probably right. I'm sure that I need more content to show up in more searches and better content to pull the eyeballs when I do show up.

Then there are the game improvements that I'm planning. The black helicopter will be wild.

so it looks like you only released your game about ten days ago? that's not enough time to tell if it's a success or not.

i also released a low-key iphone game. it has been in the store for about a year. it has made me a little less than $7,000 to date. i am calling that a middling success.

http://www.platinumball.net/hearts/

i can't ever predict what the sales are going to be. along about august, when i had given it up for dead, i suddenly had my best month ever: over a thousand bucks. i have no idea why. right now it's down to about $250.00 a month. i hope it will go back up a bit, once i release some much-needed updates.

i don't have a lot of users, but a few of them are rabidly loyal. one guy did a favorable video review and posted it to youtube. another has been bugging me incessantly to add game center integration. yeah yeah yeah, i'm working on it.

Good to hear. I've read a lot about the runaway successes of other apps - it is easy to get disappointed. I still find it strange that my Gender Scan app does as well as it does though. There is even a copy cat app out there now! Hillarious!

Another thing to consider is making adjustments to the price at various intervals. We have seen huge spikes in downloads when we move from $.99 to free and then back. I think the main factor in the download spikes comes from the app showing up on the automated lists of "bargin" apps. I am trying to get some more concrete evidence of this, so if anyone has more examples, I would love to hear about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com