tequila bomb

A look at the top-grossing iPhone apps today finds 34 of the top 100 apps are free, but make their money through in-app purchases of mostly virtual currencies as well as other premium features.  Remco van den Elzen, CEO co-founder of analytics firm Distimo, said he believes in-app purchases now represent about 30 percent of all iPhone App Store revenue. “We’re seeing more developers implement more in app-purchases especially with games,” he said. “Freemium Apps are also picking up significantly. A lot of developers realize it’s a successful model.”

This is both surprising, and depressing to me. But it was inevitable, I guess, when you consider the success of the Facebook gaming ecosystem.

I hate that the mobile games industry is more like the advertising industry than the movies. But then what did I expect?

I remember wanting to craft unique experiences for people. Not obsess about monetizing hand-cartoons that are sweet and addictive like candy, and ultimately just as unfulfilling.

Unfortunately an obsession with shipping volumes of free or 99 cents apps, and strategies to pull in a core obsessive compulsive user base, who will pump the in-app purchase money machine, is all I see people talking about on Twitter feeds, and industry blogs obsessing over all day long.

Unity Technologies is to found a new division, named Union, which will help small developers to reach new platforms and revenue streams with their Unity-based titles – and offer them an 80 per cent stake in the profits.

Headed up by general manager Brett Seyler, the new division will aim at distributing Unity titles to platforms such as set-top boxes, internet-connected TVs and mobiles, allowing smaller teams to reach into markets previously dominated by larger companies.

Sounds promising. Indies seem to have more and more options every day.

During the keynote at this year’s Unite Conference, taking place in Montreal, Canada, four initial partners were announced.

• Nokia – which has a mobile handset market share of 32 per cent
• HP Palm – with a mobile share of 5 per cent but a PC share of 30 per cent
• Splashtop – which has an installed base of instant-on operating systems on 40 million PCs
• NDS – a provider of set-top box software, with an installed base of 138 million active devices

Meanwhile, Unity also unveiled its new Asset Store, which will allow users to upload files for others to buy, with a range of files available including art assets and lighting tools. Prices can be set by the content owners, and look like ranging between $20-$150 based on content available at launch.

And finally the company revealed that Unity 3.1 was available for download on the official site now.

Certain devs. I know are still submitting bug reports to Apple for iOS 4.2. Some that actually break the existing funtionality of apps already published.

But Apple today is already pushing out iOS 4.2 iPad apps to the App Store.

Looks like the iOS Gold Master is the one we are getting.

Japanese social game company DeNA acquired CA-based iOS developer and publisher Ngmoco this week for up to $403 million. Now publicly-traded DeNA has revealed that Ngmoco’s losses more than quadrupled from its inception in 2008 to 2009.

I always had a suspicion that Ngmoco weren’t actually making any real money.

The VC people should be happy. They’ve made their investment back, and some. But then they usually do.

But revenues showed a steep increase in 2010, rising to $3.16 million, up from just $484,000 in 2009. In a post-acquisition interview with Gamasutra, Ngmoco CEO Neil Young attributed increased sales to a switch to a free-to-play model that monetized customer’s usage instead of individual app unit sales.

Having been involved in a few hype driven tech. companies that have gone from startup, through Venture Capital stages, and then onto either an IPO or sale to another company, and not having seen any of them actually ever make anything other than impressive revenue streams on paper, I have had my doubts about Ngmoco for a while.

While Ngmoco has been a money-loser in 2008 and 2009, the partnership was formed under the belief that the two companies can use each others’ expertise and technology to create a cross-platform, cross-territory social and mobile gaming network.

Is this the first hint of an App Store Bubble? I’ve been through a couple of those in my time too.. and this whole thing has me thinking we might be about to go through another.

“Dear website owner, congratulations on your excellent site, which includes features covered by our registered patent, #5,251,294. As the description indicates, many of the components on your pages, particularly your menus, rollover images, and shortcuts, are detailed in our claim. We would be delighted to lease these to you at a reasonable royalty rate of $80,000. Please call our offices at your convenience to arrange a payment schedule.”

Seems about as reasonable as claiming that you own the patent on “Sort by Date” with “Eye Candy”.

