Facebook Indie Games

the99th on Play This Thing! has a useful rant about how little Facebook or Apple or Kongregate or Google cares about developers. They only care about themselves and their own market value.

The solution? Treat channels as a player acquisition tool. Use them to bring players to your game:

The solution is for developers to make their game, ahem, THE PLATFORM, and make everyone else a *player* acquisition tool. People who really play your game, rather than merely use it like an affect-less junkie, will find their way to your stand-alone version on the web to do the biggest transactions, with only a 2.5% credit card fee to cramp your style. While they might spend more play-time on the mobile version, they might post and find newsfeeds and requests from games on Facebook via FB Connect, the core data defining their investment and performance will be centrally processed in your own data base. There's no reason why you can't take advantage of the multiplicity of distribution channels and make yourself a master rather than a slave. Commoditize these competing corporations, find your people.

Short term revenue will always favor people who specialize on one platform but they can also die overnight.

According to a guest post from Alistair Aitcheson on Games Brief the ratio of prototype dev time to full product dev time is about 1:6:

Having spent just two weeks to develop the prototype for the Experimental Gameplay Project, I expected the iPhone version to take about a month. The actual development time was in fact over three months, from early November to mid-February.

Read the full article at Games Brief or check out Greedy Bankers on iPhone.

We know Android market share is trumping ahead. But with so much fragmentation developers need to know which handset to target. Stealthcopter's Nexus Revamped Live Wallpaper app will work on pretty much any Android handset, and gets strong reviews. It's free and here's how its downloads break down by handset:

It's mainly downloaded on high end and new Android handsets suggesting that:

1. Either most Android handsets in the wild are high end OR that its the high end owners that are likely to download apps
2. Most people download apps when they first get a phone, hence lots of new phone models on the list OR Android market share is rising so rapidly that most Android phones in the wild are pretty new

I found this surprising. I expected Android's growth to be driven by low end handsets. It's still possible that handset market share is driven by low spec handsets, which don't translate into app sales and accounts for the generally low sales in the Android Marketplace. But who knows? If you have any data on the market share of various handsets within Android please share in the comments.

This data -- which is admitedly all from one app -- suggests that Android developers don't need to worry too much about low spec handsets because even when an app will work on them they doesn't account for many of the downloads.

Read the full story at Stealth Copter.

The first big peak is a result of coverage on TouchArcade and Mac Rumors, which soon fell off.

The small peak in May is probably the result of a Mothers Day promotional sale. The lesson: sales only work if you have visibility. Although it had a small impact on sales volume, the lower price meant that revenues fell.

The jump in September is due to release of a free LITE version, which lead to higher sales of the paid app too.

The sustained growth starting in December and continuing into January is due to introducing In App Purchase into the LITE edition.

Even for fairly minor players on the iPhone games scene, In App Purchase is a great path to sustained revenues.

Read the full article.

This is a great, retrospectively obvious idea:

The San Francisco based mobile advertising network gives gamers real-world rewards when they hit certain achievements in a game. Companies like group deals startup Homerun.com can offer free goods from local businesses while Sephora can give make-up samples to gamers when they level up. The company has rounded up other big brands like popchips, Sony Dash, Vitamin Water, 1-800-Flowers, Dr. Pepper, GNC, Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s.

It's a nice friendly half way point between pure nag advertising and in app purchases. Read the full story at Inside Mobile Apps.

Inside Social Games keeps teasing us with snippets from the thousand buck extravaganza Inside Virtual Goods. This week in an article about the death of 3 Playfish games they reveal:

Given the long life each of these titles enjoyed and Playfish’s continuing success through its other games, it seems like we can draw three conclusions. First, social games don’t last forever no matter how well-designed they may be. Developers tend to build products that the hope will last indefinitely, but according to research published in Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2011, engaged users only play game for about two months before moving on. If a developer isn’t bringing new users into a game to replace them or attracting old users back either with content iterations or marketing campaigns, the decline continues and a developer reaches a point where it’s not financially reasonable to maintain a game that isn’t making money.

The whole article is worth reading. It's here.

Gamasutra reports on a World Bank report into the virtual goods market -- that is, the market for trading virtual goods for money outside of official channels. It's become a serious business:

Gamers in China and Vietnam who stockpile game currencies to sell to Western players now make up around 75 percent of the global virtual goods market.

According to a report [PDF] by The World Bank, the virtual goods market is now worth at least $3 billion. "Gold farmers", or those players who collect in-game currency to sell to other players, should be encouraged as these services could aid development in poorer countries, the report suggests.

Dozens of Chinese virtual item retailers now make around $1 million each year from the practice, with nearly a dozen retailers making as much as $10 million on a yearly basis.

You might also be interested in Cory Doctorow's novel For the Win. Set in the near future, it's 50% a fascinating look at the possible future of virtual currency markets, and 50% a cloying parable for worker unionization (I'm more interested in money and power than workers and welfare). He even gives out the ebook for free.

A report from way back in 2008 says:

The data proved that word of mouth ranked highest of all methods buyers used to make purchase decisions. This was followed by retail, online demos, reviews, and advertising and promotion. When the word-of-mouth category was examined further, the data revealed that friends were approximately twice as likely to influence the purchase decision as family members. Friends were also among the most trusted of all forms of purchase influence.

"Compared to all video gamers, Influence Multipliers are a hyperinfluential subset of friends who are also far more connected to other gamers," said Dan Gallagher, senior vice president, Insight & Analytics at Waggener Edstrom Worldwide. "As a result, Influence Multipliers have an outsized network influence effect on their gaming colleagues. By targeting the media channels that Influence Multipliers rely on, marketers can optimize their marketing spending."

Read the full report from the past.

The volume of apps at the end of the year were:

• 300,000 iPhone apps
• 130,000 Android apps

• 822,000 iPhone apps
• 633,000 Android apps

• 2.2 million in the iPhone
• 3 million on Android