1. I released a free game on the iTunes app store called “Falling Balls”.
2. It somehow, inexplicably, rose to #1.
3. I realized I could put ads in a game. So I added a few features and put in some ads.
4. I made some money from ads.
5. People overwhelmingly hated it and said they were deleting it and wouldn’t play it and called me a sellout.
I feel kind of crappy about the whole situation. On one hand, it’s cool to have a popular game. On the other hand, it’s cool to make a few bucks from it. Should these be mutually exclusive? But I guess I shouldn’t take it personally. Obviously, the overriding issue is that the ads seem to distract from the game itself.
So I’ve just uploaded what I think is a decent compromise. The ads show up when you load the game, when you die and when you pause. Otherwise, you just have the game. Makes sense anyway. When you are playing the game, you aren’t going to be paying attention to the ad anyway. The update will take a few days to be approved, so hopefully the mobs won’t be storming my house with torches and nooses between now and then.
So much to learn. And it’s not just Objective-C. 🙂
Definitely wouldn’t take it personally, people are just greedy.
Ben, that was my first reaction – “selfish bastards don’t want to see me make a buck…”
But, I can see that it detracts from the game play itself. Too “in your face”. Just a matter of finding balance. Just wish I had figured all this out well BEFORE I had a number one game. 🙂 Now I’ll be chasing that success trying to repeat it and doing it right.
The sellout stuff does get to me though.
People are idiots – end of story.
The fact that they cannot cope with advertising (unobtrusive advertising at that) inside something that they got for free, is ridiculous. It’s like complaining about having to look at the packaging for something you got a free sample of at the supermarket.
I downloaded falling balls and i’m going to tap the ads just to make up for those fools.
I wouldn’t take it too personally. The average internet citizen assumes all software should be given to them for free, and anyone who attempts to make money off their work is inherently evil.
I am interested to know how much the no. 1 iPhone game can make from ads per day?
felix: read this. http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/01/interview-iphone-dev-criticizes-customers-of-his-crap-app.ars
This guy was #1 just before me. Using the same ad network – admob. My ads didn’t go in until I was moving down from #2 to #3, so I missed the peak, but still doing pretty good.
“$70,000 in one day (after Apple’s cut)” – surely that can’t be right??
70k is 100,000 sales of a 99 cent app. nothing to do with ads.
keep in mind who is calling you a sellout and it should hurt less and hopefully not at all.
Keith, you aren’t selling out, you are buying in.
That is absolutely fascinating.. man, iPhone users are so fickle… I would know I’m one of them 😉
We all have a lot to learn. The fact that you acknowledge and share that is part of what makes you a respected voice in the Flash blogosphere.
IPhone/Ipod touch differs from Flash in mindset. Flash had roots as a bohemian animation app producing easy-to-replicate content that was very DRM unfriendly. Advertising in Flash games or alongside it is the only way to make money unless you muck with its DNA by wrapping it in a bunch of thirdparty drm. Conversely, ipod apps are brought to the masses via a relatively closed and monitored app store, which has plenty of mechanisms to generate cash for the creator – most notably the fact that you can sell your apps for any price.
Speaking for myself, when i find ads in an iphone game it turns me off because i have received the game from a digital channel that is very reminiscent of a brick and mortar store. Unlike SWFs, iphone apps are perceived as software. Mentally, i FEEL like i have bought this even if its free, and ads are at odds with that experience.
Even though you SHOULD be compensated, ads in these games are going to be about as popular as ads in traditional software (remember adware from the late 90s? it went nowhere). Its the SURPRISE of finding ads in a game after the download that’s the annoying part – it has nothing to do with the game per se.
My advice – leave this game free without ads to build your iphone rep and keep ripples to a minimum,then make a new game and sell that for a price. Have faith in your games – they ARE worth something. You’d be surprised what people will pay 99 cents for. You will make good money – And if they know it costs from the start, they’ll have nothing to complain about. I have ‘Falling Balls’ and will gladly pay 99cents for your next game, knowing what you do. You can even blog about it, and if it doesn’t rocket to number one, you’ll still have learned something new and can decide what works best for you next time. And if you blog about it, we’ll learn something too.
BTW They are a tough audience, aren’t they:)
Thanks Robert. I think the iPhone app community is still learning about itself. It’s really still too young to say it’s in its infancy. We’ve really just cut the cord and given it a good whack to get it breathing. No idea where this is all going. But it’s exciting. 🙂
Speaking from experience, I believe Robert is right. The major problem of ads is that to make compensation for you they have to be displayed and thus sucked from the net, which means my telephone will make connection and download; not everybody has an unlimited data plan, so you may understand why they are not happy. While you will still get some negative comments because people believe they got your soul for 0.99$, put a price on your games, they are worth it.
Great application! You deserve something for your hard work. I agree, there is much more to learn than just Objective-C.
I haven’t played the game, I don’t have an iphone, neither an ipod touch. But I hate the advertising monetizing model. There is enough people supporting it. The minute you introduce ADs anywhere, your content loses value.
There are other (and much nicer) ways to earn some cash from your work than promoting companies or projects you don’t care about.
This is just my opinion anyway.
That, of course, depends on how much value you put to your work.
Ads are such a double edged sword. For example, we’d rather eat glass than have them on either our site or our blog.
