I received the following message, and was asked to spread it to those interested. I think that it is very appropriate for this list:
“Since I’ve heard from so many people thanking me for the games, I thought I would shed a little light on the economics of the game. I’ve even heard some nasty comments from nay-sayers. The Blindfold Games make enough money to pay for the marketing of the games, and the cloud services the game uses. It does not pay me a salary; I do this as a hobby. For those of you that think the games are overpriced, consider how long it takes to make a game. The average game takes 100 to 200 hours to program, on top of an infrastructure that took about 1000 hours to build over the course of 4 years. The app is then beta tested by dozens of blind testers across the world, and I implement their suggestions. Each game requires periodic maintenance to adjust for changes to iOS, and bugs that people occasionally find. An entry level app programmer earns about $80,000 per year; an experienced programmer earns about $150,000 per year; there are 2000 working hours in a year, so let’s consider an average programmer earns about $60 per hour. That means each game costs about $6,000 to $12,000 to build, just to break even on a programmer’s time. Apple keeps 30% of the revenue from in-app upgrades. Hence, for most games, the upgrades would need to generate between $9,000 and $15,000 to break even. The average game gets about 2,000 downloads and 50 to 200 people will purchase an in-app upgrade for between $3 to $10. Suffice it to say, these games don’t pay for themselves. Remember – most visually impaired people are on fixed income. For those of you that think the games are too expensive, I really don’t understand your complaint - they are priced far lower than their cost already. For those of you think I would make far more money in the Android marketplace, remember that a higher percent people in the USA spend far more money on in-app upgrades on the iPhone that on the Android, and that tends to be true world-wide. If the games make so little on the iPhone, why would anyone think they would make more money on Android? In addition, most of the revenue in either Apple or Google app store is generated from a handful of western countries; not from the second or third world countries. And for those of you who think I should give the game away for free – I guess you think my efforts have no value. Another thing to realize is that most developers will not even breakeven on their investment of making games for the visually impaired community, or for making their games accessible. I came up with a business model that does not make a lot of money, but makes it viable for someone to build games as a hobby and cover some of the costs. Every developer that actually tried to turn this into a business has failed and those games disappeared. I was aware of this when I started out, and knew the only way to succeed in this market is to come up with lots of simple apps that can be built in 2 to 4 weeks. Spending 6 or more months on build a game would set the price absurdly high, and very few people would spend $50 to $100 to buy it.” He also sent the following, which I think is a good suggestion: “One person suggested adding the hashtag #keepBlindfoldGames to all of your tweets and facebook posts.” You might pass that on. If you think you're finished, you! really! are! finished!!
