The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

A big dream of mine has always been to appear on late night TV with a host like Jay Leno because I created the next great video game. To me, this sort of accomplishment would signify the real rise of video games as a cultural phenomenon. Writers, actors, musicians, and animal trainers appear on these type of shows all the time, but you never see anyone promoting a video game unless they’re Tiger Woods which just doesn’t count. I wanted to see an actual game developer on late night TV, not someone else who just happened to have a video game made after them because they were good at something else.

Last night we finally hit the big time as Kudo Tsunoda took the stage to showcase Project Natal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I had some mixed feelings about Project Natal as a gamer but I do think it will revolutionize gaming with regard to the mass market. The Wii showed everyone the door but I think Natal has the potential to really welcome everyone through it. However you feel about Natal though it was totally rad to see an actual game developer up on late night TV with Hollywood and all the rockers.

The funny thing was that I made a joke to my friend 2 days ago that Kudo looked like a Bono wannabe during his E3 presentation. What the heck though, if that’s what it takes to legitimize game development as an art form so be it. People like interesting people and Kudo definitely had that going for him at E3 and on Jimmy last night.

Of course I also think this breakthrough has a lot to do with the type of games we’re getting into these days. E3 was quite a bit different this year with all the human performances to go along with the games. Between the Wii and Rock Band we finally have games that appeal to people not just nerds. Before now the best the industry could muster was to mimmic Hollywood and make epic looking pre-rendered trailers.

At E3 this year the most boring presentations were old school gamer gamers like Modern Warfare 2 and God of War III … I almost fell asleep watching people play them. Second up was the epic trailers, which needless to say were also pretty boring. The best presentations were the Wii, Beatles Rock Band, Playstation Eye/Motion, and Natal demos where real live people were performing in sync with fine cinematic sequences in the backdrop along with real gameplay that the players were interacting with but in a way that was also entertaining for a crowd. By comparison the old school way of playing games seemed really archaic.

That’s not to say that I don’t like old school gameplay. I think it’s fine for 1-4 people to sit down and play together. However, it was never going to be an all consuming force like music or movies until you could simultaneously enjoy other people playing. The human element that music and movies contain was simply missing.

Anyway, congratulations Kudo and I hope to see many more game developers appear side by side with actors and rockers in the future!

I wrote a while back about The Craft, that desire to fully master the art of developing games. I’m proud to say that since I’ve gone full time as an iPhone developer it’s been getting easier and easier with each game to perfect that art. Debris was a prototype that I had sitting around for years and years. I could never quite get the concept implemented correctly but I had this feeling that I just had to get it out there. For some reason I’m always in a rush to get the “working idea” out as if that matters at all.

Pretty much everyone knows that execution is the key to success when it comes to making games but I have always felt that it’s a combination of timing and execution. With Debris iPhone I decided it needed to be the best game I could make in a month while simultaneously learning a new engine and platform. As it turns out, most people “Don’t get it”. The up side though is that I learned a lot and Debris was the first game to sell a reasonable number of copies for me. While it’s not the best game, it was the best game I could make at the time.

Sometimes the most important thing with game development is “shipping” the game. It might sell, it might not but I can guarantee you from experience that a title which sells well but receives poor reviews is a better motivating force than a title that gets good reviews and poor sales. In the case of Aerial Antics years ago I spent over a year developing a game to fit within a publisher’s lineup, I contracted an artist, and was late to my “real” job many times. The end result was a lot of pats on the back and no money which meant that I had to keep working a job that had nothing to do with games and I lost all motivation because I didn’t know what went wrong.

Fast forward to November 2008. I had almost no money, I experienced my worst year in business in 5 years, and I only spent 1 month developing my game. As it turns out this game made enough money during the month of January to convince me that it was worth pursuing full time. The early reviews were pretty good but then as time went on it was apparent that only a small percentage of the population understood the game. But … that was OK, because I didn’t spend that much time on it and it was making me enough money to think about this stuff FULL TIME. With a poorly reviewed but decent selling game you know what went wrong and you also get the opportunity to fix it.

Since the beginning of 2009 I have created 4 more iPhone games; Cosmosis, SkylineBlade, Disco Pool, and Kube Killer. Each game has become more and more polished and the reviews continually get better. There’s no substitute for time. When you get the chance to think about something like game development full time you have to jump at it no matter how risky it seems.

