We set this site up for our new game Crabitron and decided to call it Crabstarter. It is intended to be a light-hearted parody of Kickstarter, while showing real sales.
One of the main reasons we set it up is because we wanted to have some hope of recouping our investment in this game. In order to do that, we felt that we couldn't go for rock-bottom pricing and hope for a mega-hit. That seemed crazy and unrealistic.
Instead we gave our game the price we thought it deserved — $5. In order to help App Store players get over the "sticker shock," we set up Crabstarter. When you see that five dollar price in this context, it suddenly doesn't seem so high.
We also wanted players to see that we were real human beings, and not a faceless company. So we tried to make an honest video in the format of a standard Kickstarter video.
It's good to educate the buying public about how much it really costs to make something like this and how hard it is to recoup that. I hear people grousing about $3 apps and it drives me nuts.
The new era of apps is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we've got these obscenely low prices... but on the other hand, people are actually buying software. That's a bigger deal than most folks realize. Before the iOS era, people basically just didn't buy software. I mean, geeks did if there was some specific tool they needed, and gamers bought games of course... but the run-of-the-mill normal person? At most they bought MS office and maybe got hoodwinked into picking up Norton when the trial expired on their computer.
Now? Jane Q. Soccermom buys programs and games. That's a huge shift.
Also, people who in the past would have pirated software can't be bothered. When your a high school student, $50-$60 per game means you buy a couple of games a year, pirate them, or just stick to shareware and demos. Hell, how many of us burned through 99 cents in minutes on one-shot arcade machines?
Quality apps can demand premium prices, Minecraft runs for $6.99. I think in the future we will see more of a divergence between premium, dirt cheap, free, and freemium. Certainly the more hardcore gamers will understand the models behind freemium games and lose interest in them.
While funny, it completely fail in identifying the underlying causes of this consumer behavior.
I do not consider it strange that people feel threaten by a $3 app purchase, but not a $400 phone. To me, its consistent with consumers when they buy a product they trust vs a product they don't. In psychology, economics, and finance, its call Risk aversion and is the reluctance of a person to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff.
People expect software to fail. To a degree, Microsoft is to blame with blue screen of death, but thats only part of the culture regarding software. If I buy that $3 app, it might not solve the problem I got, it might be buggy, and it might not even start. If it end up in either of those cases, the social blame is normally put on the consumer for not knowing better on which software to buy, adding additional feeling of uncertainty.
On products like phones or computer hardware, the risk feels less. If the phone don't start, we expect to get it replaced and fixed. The blame will be on the seller/producer, and not on the consumer. Add on top the positive reinforcing through marketing in TV and movies, and a physical sale person, and the $300 or even $1000 can feel much safer for the consumer than clicking yes on a $3 app purchase.
Point. I've been dithering on purchases of a DNLA client for my iPod because quite frankly everything I've demo'd and tried has sucked. Crashy, buggy, poor format support, etc. Now, maybe these problems are also coming from my servers, but the programs are terrible at explaining what I'm doing wrong.
Good luck from a fellow Adelaidean. Have tweeted (@isaacforman) to plug the game and will buy it when I get home to the iPad tonight. Looks like a decent partner game to Ridiculous Fishing, which is my current time-waster.
Brilliant concept IMHO. A lot of people don't realise the amount of work that goes into creating this kind of stuff, and sadly the race to the bottom that's happened with games on the app store has meant in a lot of cases it's hard to for developers these days to justify the large development costs.
I also love that you've given it a price and not gone with a freemium model. I'd much rather pay $5 for a (good) game up front than be constantly annoyed with offers to "buy more coins" etc.
The game looks really fun. I'm going to get it now.
One thing I looked for and didn't see was additional tiers of contribution a la Kickstarter. The post-game credits tier, the t-shirt tier, the poster tier, etc. The art and game looks so fun I would've tossed in an extra $20 to support you guys and get a shirt.
Normally with kickstarter they ask people to contribute to the development of something before the development is done.
In this case, they've finished & released the game, and are encouraging people to contribute to recovery of their development costs after the development has been done. Hence it's in "reverse".
People "donate" by simply purchasing it on the app store, just like you would with any other app, and thus they get the game (immediately). And they are saying that they will add other features to the game if the revenue exceeds the target.
