iPad port of a 5 year old game of mine (which previously already paid for itself about 9 times over in its PC and Mac versions) was released a few months ago.
Didn't expect much but amazingly it pulls in consistently $70-$110 a day (about $2,500 a month) for a few months now (not counting the initial release spike).
Game is free to download with 1 In-App-Purchase that unlocks the full game.
Thinking of doing an iPhone version soon which will be a bit more involved than a straight port due to the small screen size and different screen aspect ratio, but I'm currently convinced it will be worth it since the genre actually usually does better on iphone than ipad.
Just wanted to add this to counter all the doom & gloom posts about iOS games not doing well. If you have a great and unique product for a good target market with good retention and monetization, then you can still do very well without too much marketing.
(I actually run ads with about $4 daily budget. Not sure if it actually helps, but I think it does.)
Mind sharing which game this is? I'd simply be curious to see what sort of/quality of game generates that sort of (as you said, very favorable) income characteristics in this current market.
I'm sorry, but that sounds like a bit of a cop out. One would hope that an idea with the traction to be successful in the way you're describing would be hard enough to replicate to merit that value, or stand alone in such a way that if someone replicated it it would be VERY obvious and difficult for the clones. Perhaps I'm being exceedingly naive to the aggressively cutthroat world of mobile game development, but "competition" seems like a very unsatisfying reason to not want to communicate a shared understanding of what people want in tech at this point in time.
Competition is not an actor. It is a process, of which you're part; whether you want it to be this way, or would prefer a different market to the one we have.
Embrace the competition. Plan for it. Set time aside for it. Make it work for you.
Thing is, my budget is actually higher than that, but that's how much the campaign actually uses up each day. Not enough reach / people clicking on the ad.
I could try other ad channels, but I'm talking with a publisher who might be interested in publishing it so haven't tried that yet.
Didn't expect much but amazingly it pulls in consistently $70-$110 a day (about $2,500 a month) for a few months now (not counting the initial release spike).
Game is free to download with 1 In-App-Purchase that unlocks the full game.
Thinking of doing an iPhone version soon which will be a bit more involved than a straight port due to the small screen size and different screen aspect ratio, but I'm currently convinced it will be worth it since the genre actually usually does better on iphone than ipad.
Just wanted to add this to counter all the doom & gloom posts about iOS games not doing well. If you have a great and unique product for a good target market with good retention and monetization, then you can still do very well without too much marketing.
(I actually run ads with about $4 daily budget. Not sure if it actually helps, but I think it does.)