I read this Gamasutra Interview with Tim Sweeney and he outlined his career from the beginning. He knew that he was going to be doing it full time when his first game started brining in just $100 a day. He acknowledged that it wasn’t much but that it was an income, something you could technically live on. From that point on is when things began to take off for him in a seemingly exponential fashion.

Since I posted about my iSales I’ve gotten a few “concerned” sounding emails. No, I’m not making a lot of money … yet. The important thing though is that I can afford my bills and I can afford to spend all of my working hours on game development resulting in a better game every 2 months. Considering the fact that we work in a “hit driven” industry this is a great strategy.

A while back when I first jumped into iPhone development I told Jeff Tunnell I’d give him a heads up on the sales figures. Anyone who actually reads this blog might have noticed Jeff’s comment under the Disco Pool release post about revealing some iPhone sales statistics whether they be good, bad, or ugly.

Something I want to preface this post with is that my sales numbers are a little better than average for the app store. I’ve hinted several times over the past 4 months or so that I’m able to scoot by on what I’m making but not much more. I’ve recently been reading the comments to this Gamasutra Article and I’m glad someone else spoke up about what constitutes a livable income.

From Dave Stein:

I thought this quote was very disturbing, mostly because I’ve been seeing these kinds of quotes all over the place lately:

“Mark Johnson recently published sales data for his game Hit Tennis, which has netted around $10k since its release six months ago. Not bad, but not an income either. ”

Not an income? Tell that to real indie developers in the trenches. I’m one of the folks referenced above, who quit his day job to write iPhone/Mac software. I would be all smiles today if I was pulling in $20k a year. But I’m not, and now I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my cat if I can’t make rent.

I might be going a little offtopic here, but I can’t help but commenting on this obsession with money in our culture that has deluded people into thinking they’re poor if they can’t afford a new $300 phone every few months. People who think $20k/yr is not an income are delusional and out of touch with reality, and the rest of the planet. We’re in a global recession right now. Want to see just how little you can live off of? Take a look at people living outside your own borders… or just outside your local Starbucks or Apple store, for god’s sake.

$20k a year _is_ a livable income, even in America for a software developer. I have the expense sheet to prove it.

In short I think an income like that is pretty good when you’re doing what you love and you don’t have to answer to anyone. I also posted a comment on Gamasutra asserting that I thought the revenue numbers cited in the article were low. This was first of all based on a different application of the basic math used in response to the statistics provided from Ian’s links but also because I felt that I probably represented the average developer developing fairly average games for the platform.

I won’t be revealing specific numbers just yet but every month that I’ve been developing iPhone games my monthly income has been increasing by an average of ~120%. If I extrapolate out using my average growth rate then my income for the month of December alone should be around 7k. This could be a pipe dream of course but I don’t see why since my numbers have steadily increased so far. In fact I’m willing to bet that my increase is probably representative of the App Store’s total average monthly sales increase since I began … just a hunch.

There are some interesting bits which affected my sales numbers.

-The average price point for the Apps I’ve released is $2.28.
-I doubled my income from December to January by “working” the App Store’s various Top 100 lists to maintain visibility.
-My 2nd game Cosmosis tanked as a paid App and now makes more money as a freebie via an AdMob revenue stream.
-I’m approximately representative of the average iPhone developer/publisher not only in sales but in the fact that I have exactly 3.5 Apps out currently (Cosmosis counts as a half). Though it should be noted that the sales numbers I based my above statistics on were primarily from 2 games. My 4th App was just released and has no bearing on my stats yet, although it’s currently selling better than Debris.
-I made more money in the first 4 months of 2009 as an iPhone develper then I did in the first 4 months of 2008 with my old business.
-Debris made more money in its first 2 months than Aerial Antics made in 5 years and Aerial Antics required ~20X the number of man hours to develop.

Simply put I’ve been living “indie” since 2002. I’ve worked odd jobs while developing games and run my own contracting business while developing games. It was cool to see Aerial Antics get nods like a Sim Game of The Year Nomination from Game Tunnel, a Top 5 Physics Download spot from Computer Gaming World, and even a cable network slot on Cinematech via G4 but when all was said and done there was no cash profit and a huge amount of time was spent developing it compared to iPhone games. Between Aerial Antics and now I developed dozens of prototypes, several shareware titles, and even some grandiose pipe dream concepts like Full Contact Debate but none of them panned out.

If the goal is to independently do what you love AND make a living doing it then I think the App Store provides the best opportunity around. Before iPhone development I had been chasing the dream for 7 years, now I live it … albeit somewhat modestly at the moment.