One of the most interesting things I want to get statistics of is in which platform is Indie game devs
making more money profitwise?
android
pc
ios
amazon
windows mobile
any others?
I am specially referring to games made with corona. If there is some evidence then maybe Indie gamers can target that platform first to get some profit out of their games?
I only have Amazon, iOS and Android apps. I make most of my money on iOS. At least in LATAM for me, the ads rate for Android are very low and I have never gotten anybody to buy anything on Android in LATAM.
What is LATAM?
Latin America
I’m a huge advocate of Android. To date I’ve only built Android apps, largely because our iOS test device collection equates to exactly one rather old iPad (from 2013 possibly!), and also because I don’t want to start paying the annual license fee to publish to iOS until mobile apps are making a reasonable amount of revenue already.
But, despite my bias, I’m also of the opinion that iOS is where the money is.
Android has the market. It’s huge - I think I read somewhere that more Android devices sell every year than the entire number of iOS devices that have ever been produced. You can pick any free app and compare it’s Google Play store download count to an Apple store count and the Android count will be far higher. Look at any article that focuses on stats like this and you’ll wonder what the point in publishing outside of Android is.
But, if you look at the global distribution of Android sales, you then find that they have the market almost entirely because poorer countries buy vast quantities of cheap Android devices. These are people who can just about afford to have something nice, but not to also buy commercial games or apps for it. Additionaply they’re generally on older Android versions, and low range hardware.
iOS on the other hand, while having a smaller audience, tends to sell more to the west. Pretty much every iOS user is somebody who doesn’t think twice about paying for apps. Apps are almost expected to have a price, and because iOS devices are more of a standardised spec and the software is optimised specifically for that spec, if an app is in the store it’s pretty much guaranteed to work properly on the device the buyer is holding, so there’s no need to wait for something to have a reasonable following before trusting that you’re not about to buy something that’ll run poorly.
Looking at the bigger picture, it makes total sense to publish to iOS, and for iOS sales to out-earn Android sales. But if your app is free, it’ll probably get more downloads on Android. Just remember that most mobile ad networks seem to be priced around installs, not clicks, so a free app on Android running adverts that pay you when the user installs the advertisers app and earns them some money might not necessarily do any better than a paid app would, since your probably poor user still isn’t going to install the paid apps that you’re advertising.
Same as Richard I have theories. At least in Latin America, everybody has some sort of phone, but mostly low-end Android phones. Most people do not have the level of disposable income or access to cheap credit that most Americans have. Those that do have an iOS product tend to have more disposable income and tend to spend more on IAP or buying an app. In my country DR the minimum yearly wage is around $1,200. Just slightly less than an iPhone Xs Max.
Thanks richard11 for your insightful thoughts and theories on this. I have learned so much from this forum. I have been part of other forums too but I did not find such an active group of people willing to contribute to knowledge and share their thoughts. I am glad to be part of some of this highly interesting topics and also listen to stories of individuals.
Thanks to agramonte as well for helping me identify the target platforms.
This is a lot more complicated question again than simply “what is the best?”
For instance, what is your app and who is it for? Are you creating a free to play game or a pay to download game?
You need to know your target audience and their needs, so you need to conduct market research. If you are creating some generic casual title, such as another match three clone, then you might want to keep your game free to play. Why? Because if your potential customers have access to hundreds or thousands of match three games for free, then why would they buy yours? It could be that you have some great twist or you have an interesting franchise license with great name recognition that draws customers to it, but without such things (and a lot of marketing), you’ll likely fail to attract any customers.
Then again, if you are creating something very specific, like… let’s say a text adventure or a visual novel, then you are targeting a much more niche target segment. Such target segments are used to paying for the games and free to play doesn’t really exist in those niche markets. Those games are also a rarity outside of desktop markets. An indie game on PC that costs 10€ or 20€ is a common practice, whereas an iOS or Android game costing 20€ is a rare sight.
So, to wrap it up, you need to really understand what your app is, who it is for, what platform are those customers on, what those customers expect and need from such games and what the common practices for such games are. Failing to understand and address these questions will greatly hurt your game’s chances of success.
Per user Amazon is most profitable, closely followed by iOS then Google but install base is the opposite.
As far as I understand the main source of revenue for free games is from advertisements, nothing else 
You are generalising a bit too much now.
Think of games like Candy Crush Saga, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, etc. Those are among the top grossing games on the mobile platforms and they don’t have any ads. For instance, an article by PockerGamer pointed out that Clash Royale has generated over 2 billion dollars in two years.
Now, these games are at the top of the food chain. They are extremely well designed and refined, plus they each have a marketing budget in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So your game will most likely not be comparable to them in that sense.
The most important thing to really understand is that people like what they have and that includes their money. Making people give up their hard earned money is difficult. Think about yourself and your spending behaviours. How much do you spend on an average free to play title? For mobile games, I don’t think I’ve ever spent more than 5$ or 10$ and even that was after some serious pondering. For some free to play PC games that I’ve played for years, like Heroes of the Storm, I’ve easily forked at least ten times that.
In order to generate reasonable revenues from IAPs, you have to think of your games as a service. Something that will keep players captivated for months or years to come. Does your game have that hook that makes its players want to pay for them IAPs? Do they actually benefit from making IAPs in a meaningful way? If the game is just another indie title, then the answer is probably no and in that case your main source of income is probably ad revenue. Still, even with ads, in order for them to have any effect on your earnings, you need to have a larger active player base.
