Study: 20% of game developers for the App Store receive 97% of all money

Original author: Owen Goss
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On September 19, I launched a survey among iOS game developers to get statistics on the income of as many of them as possible. The task was to create a realistic picture of the current state of the market and share this information with the community. I was inspired by an abundance of articles describing the situation in extremes: “The developer has made millions on iOS games!” or “The game earned $ 0 on the App Store.”

In order to get an objective state of affairs, on September 19, 2011 I launched a seven-day survey in which 252 developers took part.

However, before sharing the data, a few words about the methodology and errors.

Methodology


The study was conducted using the SurveyMonkey online service and consisted of 8 questions. The first two of them were about the type of developer and the number of people in the team. The next three questions were about the games released by the developer for all the time and what profit they brought. The last three questions are about games released in the last 12 months.

The proposal to participate in the study was posted on the following resources:
  • twitter
  • facebook
  • Google+
  • 148Apps.biz
  • Reddit
  • TouchArcade forums
  • iPhoneDevSDK forums
  • cocos2d forums
  • Unity forums

The goal was to attract as many active game developers for iOS as possible. The study ended on September 26, 2011 at midnight. It is also worth noting that before the start of the survey, I promised that:
  • the study will not collect any personal data
  • data will be presented in aggregate; “raw” data will not be published

Errors and Errors


Note: I do not pretend to be statistically accurate. There is a possibility that the sample is not representative, or that I unknowingly introduced an error into the results by the way I formulated the questions. I am not a professional statistician, so do not consider this data as the ultimate truth. A little more about this below.

Sample

Since the study was completely voluntary, and I do not have information about the demographics of iOS developers, I can not, as I have already noted, assess the representativeness of the sample. In addition, due to the way I collected data, the developers who participated in the survey are active members of the community and are actively working on games. Therefore, there is reason to believe that the numbers that we see here are slightly higher than the overall App Store. However, I do not have data confirming or refuting this conjecture.

12 month data

One of the things I wanted to know is how the last 12 months looked for game developers on the App Store. However, the questions I posed confused the respondents a little. I intended to find out how much the games released in the last 12 months earned, but many developers made a profit from all of their games in those 12 months, regardless of when they were released. This made the data unsuitable for the purposes that I set initially. In addition, many people did not understand the instructions for the two issues, where it was necessary to separately indicate the profit from direct sales and non-operating income. As you will see, I still got some statistics, but not all that I planned.

Other

There are, without a doubt, other sources of data errors and errors. The main thing to remember is that these numbers are not 100% accurate, but, nevertheless, give an idea of ​​the game market for the App Store.

results


The survey was conducted 7 days, 252 developers took part.

General issues

The first 2 questions were aimed at obtaining general information about the responder.

As can be seen from Figure 1, only ⅓ of the respondents work in full-time mode. A little more than half work either part-time, or make games as a hobby, or students.



When asked about how many people are on the team, half of the respondents said that they work for themselves. It was a surprise to find out the percentage of people working for a company of 10 people or more. Nevertheless, 93% of respondents work in a team of 5 or less people (see Figure 2).



All-time profit

The following 3 questions related to information on the number of games and profits from them for all the time:
  • number of games the developer has on the App Store
  • how long have these games been featured on the app store
  • profit from all games for all time

Using this data, you can get interesting results. First, let's take a look at all-time earnings (Figure 3). One interesting observation is the exponential nature of the graph. It clearly shows that most developers do not get a lot of money selling games on the App Store, and at the same time a small amount makes great money.



I noted on the graph the arithmetic mean and median. The median is important because the extremely high incomes of a small number of developers significantly reject the arithmetic average value, looking at which it can be mistakenly concluded that the average developer’s profit is $ 165,000. The median testifies to another. It divides the developers into two equal parts, and we see that the profit of 50% of the developers is less than $ 3000, while the other 50% earned more than this amount. The reason the arithmetic mean and median are so different is because the standard deviation is 639.966. Such a high value indicates that the arithmetic mean is not representative in our situation. Therefore, in the future I will use the median in the charts.

You can also observe on the graph, for example, that if you were in the 75th percentile, you would have earned about $ 30,000. This means that only 25% of developers have earned more than $ 30,000 all the time. Similarly, we see that the profit of 25% of developers was less than $ 200.

