So let’s check the iTunes Connect reports and see what happened the first full day BallZOut<\/a> was available, with our total “marketing” having been cross-posting to Ludum Dare<\/a>, a tools post in the cocos2d forums<\/a>, and a Touch Arcade post<\/a> …<\/p>\n … well look at that, 48 sales for $32.51 income! Woo-hoo! October Challenge<\/a> WIN! *does the happy troll dance* We’d thank you all by name, but you know who you are. Okay, we’ll thank Pat by name, for providing the most amusing testimonial so far:<\/p>\n It is without doubt, the best app I have bought for iPhone!<\/p>\n (since it’s the only app I have paid for Thank you, Pat. Your entry into the App Store economy is duly noted.<\/p>\n Speaking of the App Store economy, examining just where these results place us in it is rather eye-opening. “Shocking” might not be overstating it, in fact. Taking a screenshot here of AppAnnie<\/a>‘s rankings page as we write this:<\/p>\n Woah, dude<\/em>. Thirty bucks and change of total sales actually gets your game on the charts? And into the top 1000 overall<\/em> in Argentina? Clearly Argentinians (Argentines? Argentineans? Argentinos?) are discerning folk indeed — we’ll tip a bottle of Fuzion<\/a> to them at our celebratory dinner — but that certainly seems to indicate an surprisingly low amount of overall sales, doesn’t it? Even if we just look at the U.S. where most sales come from, BallZOut was 265 in Puzzle games and 437 in Action games yesterday. And those are the two most heavily populated categories of games, by far. Can’t seem to quickly google up a running count of subcategory splits, but sufficiently enlightening metrics we can quickly get from 148apps.biz<\/a> for the ‘Games’ overall category:<\/p>\n Yes, it seems like we can conclude pretty safely that the massively overwhelming majority of iDevice games are just not making any money,<\/em> if you can be comfortably into the top 500 in your subcategories in the U.S. by pulling in just about enough to go out for lunch with. And unless you have a really killer and massively financed marketing plan, you would be extremely ill-advised indeed to consider writing an iPhone game to be anything other than an amusing hobby. Which, indeed, we did find frenziedly pounding out 1.0 to be; so we have every intention of continuing work on this project as our little playground to experiment with multiplayer Game Center support, features we haven’t tried out yet of the cocos2d engine, and so forth … but we’re certainly not going to shortchange paying projects to do so!<\/p>","time":"October 21st, 2010 1:49 pm","title":"BallZOut: The First Day"}![\":-)\"](\"http:\/\/ludumdare.com\/compo\/wp-includes\/images\/smilies\/simple-smile.png\")
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