It's just being sold on the App Store. The whole site is a parody / joke around Kickstarter campaigns. At the same time it does show real sales data and have an authentic video.
I like the idea of the top-up, in-app purchases. Makes me wonder how successful a much-loved, popular app would do if it adopted a 'get free, pay what you want via in-app' model, along the lines of Radiohead's In Rainbows sale. Think something like ... Monkey Island 3. Unfortunately, if my maths is correct, Crabitron has sold barely any (literally 1-3) top-ups :-(
(Bear in mind that I don't know whether you're anything to do with the project, so I might be speaking out of turn!)
I'm assuming that the two figures in the top-right, being so closely related, are 'cached' in tandem: 732 backers, $2,569.56. 732 * 5 = 3660. 3660 - apple tax @ 30% = 2562. That gives $7.56 worth of 'top-ups' (no, I can't explain why that's such an odd number, unless the apple tax for in-app purchases isn't exactly 30%)
It's not a simple equation of 732 * 4.99 because you have to take into account all the different currencies in which the app can be purchased. Each country has its own representation of "$4.99" — in Australia it's $5.49, in the UK it's £2.99, and so on.
I have just checked the figures and the In-App-Purchases have earned $114.00 in profit so far. So it's not too bad, and we really appreciate that people have decided to support us enough to buy them.
I have nothing to do with the project, and I agree with you on the caching in tandem. I think my point is that those numbers might shoot way up tomorrow after a decent showing on HN (and presumably other places).
I really like the idea, the look of the game, and the execution of the site. I'm in for the full $10.
I hope it does well, too. Our current chart position is #117 in paid iPad apps (ranked by number of downloads). Our current grossing chart position is #368 for iPad (i.e., Crabitron is the 368 highest earning app on iPad).
There is a massive discrepancy between these two charts because freemium games (i.e., games that allow consumers to spend as much as they want) can sit relatively low in the paid charts, but earn a lot more money from a stable user base.
Our current popularity is mostly due to being featured by Apple in their New and Noteworthy section. This will end in 5 or 6 days and sales will likely drop down to $100/day (instead of $1000+ per day). Games are extremely hit-driven, and have very unreliable sales curves.
With this trajectory in mind it is unlikely we will hit our development costs of $100,000. More realistically, we will see $20,000 before the game drops off completely in a few months.
It's still a pleasant amount to earn back for a side project, but it's definitely why we still work full-time for someone else, building things for clients.
I'm going to guess that KS will be sending a C&D. It's a cute site, and I like the idea, but the style is way too close to KS. They have to be concerned about people stumbling onto this and not getting the joke.
On the other hand, if it gets popular to the point that KS sends a C&D, then the site probably served its purpose. Overall, a neat marketing idea.
I tried to make it an obvious parody, but if it's too close for comfort I will change it even more.
It's more about showing players our sales data and giving faces to the developers of their games. The Kickstarter parody aspect of it is intended to be humorous more than anything.
Thank you for letting me know. The last thing I want is for people to confuse our page with a real Kickstarter page, so I've made a significant change to the theming.
I love the concept, but I spent most of the time reading the page wondering when kickstarter had started offering projects hosted on your own domain, a la wordpress.
it's the layout of the right column that's sailing a little too close to the wind, IMO
I feel as though a much more exciting thing you guys are doing is Codea - http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/. It looks so cool and something a lot of people could relate to, given the major shift to tablets.
It's incredible to hear that since your work is really insightful (Codea reminds me of http://worrydream.com/#!/LearnableProgramming) and is pointing in an interesting direction. At the same time I do get that you need to put bread on the table, so to speak. Still with startup culture booming one has to wonder, why not commit? Have you guys tried that or is it something in the works?
One of the main reasons we set it up is because we wanted to have some hope of recouping our investment in this game. In order to do that, we felt that we couldn't go for rock-bottom pricing and hope for a mega-hit. That seemed crazy and unrealistic.
Instead we gave our game the price we thought it deserved — $5. In order to help App Store players get over the "sticker shock," we set up Crabstarter. When you see that five dollar price in this context, it suddenly doesn't seem so high.
We also wanted players to see that we were real human beings, and not a faceless company. So we tried to make an honest video in the format of a standard Kickstarter video.