Take a look at Figure 4. Note that the horizontal axis uses a logarithmic scale instead of a linear one. Income data is divided into groups (each subsequent group is 10 times larger than the previous one). The graph shows that about 25% of developers earned from $ 1,000 to $ 10,000 in the App Store. What is impressive, 4% of respondents (10 respondents) earned more than $ 1,000,000!

Note: in Figure 4 you see duplication at the borders of ranges (e.g. 1-10, 10-100, etc.). This is done only for the inscriptions, so that they are easier to read. In fact, the data are divided into groups (10n) - (10n + 1 - 1), i.e. 1-9, 10-99, etc.



The 4% of millionaires mentioned above made me think about the ratio of income distributed among developers. Those. what percentage of profit belongs to what percentage of developers (see Figure 5). I was surprised to find that 97% of all profits from selling games on the App Store belong to 20% of developers. And more than ⅓ of all the money goes to the top 1% of developers. The bottom 80% of game developers get only 3% of the profits.



Next, I decided to trace the dependence of the amount of earnings on the type of developer (see Figure 6). The vertical axis shows the median of profit for all time. As expected, developers for whom mobile games are the main income and developers representing companies specializing in iOS development earn more. Please note that as vertical scale - logarithmic, the difference between the first and second column is 30 times. This does not mean that if you switch from part-time to full-time, you will start to earn 30 times more, but nonetheless, the data received from respondents are as follows.



Next, I wanted to find out the dependence of the profit figure on the number of people in the team (see Figure 7). Again, the vertical scale is logarithmic.



Note: the median profit of companies with 10 or more people may not be entirely accurate due to the small number of respondents in this category . Nevertheless, it is clear that single people earn on average the least.

But then I suggested that larger teams could just produce more games and get more profit. To test this, I divided the profit by the number of games released and the number of months during which the developer sells games on the App Store.

Figure 7b shows the dependence of the median profit for the month for one game on the number of people in the team.



As you can see, the appearance of the schedule has not actually changed compared to Figure 7. From this we can conclude that games created by teams, as a rule, bring more profit than games created by loners. I assume that this is due to the fact that the former create more technically interesting and more elaborate games due to the number of people involved in the process of improving the game.

Finally, it was interesting to find out if the profit increases with each new game as the developer becomes more experienced. Trying to answer this question, I divided for each developer his profit for the whole time by the number of games, then I calculated the median depending on the number of games released (see Figure 8). There is a tendency that, over time, the released games earn on average more than the previous ones. That should cheer you up if your first game failed. Do not worry, because 50% of the developers from their first game earned less than $ 500. But, as a rule, the more games they released, the greater the profit from each new game. As they say, perseverance and labor will grind everything.



Profit for the last 12 months


From the answers to the last 3 questions, it was supposed to receive information on profit from applications that were released in the last 12 months. However, since many respondents provided profit over the past 12 months from all their games, regardless of the release date, I could not draw all the conclusions that I wanted initially. Nevertheless, I still got some information.

In Figure 9, we see a graph of profits from each individual game over the past 12 months. We took into account 382 games that were profitable through direct sales (including In-App Purchases). It can be seen that the graph curve is similar to the sales graph for the whole time, it is also exponential. And again we see a significant difference between the arithmetic mean and the median.

You can see that the average game has earned $ 1,100 in the past 12 months. This means that 50% of the games brought their creators more than this amount, and 50% - less. 25% of games earned less than $ 140, and 25% more than $ 10,675.



Finally, Figure 10 shows the non-operating profits earned from 85 games. This refers to profits from advertising, affiliate links, the sale of by-products, etc. It is clearly seen that the numbers in the far right area are much lower than in the previous chart. However, in the middle of the chart, the figures even slightly exceed the corresponding amounts received from direct sales.

This means that such things as advertising, affiliate links and the use of other methods of obtaining non-operating income can bring good money, which some developers successfully use.



Conclusion


Fuf! I had to process a large amount of data and thanks for reading up to this point. I apologize for not being able to get more accurate data regarding the past 12 months; I should have formulated the questions differently.

I hope the results shed some light on the game development market for the App Store and will be useful for both beginners and more experienced igrodelov. Obviously, you can still make a lot of money, although this is not easy. As statistics confirm, the more games you make, the better you become. And finally, I want to thank all those who participated in this study.

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