According to Law.com, Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures, and has been having a grand old time with it ever since. The firm is suing Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, Visa and ten other companies for patent infringement on ’294. And the outfit wants jury trials in Texas. East Texas.

With the Patent System showing itself increasingly to be devoid of any way of coping with contemporary IP issues, and the US becoming a veritable Wild West where the new stage coach robbery is done in shady states with questionable legal systems, isn’t it time to take a new approach to all this?

I myself had to defend a Patent action recently, against a US company that was so paranoid about “losing its patent through dilution” that it was willing to pay me to rebrand a dollar app in the Apple App Store.

Whilst the Angry Birds story in interesting.

The incentives that Microsoft are offering developers is a far more entertaining yarn…

Microsoft is offering an exclusive and limited time opportunity for

you to join, publish and distribute your applications on Windows Phone

7 Marketplace while receiving several benefits. The benefits for

registering on the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace by December 31st, 2010

during this offer include:

·         Rebate of US$99 dollars on the application registration*

(after having at least one compatible application included on the

marketplace by December 31, 2010)

·         Application name reservation on the Marketplace

·         Technical & application submission support

·         Local events to assist with your development efforts

·         One free copy of Windows 7

To apply for this offer please email me back with your contact

information or call me at the number below to help you complete the

marketplace registration and reserve your application names.  See

additional helpful resources below.

Cheap.

And people think that Apple treats App Store Developers like cattle.

This may be enough to make me quite App Store Developing.

Some background.

Once you create your app in iTunes Connect and assign your app name, you will have 120 days to delivery a binary or your app will be deleted from iTunes Connect so your name is freed up for use by the developer community.

Whilst this is a patently absurd restriction, it is at least a rule construct that we can learn to work within. Why professional developers who pay for the privilege should have to do that is anybodies guess. But, hey, this is Apple. Unfortunately the rule is in itself an imperfect solution to something of a non-issue. App Store Name Squatting is yet to be any more than a minor blog phenomenon. One has to wonder why, therefore, Apple is keen to deal with this problem so aggressively. Less charitable minds than mine would think perhaps that Apple just want to turn over more apps in more volume than anything else. A pretty damning conclusion to come to.

Per section 3.2 of the iOS Developer Program License Agreement, to which you agreed, squatting on an app name to prevent legitimate third party use is prohibited.  We do understand that there may be a case where development could take longer than 120 days and to prevent this issue in the future, we recommend that you wait to create your app in iTunes Connect until you are further along in development.

The names that I, and quite a number of developers are sitting on, are not names which would make other developers slather at the mouth. They are simply catchy names associated with a long term project where we have already committed time, created resources, artwork, and perhaps storyline details (in the case of games) which are tightly tied to the name we have allocated.

To restrict the development progress of any developer, small or large, to 3 months from naming of a project to final release is completely unrealistic, insulting, and tends to suggest that these are arbitrary rules made up by accountants rather than people who develop software for a living.

If you wish to make an appeal for an extension, these are granted on a case-by-case basis.  Please email itunesconnect@apple.com placing your Apple ID in the email subject line as well as “Dev Forums – App Name Extension Request” and explain why you need an extension to the 120 day deadline.

What really galls me about this last bit is that I, and others, have already sent these exact emails to Apple over the last 30 days. More than once.

To date none of us have had a reply.

Apple have said that they hate us running to the press, or blogs, anytime they do something wrong in our eyes. And I sympathise with their position. And this hiccup is very much a function of their growing pains. I recognise that.

What I cannot forgive is people ignoring my emails. 3 or 4 times in a row.

And then asking me to send them again.

It’s just plain ignorant.

We hadn’t given much thought to who would play Dolphin Hero; we just made it. This was a big mistake. Dolphin Hero earned just $300 in its first 6 months on the App Store, but we persevered.

Spoiler : Things works out for them in the end.

Moral : It’s all about planning, hard work and marketing. Oh and a million other jobs that probably never occurred to you.

Lots of cold hard facts, and painfully open figures in there too.

The amount of uploads per day is quite staggering.

Around 90% of Apps are selling for $2.99 or less.

Books and Games make up over 30% of App Store content. It is perhaps worth thinking about looking at other categories for markets where there is less background noise.

Click on either image to see the original article and much larger images.

It’s been done before. But this is one of the nicest implementations so far.