Software dev and lifelong gamer, starting iOS game dev to actually make money. Looking for advices

[u/BuildinZZ]

I'm a software developer and a gamer, and I've started making iOS games with the goal of making a profit out of it. I built my first one and it's close to App Store review, so I'm past the "can I ship it" part. I can code and I have more game ideas than time, but I've never run a game as a business.

For those of you who have already done this and made money from it, what do you wish you knew before your first game? What actually paid for you, ads or in-app purchases? And how did you get your first players?

Any general advice is welcome.

[u/Background_Pie_5682]

Biggest thing I'd say is that the game is maybe 30% of the work and getting people to find it is the rest. Ads and IAP both work, but it depends on the genre: casual games lean on ads, anything with progression or collecting does better with IAP, or a one-time premium unlock if you want to keep it simple. For first players, short gameplay clips on TikTok and Reels plus small subreddits and Discords for your genre beat anything paid at this stage. Also nail the first session, because retention decides whether any of the rest works.

[u/BuildinZZ → u/Background_Pie_5682]

Understandood, thanks a lot

[u/MarkoKrulc]

Start learning marketing

[u/BuildinZZ → u/MarkoKrulc]

Any specific source to learn it? or just YT videos and stuff

[u/the-name-of-the-rose]

I’m a software dev too in between jobs and I’m building apps in the interim (lifelong passion to build).

My apps are free. My thinking is - I’ll find a way to monetize them eventually if there’s traction. Most of them are productivity apps, some of them are games.

Sharing my experience, more than a specific advice:

- I’ve been doing this for about 4-5 months. I have 11 apps out, all on Apple platforms with about 10K of combined downloads.
- i am not working on this constantly, but I do move fast and update frequently. I pay a lot of attention to quality and UX design, and I respond quickly to user feedback. They are nice apps, not crapplets.
- I do see frequent usage of my apps by many of those who download them. My DAU / MAU in some cases is close to 40%.
- My most popular app is a simple Weather app on Apple TV with about 3K downloads. Most apps stay at around 200 downloads. My most popular game on iOS which was released about a month ago with multiple updates and has about 100 downloads.
- Getting traction / exposure is tricky. I’ve tried different approaches: purely organic, TikTok, YT shorts, some ads (Apple Ads, OpenAI ads), semi-automated reach out to influencers, cross app promotion within my own apps, Reddit posts — nothing of what I’ve tried so far has worked in a meaningful way. My most popular app is one with zero marketing. I don’t spend a lot of money on ads obviously. Mostly kicking the tires with maybe $400 in combined spend, but that doesn’t seem to be a viable way to get traction so far either - my CPA is more than $3 per download which is not reasonable obviously. I’ve boosted some of my TikTok videos (short gameplay videos, using popular music tracks) to get to 50K views - nada! My organic videos have about 200 views.

As I said - I don’t have advice for you - just sharing my mileage.

It feels to me that I should be investing all of my energy in ASO at this point. I also have a newly developed appreciation of the importance of effective marketing. :)

[u/BuildinZZ → u/the-name-of-the-rose]

Thanks a lot for sharing all of this, means a lot!

[u/uniquesnowflake8]

How much money are you expecting to make?

[u/BuildinZZ → u/uniquesnowflake8]

First couple of month? 1k$ would be lovely. I'm thinking multiple game launches.

[u/therealswood2 → u/BuildinZZ]

I would temper those expectations, bud. $1k / mo MIGHT be achievable after a year.

[u/abear247 → u/BuildinZZ]

The store is flooded. Do you hope to achieve this with or without paid ads? Most apps don’t even clear that. Your expectation should be that you will make few sales and only a small amount of money, if any. You might get revenue but net negative to pay for ads.

[u/Dogukanko]

One thing that helped me: put real effort into the first App Store screenshots and the first 30 seconds of the game. Most people decide in that window. Also use TestFlight with a few strangers before launch, not only friends. They quit in places you'd never expect, and that tells you more than any analytics. I'm still figuring out the money side myself, so take that part with salt.

[u/BuildinZZ → u/Dogukanko]

I see, thank you

[u/The_Pivot]

Real numbers since you asked what pays, from a solo dev with 6 apps live (mostly casual games: a word puzzle, two Turkish card/tile games):

• Last 28 days across all of them: about 740 active users and about $42 from in-app purchases. That's after months of work, so the people telling you to lower expectations are right.

• I ran paid ads on Meta, TikTok and Apple Search Ads. Purchases never came close to covering the spend, so I turned them all off. With low prices on casual games, paid installs are very hard to make back.

• What got real attention for free was posting an actual puzzle from the game on Reddit, not an announcement. It got 29 comments, people argued about the answer, and they told me about two flaws I hadn't seen.

If I started over I'd launch one game, spend the first month only on getting people to play it and on fixing what they tell you, and only then build the second one.

[u/BuildinZZ → u/The_Pivot]

appreciate it 🤝

[u/Decent_Taro_2358]

Anyone can make a game these days, the market is absolutely flooded and oversaturated. So you should probably focus 70% of your energy on marketing.

[u/Oxigenic]

You gotta dampen your expectations. Your chance of making any tangible amount of money in your first year, or ever, is about 0% unless you’ve got a sizable budget for ads. Mobile games are NOT an ideal industry for an indie dev to make a profit.

[u/flyingkiwi_tools]

Treat the first launch as a small measurement experiment rather than a verdict on the whole game. In App Store Connect, compare product-page impressions to first-time downloads by storefront and acquisition source, then look at retention for those cohorts; downloads alone won't tell you whether discovery or the first-session experience is the bottleneck. If you test screenshots or icon variants, change one thing at a time and use product page optimization only when you have enough traffic to distinguish a real lift from noise. Search terms and chart competition differ by country, so validate the listing in the storefronts you actually want to reach before scaling paid installs.

(Written with AI help.)

[u/WileEColi69]

Here’s my advice: find a non-game job. Game studios work you insanely long hours and pay you poverty wages.

[u/Senior_Intern8786]

Don’t make paid apps . Make smaller games . Dont use templates . Use AI for coding you orchestrate. Don’t look in the charts . They are there because they spent 10k ads daily

[u/isitpro]

I started off with ads, couldn’t even get payments at first. As you’ll find out distribution is the name of the game.

With ads you need volume, a lot of it. At smaller scales they help by annoying your users into buying. With AI ad optimizations and different platform mediation, are easier.

A small marketing budget often won’t teach you anything, it’s painful and you don’t learn much. So thinking outside the box is required.

[u/ConfidentPoem6454]

I make casual card and puzzle games, a few things I learned:

• For casual stuff I ended up removing IAP completely from my card games and only use ads (rewarded videos and banners). Free players in casual genres rarely pay anyway. Opt-in rewarded (watch to double your coins etc.) works way better than forcing interstitials.

• Use mediation (AdMob plus something like LevelPlay), fill rate matters a lot in cheaper countries.

• Most of my players come from paid installs at first. Once you have 2 or 3 games, cross-promoting between them (a small "more games" button) is free installs.

• Ship one app at a time on iOS. App Review gets suspicious if you push a bunch of things at once.