Chapter 10. Make Some Money for Bananas

Most game developers today have heard stories from other developers who have become rich overnight by publishing games and apps in well-known mobile app stores.

They read about people who made lots of money with simple games and were enchanted by the so-called gold rush in mobile app development still going around.

But let's face it, every one dreams of this. And somehow people think it is very easy to make big money there. In the early days of the app stores, it was much easier because the competition wasn't that big. Nowadays, the app stores are loaded with apps and games. A lot of them are similar. Even if you have created the most awesome game, you can't be sure that people will notice it in the mass of new releases every day and week. So, you need a lot of luck. You need a good app and you need to publish it at the right place and time, and of course, to the right audience.

This chapter will concentrate on two methods that will help you make more money with your Monkey games. They are as follows:

  • Sell your app for a one-time fee inside a marketplace
  • Display advertisements in the app

Giving your game away for free and displaying ads has become very popular these days, and so we will look into this more closely. Some people say that the classic way of selling apps will become a method of the past sooner or later. But you as a developer have to make a choice when you release an app or game. You can definitely release it for free and just enjoy the feedback from users. But everyone likes to have a little extra pocket money for a pizza or a movie, right?

So, let's go and get the money rolling for some bananas!

Which markets exist for your game?

The short answer is many! The long answer is it depends on the platform your game is running on. Let's look at the platforms that Monkey supports at the moment:

iOS

When you build apps for the mobile iDevices of Apple, the only place where you sell these and publish these apps is the iTunes App Store. You need to sign up for an iOS developer account to be able to publish your apps to a device for testing, and also for publishing them on the iTunes App Store.

OSX

Here you have several choices. You can publish an app on your own web space, or sell it through a publisher. Another possibility is the (OSX) App Store from Apple. Again, you have to sign up for an OSX developer account to do this.

Android

As time goes by, more and more options to publish and sell your apps will become available. Besides Android Market from Google, where you need to sign up for an account, there are also markets such as Amazon or, now, Barnes and Noble, where you can try to publish your app. Of course, you can distribute your app on your own website too.

XNA

As a Windows phone app, you can sell it through the Windows Phone Marketplace. If you target the XBOX 360, then there is XBOX Life. You can also sell it as a normal Windows XNA application from your own web space.

HTML5/FLASH

Here, the whole Web is your place. Google opened the Chrome Web Store to publish HTML5 and FLASH apps, and so hundreds of possibilities exist.

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