The breakdown of players who use IAPs is very bleak. At best, my team’s projects have had 3.4% of the users pay at least 1$ and at worst it has been 0.6% on iOS (Android figures are generally worse). But then again, the more a person has paid, the more likely they have been to play the game for longer and the more frequently they’ve made purchases. In other words, these users found something they were willing to pay for and they did. Once a person has made a purchase once, they are much more likely to make another one, etc.
For hyper casual publishers like Ketchapp, Voodoo, etc. you are correct, the majority comes from bombarding users with ads. IAPs for games that have play times measured in seconds is not really a thing.
However, as pointed out above, the big income comes from very sticky games that keep the player hooked. There MUST be some form of competition in there that motivates players to beat other players and pay to gain a competitive advantage.
Just look at the top grossing charts as this is derived from IAP revenue not ads. On the other hand the top free charts will all be dominated but ad income in one form or another.
When I was doing free-to-play games with IAPs for additional content, the conversion rate was about 1-2% (i.e. out of every 100 free downloads, 1 or 2 would upgrade), which equated to about a 50/50 split in income between IAP and ads.
So you need your install base to be in the high six-figures or seven figures for that 1-2% to result in a decent return.
Fortunately I was able to achieve over 3m downloads, but that was a good few years ago when the market wasn’t so saturated and apple gave indies a chance with the new releases tab.
95% of income was from iOS, very difficult to make much impact on Android.
I only have Amazon, iOS and Android apps. I make most of my money on iOS. At least in LATAM for me, the ads rate for Android are very low and I have never gotten anybody to buy anything on Android in LATAM.
What is LATAM?
Latin America
I’m a huge advocate of Android. To date I’ve only built Android apps, largely because our iOS test device collection equates to exactly one rather old iPad (from 2013 possibly!), and also because I don’t want to start paying the annual license fee to publish to iOS until mobile apps are making a reasonable amount of revenue already.
But, despite my bias, I’m also of the opinion that iOS is where the money is.
Android has the market. It’s huge - I think I read somewhere that more Android devices sell every year than the entire number of iOS devices that have ever been produced. You can pick any free app and compare it’s Google Play store download count to an Apple store count and the Android count will be far higher. Look at any article that focuses on stats like this and you’ll wonder what the point in publishing outside of Android is.
But, if you look at the global distribution of Android sales, you then find that they have the market almost entirely because poorer countries buy vast quantities of cheap Android devices. These are people who can just about afford to have something nice, but not to also buy commercial games or apps for it. Additionaply they’re generally on older Android versions, and low range hardware.
iOS on the other hand, while having a smaller audience, tends to sell more to the west. Pretty much every iOS user is somebody who doesn’t think twice about paying for apps. Apps are almost expected to have a price, and because iOS devices are more of a standardised spec and the software is optimised specifically for that spec, if an app is in the store it’s pretty much guaranteed to work properly on the device the buyer is holding, so there’s no need to wait for something to have a reasonable following before trusting that you’re not about to buy something that’ll run poorly.
Looking at the bigger picture, it makes total sense to publish to iOS, and for iOS sales to out-earn Android sales. But if your app is free, it’ll probably get more downloads on Android. Just remember that most mobile ad networks seem to be priced around installs, not clicks, so a free app on Android running adverts that pay you when the user installs the advertisers app and earns them some money might not necessarily do any better than a paid app would, since your probably poor user still isn’t going to install the paid apps that you’re advertising.
Same as Richard I have theories. At least in Latin America, everybody has some sort of phone, but mostly low-end Android phones. Most people do not have the level of disposable income or access to cheap credit that most Americans have. Those that do have an iOS product tend to have more disposable income and tend to spend more on IAP or buying an app. In my country DR the minimum yearly wage is around $1,200. Just slightly less than an iPhone Xs Max.
Thanks richard11 for your insightful thoughts and theories on this. I have learned so much from this forum. I have been part of other forums too but I did not find such an active group of people willing to contribute to knowledge and share their thoughts. I am glad to be part of some of this highly interesting topics and also listen to stories of individuals.
Thanks to agramonte as well for helping me identify the target platforms.
This is a lot more complicated question again than simply “what is the best?”
For instance, what is your app and who is it for? Are you creating a free to play game or a pay to download game?
You need to know your target audience and their needs, so you need to conduct market research. If you are creating some generic casual title, such as another match three clone, then you might want to keep your game free to play. Why? Because if your potential customers have access to hundreds or thousands of match three games for free, then why would they buy yours? It could be that you have some great twist or you have an interesting franchise license with great name recognition that draws customers to it, but without such things (and a lot of marketing), you’ll likely fail to attract any customers.
Then again, if you are creating something very specific, like… let’s say a text adventure or a visual novel, then you are targeting a much more niche target segment. Such target segments are used to paying for the games and free to play doesn’t really exist in those niche markets. Those games are also a rarity outside of desktop markets. An indie game on PC that costs 10€ or 20€ is a common practice, whereas an iOS or Android game costing 20€ is a rare sight.
So, to wrap it up, you need to really understand what your app is, who it is for, what platform are those customers on, what those customers expect and need from such games and what the common practices for such games are. Failing to understand and address these questions will greatly hurt your game’s chances of success.