mobile Archives - Page 7 of 9 - Reality is a Game

There are a lot of great success stories on the App Store from people who made games in their spare time striking it rich to the small but determined company finally making it. When people see these stories and hear the market size of Apple’s growing iOS market they may think that they too can be a App Store millionaire.

Sure, they have the chance to have great success on the App Store, but if you’re thinking of throwing your hat in the ring then you’ll want to check out a great write-up on Money and the App Store.

Myth #2: Making an iPhone game is fast and cheap
Compared to making Assassin’s Creed or Red Dead Redemption, this one is actually true. Making an iPhone game shouldn’t cost $50M and take 4 years. (Well, neither should a console game, if you ask me.) But unless you’re aiming for a Doodle Jump clone, it’s still a bit of work. If you make it cheap, you’ll have a very small team (say 2 people), and it’ll take AT LEAST six months to get something polished out there.
A quick estimate of an iOS game budget:
2 salaries x 6 months
A freelance contractor for sound design
A trip to GDC or some other event to meet journalists
Hardware to work on (a new computer, or a hard drive, or an iPad)
Some software licenses, because software devs need to earn a living, too
Maybe a website or a Dropbox account
You’ll do the QA yourself? All right then…
All in all, you can’t be serious about making games and “earning a living” out of it without at least a $40k budget. (And I’m really being cheap here; I think to be competitive today on the App Store you need $100k.)

It’s worth reading the entire article – particularly the conclusion.

Link to the Gamasutra article.

Anyone who has been following HTML5 to any degree has probably gotten lost or confused at some point about what’s going on. I know I have and I know I will get confused again in the future. For now (end of Jan 2012) this wonderful blog post on HTML5 game development is great!

The post covers nearly everything one needs to know from the technology to some problems with HTML5 to how the heck one can monetize games made using the tech.

Here’s a snippet from the mobile web browser section:

Not to be mistaken with mobile apps, which you download and install onto your phone, the Mobile Web Browser is an increasingly important platform to target. Mobile browsing is catching up to Desktop fast with some predictions putting the overlap period to be as early as 2014. Take that figure with a pinch of salt of course, but no-one denies the rapid growth here. This is in part supported by the recent advances in mobile technology. It assumes the player is online and browses to your game via the browser installed on their phone or tablet. There is a rapidly growing market in mobile web games, with a number of high profile games portals already on board buying them and many more will follow. In terms of development you need to approach it from either the DOM or Canvas angle. Most smart phones contain dedicated GPUs and Mobile Safari will now use it to render DOM elements and under iOS5 Canvas as well. WebGL is also on its way. Enabled in Firefox on Android and a hidden option in Mobile Safari expect to see more of this soon.

Link.