Unless a site is designed from the start to accommodate ads with a bit of forethought ( Nitrome springs to mind ) it does cheapen the content around it in nearly all cases.
I’ve done an adver-game for Eidos where I was forced ( It’s the only word to describe it, as I did stand my ground as much as I could ) to add mochi-ads to it.
This is a viral game to promote a full priced console game with a budget set aside for it, and we’re dropping ads in there which will make what, $100, $200 or even $1000 ? Nothing basically. It cheapened it beyond belief and I think reflected badly on everyone involved. For $1000 it’s really not worth damaging people’s perception of you.
But on the other edge of the ads sword, it has kick started the Flash indy scene. More and more people are developing games in Flash now, because aside from sponsorship, there’s a revenue stream for people.
Yes ads are nasty, yes they cheapen your work ( I don’t like sitting through an ad, but I’m sensible enough to know that this 10 seconds of my life has helped pay the developer for their time. It’s a small trade off ) and yet they also enable a lot more people to come to Flash to make games.
Out of every 50 badly reskinned tutorials with a gameJacket wrapper on, there is one gem.
Someone with the will and ability to keep on improving so one day they can proudly be some designers bitch 😉
In the past we’ve gone with ads where we couldn’t get a sponsorship worth our while ( And we’d lost out to a paid placement, there’s just no competing with that ), and we’d rather have the game make $0.50 a day for us than let someone have our work for next to nothing with their branding dropped in there.
So sometimes ads are the only way to re-coup the development time spent on personal projects, as unpalatable as that is at times.
Squize, I think you are totally right about being designed from the start. I just crammed it in there as an afterthought, and did it poorly.
Anyway, despite all the bitching about them, plenty of ads are being served, and getting clicked on.
Here’s my take on the ads. Look getting revenue from something you put time in and also to understand the revenue models isn’t a bad thing. I am sure it was a great learning experience. It should be done with taste and not take away but also creating a market so that we can do what we do all day and get paid is a nice proposition. To the people against ads they are right, they suck … But they have also created ALL entertainment radio, tv, movies and now the web to make it a market that people can work in. I hope the internet is the new entertainment platform, of course that means to survive in it you need to get value from your value, sometimes ads are the only viable way to get a big enough group and make it cost effective. It can supplement the work and doesn’t take away if done right.
Also, another thing that is coming about for the people that aren’t willing to give you some pennies for free stuff is opting out of ads. So the real ad haters can turn it off, others can flip you some pennies while they are playing a fun game you made for them.
Also you may want to release one that is .99 with no ads ever. I am sure some people would get that one to have an ad-less experience. If not well then I am not sure how we will all get paid all day making iphone apps, which seems like a nice market to support if you ask me even if you have to put up with some ads.
You shouldn’t feel bad for earning money for your skills.
You deserve to be compensated for your product.
I remember and old saying.
Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
Listen to your customers:
Have a new update with the same game without pub and no falling balls! 🙂
i should make a falling ads game. ads fall and you have to avoid them. or better yet click on them to “kill them”. 🙂
A falling ads game is actually really rather a good idea – I’d do it if I were you before someone else does.
Forget ads, charge for the game. Seriously. Ads compromise quality anway.
i would rather, kp, that you charged for the app, then the $$$ would be going directly to you (and apple) who built and serve the app respectively. seeing an ad out of context in a game is annoying and i personally don’t want to be bombarded by ads ever. advertising encourages want and obsolescence in the same sentence. that being said, your forthrightness about the situation and your willingness to reexamine your previous decision is HIGHLY commendable. thank you.
“i should make a falling ads game.” heck yes. you genius. take a bunch of ads and see how you can add gameplay to that soup of pixels.
somehow making a game not with ads, but from ads, seems like a mad evil masterplan to trick em all 🙂
this wont work for many, but for one or two really cool games that would rock. don’t ask me how this could look like, but if you get that right, then at least for me that’s a piece of art. i’d try this right now if i had an iphone.
i mean look at how long we’ve been reading pixels and messing with bitmaps, it’s all just information and you know how to handle that.
maybe balls are a bad shape to got for if an ad is basically a rectangle, but i’ve seen rectangles before in games and levels.
seeing ads basically sucks, true. but if you have to struggle your way thru a loooot of ads, then again it could be so grotesque that people enjoy it.
imagine colors from pixels mean different speeds of motion when running over it. then ads are visually distracting. noise. makes it hard to see things. aha. sometimes you wanna hide things. enemies could camouflage in ads, so you only see them when moving. i guess we’re all just customers struggling on a daily basis to get thru all the ads and separate them from the useful bits of information we encounter. so, the modern citizen/consumer would be your gamehero, always tempted and disturbed by ads while trying to survive. sounds good to me. in real life i have no real enemies, it’s the ads, the confusion and the overinformation i hate and try to avoid. that is the enemy.
so in terms of information and message one could build something with ads i guess.
That is why I don’t put up many free apps anymore. I have started always charging for apps, and you get a better quality of customer. I had an app that was quite successful, with 3000 downloads a day, but about a dozen negative reviews. It was simple, but it was free. So I started to charge for it, don’t get so many downloads, but don’t get any negative reviews anymore. There are a lot of people out there who don’t deserve free apps.