We need a consistent baseline to measure against, and we haven't quite reached that yet."Ī lot is still in flux at the App Store, including the so-called "race to the bottom" where some companies price their games at $0.99 in order to win as many sales as possible.
Greenstone said of the still-booming business: "I think we'll have to wait another year before we'll know where this is all going to settle down to.
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The App Store is still a brave new world for mobile software sales, and Mr. In the old retail days you could just shell out $15,000 and buy an end cap on the games aisle. Granted, it is much more difficult to get seen on the App Store. They just take their 30 percent cut, handle all the customer interaction and send the money every month.
He added: "The App Store is the same thing: there's no hassle, and Apple is a very easy middle-man to deal with. Our sales volume dropped in half, but our per-unit profits were around three times higher, so overall we actually made more money selling direct on the web site than through retail, and with none of the stress." "Later, I ditched all retail sales and went with a direct, online system which was much better for us. "I hated dealing with distributors and retailers back in those days," Mr. One area of overlap, however, has been the ease of cutting distributors and retailers out of the chain, with Apple serving as the only middle-man in iPhone game sales.
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I'm sure that this has brought some PC people into the fold who might be now looking at doing some work on the Mac, but I think most iPhone game developers are mostly focused on the iPhone."
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iPhone games are just so different than Mac games that there's not too much room for overlap. The whole iPhone thing got me interested in doing games again." He said he doesn't pay much attention to Mac gaming anymore, characterizing that part of the industry as one where "most games being produced are casual games which are being done by companies none of us old-timers have even heard of."Īsked if the success of iPhone gaming could give Mac gaming a boost, he responded: "I don't think there's any connection between the two at all. Greenstone said came out of being "tired of doing games and wanting to do something new. Pangea dropped out of the Mac games business after the release of Pangea Arcade in 2006, a decision Mr. Pangea did US$4.3 million in overall app sales last year, which he said "was better than any year we had with our Mac game sales," despite the fact that the App Store only existed for half of 2008.
Greenstone estimates he has sold several million copies of his eight iPhone games, with Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally clocking in at one million-plus each and Bugdom 2 and Nanosaur 2 selling in the six figures. "I thought it had potential," he said in an interview, "but I grossly underestimated just how much potential that was. Brian Greenstone, founder and president of Pangea Software, has been around the block more than a few times since releasing his first commercial Mac game 20 years ago, but even he had no idea how big the App Store could be when it launched in mid-2008.
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