Owen Goss is the developer of Dapple, a cute color matching puzzle game for the iPhone (you may also remember his memory leaks tutorial here on Mobile Orchard). Despite having a slick site, good gameplay videos, and so forth, it hasn’t sold too well. So Owen’s written The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) where he reveals how it has sold so far and what effect a review on Kotaku had.
It’s a well written post but doesn’t make for good reading if you’re still in the development stages and were hoping to make big money for just releasing an iPhone app without doing your market research. Owen had a development budget of $32,000 for the game but in the first month made $535 in revenue, despite a glowing review from major gaming site Kotaku. As Owen says:
I remain convinced that there is money to be made on the App Store, but I suspect we’ll see fewer and fewer stories about people getting suddenly very rich.
The comments left are as valuable as the main post, however. Todd Bernhard points out that Owen didn’t spend any money on advertising and had no free “Lite” version for people to try, whereas he’s spending $1000 in advertising and his own app has entered the top 100 on the store. Others complain that $4.99 is a bad price point for a “simple” game. It all makes for educational reading..!
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