I wonder, though, if what you’ve written here also applies to business and productivity apps. From my own experience as an App Store customer, the top 10 lists don’t interest me very much in these categories. If I’m looking for something specific – and in these categories I’d imagine most people are – I search. I also check out apps that I read about on blogs or hear about on Twitter. But for games, I think you’re right. Unless I hear or read about an app by chance, I just scan the top 30-50 and see what looks interesting.

From what I’ve read on other sites, the way to go for games seems to more and more be the Freemium model. Have you considered going free and adding in-app purchases? Maybe you could launch additional levels or power-ups or something as in-app purchases. Financially, consumables are probably the way to go, so maybe you could offer, I don’t know, 100 speed boosts or something for $0.99. Not that I’d buy it, but from what I see in the wild there are actually people who buy such things ;)

The truth is, Apple’s App Store works. It just does. It’s a perfectly fine market place to sell your software at. But col000r said it himself: It was a whole lot easier three years ago, because there wasn’t a lot of competition going on.
The only thing that Apple does wrong is that they approve every piece of shit that gets submitted to them, no matter how good it is. But then again: What if they didn’t? I can almost hear the angry mob crying “censorship” and “unfair policy”. Apple simply has no choice.

One could argue that the mistake was to endorse a price as low as 99 cents. People now think it’s possible to produce content for that kind of money, but it isn’t. And for everyone who thinks its easy for EA and the like to produce content for a buck a shot and forcefully push to a black bottom line by throwing shitloads of money into advertising: They have to fight just as hard as we indy devs do. For every Tetris they have in the store there’s a couple of games that’s not even in the top 50. I know, most of us would be happy beyond believe if we could sustain a sales rank that high for just a few weeks, but EA is not a tiny company. They’re having just as a hard time as we do to survive, only they also need to pay wages for a huge workforce.

In the end, it boils down to having prime content, a prime quality product. It’s actually that easy. I can understand col000r’s disappointment first hand. I have been there, I have done that, I had to learn the very same lessons. But it doesn’t help your bottom line to be angry at others that your game doesn’t sell. It’s everybody’s own fault. It’s simply not reasonable to think you could make a decent income on a product that doesn’t really stand out in a marketplace that is overrun by tens of thousands of cheap fucks who all think they can get rich doing the next Angry Birds.

But to end this on a positive note: I also learned another lesson. If your game doesn’t get bought by a whole lot of people anyway, those who do buy it because they like it. And those are willing to pay for content. If you can’t make a living by sell in quantity, do it with quality. Raise the price to 2.99 or even 4.99 and explain why you did that in the description text. You’ll see pretty soon that your sales won’t slow down by much, but your bottom line will grow by a lot.

And then there’s also other software genres that are not nearly as crowded as the games sector: Utilities, Healthcare and Fitness, Music – there’s a whole bunch of ideas and concepts that haven’t been done yet for the App Store. You don’t need to make games to make money.

What do you think of the android platform for publishing software? Do you think that its easier for small devs threre?