Ged Maheux of IconFactory posted about his frustration with the iPhone App Store and their skee-ball/carnival game Ramp Champ’s lack of sales and financial return. It’s an interesting read (as is a counter opinion by Marco Arment), and Ged has some very valid points: developers really do need a way to push updates through the App Store approval process faster. Ramp Champ was hamstrung by a crashing bug right after release and it would have helped them tremendously to get in front of the negative first impression it left with users.

I’m not going to speculate on the reasons Ramp Champ is not a sales success (personally, I thought the game extremely pretty, but the gameplay flawed and not responsive). Instead, let’s look at the issue of Ramp Champ’s failure to return on investment. IconFactory design Talos Tsui commented on Ged’s article:

We (Iconfactory) spend at least 3840 hours (8 designers for 7 months) on art and design of Ramp Champ. DS Media Labs working on the programming side on and off for 7 months.
-(http://gedblog.com/2009/09/28/losing-ireligion/#comment-20667)

Let’s assume the DS Media Labs had a single developer that worked half of the seven months on Ramp Champ (3.5 months), which would be about (14 weeks * 40hrs/week) 560 hours. That’s a grand total of (3840 + 560) = 4400 hours. I have no idea what the designers at IconFactory are able to bill for client work, but let’s assume it’s $100/hour. We’ll also peg the DS Media Labs developer at $100/hour. Of course, we’re using 1099 rates, not considering the cost of any benefits either company might provide to their employees. In labor, Ramp Champ cost (4,400 hours * $100/hour) = $440,000 to develop. The App store will take 30% of each sale, so we need Ramp Champ to pull in ($440,000 / 0.7) = $628,517.

Ramp Champ sells for $1.99, and has 4 add on packs available for in-app purchase at $0.99 each. Originally only two add on packs were available, an additional two just recently became available. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that 20% of users purchase a single level pack and another 20% of users purchase both level packs available at launch. I’m leaving the recently released level packs out of the analysis.

With those assumptions in place, Ramp Champ would need to just over about 243,000 copies and almost 146,000 level packs to break even:

((243,000 * 1.99) + (97,000 * 0.99)) * .7 = 439,677

Apple doesn’t release detailed sales and revenue figures for the App Store, and most publishers understandably don’t like to share this data either. According to one set of numbers I’ve looked at from Fade (http://news.vgchartz.com/news.php?id=5113 – disclaimer: I have no idea how they obtain their figures), it seems that very few titles at the $2.99 price point sell at the volume IconFactory would need to break even on Ramp Champ.

In the end, I really think Marco got it right (as usually): Ramp Champ is aimed at a very casual audience, but was developed like it was a premium title. The lesson to larger design and dev shops (where larger is any shop consisting of more than a single person) is clear: don’t bet the farm on massive iPhone sales.


Comments are closed.

Return to Top