Neither of mine are in the app store any more, but apps with similar names are.<p>Santa's Last Stand - 3-4 mos - $250 since 4 years ago, free + 2.99 paid<p>Bank Defense - 3-4 months, - $100 since 4 years ago, free + 1.99 paid (approx--I don't remember)<p>mobile game market is _hard_ unless you're flight control/angry birds/candy crush. The market is saturated and Zynga (for example) has entire teams of people to make sure consumer dollars flow to them and not us (indies).<p>You might get lucky though! :-]
Made about £15 with dino sprint. It was never really about the money tbh, I just wanted people to enjoy something that I had created. It has 10,000+ downloads which im extremely happy with.
<a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wockawocka.nether" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wockawocka...</a>
I thought I put together a decent game, but I didn't have any knowledge of how to market, and no real desire to put the time in on that aspect. It made a sale a week for the first 2 years and is tapering off to a few sales per year. I think I will just drop it to free and eliminate the free version some time soon. Perhaps I should even release the source.<p>If you want to make money selling games you need to be prepared to put a lot of work in. Otherwise you should consider it to be buying lottery tickets which rarely works well.<p><a href="http://tactitionprogramming.com/oceancommotion.html" rel="nofollow">http://tactitionprogramming.com/oceancommotion.html</a> iPad only
I launched a turn taking two player real-time board game in HN 4 years ago, with zero returns so far. It took 3 months to build the web app, another 3 months for android app. But, lots of PR for the stunt. It is still up. 30K game instances so far and 3K players.<p>Recently I am having thoughts like should I relaunch this ? But won't want to do it without someone to look it as a business. This game feels like Chess but it is quick to learn, setup and finish.<p>Play with AI here:
<a href="http://obaghchal.com/computer" rel="nofollow">http://obaghchal.com/computer</a>
Interestingly, I do collect about 10% of my visitors from mobile on my sudoku webapp, which was NOT designed for mobile. A mobile version would be possible but since it doesn't make much I haven't bothered. Still, it's better than the zero some report for their mobile game :)<p><a href="http://sudokuisland.com" rel="nofollow">http://sudokuisland.com</a><p>App discovery was one of the main reasons I decided to learn webapp first. Unless you make a graphic heavy game, eventually HTML5 apps will perform on mobile :)
Made about $5000 from in-app purchases and about $4000 from ads across 3 games. All free games at <a href="http://mugalon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://mugalon.com/</a> .<p>I am doing this on the side while freelancing (or having a day job before) as income. Most games did not have any monetization for most of their life and I am sure I could get this up one order of magnitude if I put in some work.
My free game (with ads) hasn't made enough to cover the dev license.. I think mobile games are one of those things where you either make the top 10 or languish in purgatory.<p>Made it in about a week: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smashcorp.smashmash" rel="nofollow">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smashcorp....</a>
Tried this as an hobby for a while, modded some with Corona and Unity, barely profitable, discontinued. Trailers still here: <a href="https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCUv8iB1TUHHulj0OdWVS3Rw" rel="nofollow">https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCUv8iB1TUHHulj0OdWVS3Rw</a>
Here are some stats from the first couple months for my last game.<p>Highest Positions in US App Store.<p>All Games US #54<p>Adventure (Games) #7<p>Arcade (Games) #23<p>Board (Games) #4<p>Music (Games) #2<p>Revenue<p>$18,430 Interstitials - Static & Video<p>$5,180 Banner Ads<p>$1,515 IAP to Remove Ads<p>=============<p>TOTAL $25,125
at a tangent: one thing I miss is "Under the Radar" from this Indonesian website. Here's a sample page. Google Translate works well enough. There's a bunch of good games scattered through those pages and most of them don't use horrible freemium models.<p><a href="https://id.techinasia.com/game-radar-zeen-tiny-acrobats-dan-volcano-attack/" rel="nofollow">https://id.techinasia.com/game-radar-zeen-tiny-acrobats-dan-...</a><p>Does anyone know anything similar?