How much does it cost to develop and port a mobile game?
Marmalade shared with us the report of its Director of Technology Tim Kloss “Porting mobile games using Marmalade Juice”. We decided to lay out his most interesting points concerning budgets.
Budgets
The most interesting thing in the report is, of course, the chapter about money. Tim explained in detail how much it takes to develop an application today (apparently, without taking into account promotion).
- AAA (Premium Apps) – large organizations with professional developers, a team of 4-12 people for 4-12 months. The budget ranges from 160,000 to $1.4 million.
- AA (Standard Applications) – small organizations with professional developers, a team of 2-3 people for 1-3 months. The budget varies from $12,000 to $90,000. The average budget is $50,000
- A (Budget applications) – often one developer, work for 1-2 months. The average budget is $3,000
Marmalade specialists also found out the number of applications of certain types in stores. Actually, there were no surprises:
- AAA – less than 1%, mainly 0.1% of all apps in stores
- AA – 30% of all apps in stores
- A – 70% of all apps in stores
Now we recall Pareto’s law, as well as the fact that it is distorted in the mobile market (the number of people earning most of the money is less than 20%).
How much does it cost to port the game?
This question is not asked very often, but it worries everyone. Marmalade calculated that the cost is different from project to project. In principle, this is natural.
- AAA – conversion = 40% of the original budget, Optimization = 15% of the original budget
- AA – conversion = 60% of the original budget, Optimization = 30% of the original budget
- A – conversion = 80% of the original budget, Optimization = 50% of the original budget
It is also curious that “if we take a ‘standard application’ with an initial development budget of $50,000 for iOS, the price of transcoding to Android can be 60% of this amount, i.e. $30,000. If 30% of all 750,000 apps on the App Store belong to the standard category, and if we assume that 1/5 of them need to be ported to Android and they are written in Objective-C, then the total conversion of transcoding will exceed $ 1 billion. And this is a price that does not represent any value for the end user.”
Marmalade Juice
Marmalade specialists decided to save application developers the cost of porting and developed Marmalade Juice, Tim says. How exactly, you can see here:
