[japhib]

My 2c having released both premium and free apps on iOS and Android: premium apps do not sell. People don’t want to fork over any amount of money just to try an app that they may or may not enjoy. You can still make _some_ money, and get some downloads, that way, but it’s just completely incomparable to making it free.

Some rough numbers from my recollection: I released Card Crusade (deck building mobile game) for $4 back in 2019 and i think in the first year we got about 2k-3k downloads total. When we made it free in early 2020 we got 25k downloads in the first _week_. The revenue was less for us as a free app, but that’s with no ads and IMO we designed the IAPs pretty poorly.

But, a while after making it free, we accrued enough positive reviews that the iOS App Store started recommending the game to more people, so we have a steady 200+ downloads per week, despite not having updated the game since 2020!

I released another premium mobile game, Barnard’s Star, back in 2022 (and am still slowly updating it). Coincidentally, both apps make roughly the same amount of money (about $500 every 6 months), but Barnard’s Star makes that money from a fraction of the downloads… but the word of mouth effect (and game community) seems like it would be a lot stronger with f2p. So I’m planning on making Barnard’s Star free eventually (with hopefully better designed IAPs this time!).

One place where the “just a game and a price tag” model still works well is Steam. If i were trying to make a living off making games, I think I’d focus on releasing stuff there.

[cableshaft]

Yeah, I'm planning to release the game on both Steam and iOS. With Love2D, I'm able to use mostly the same codebase outside of native iOS or Steam features I'd like to add.

Thanks for helping to confirm my suspicions. I used to release mobile games myself but it's been well over a decade. The landscape was a lot different back then.