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The line between Flappy Bird and flop: How indie devs can come together to make all apps more successful

WildFire CEO Ken Johnson on sharing users and in-game currency

The line between Flappy Bird and flop: How indie devs can come together to make all apps more successful

Ken Johnson is CEO of WildFire.

App stores are crowded, user acquisition costs are rising and major publishers seem to be the only ones making any money.

These trends are backed up by countless stats and even more industry anecdotes. As passionate games developers, we hope that the heart and soul we pour into creating a game is enough, but the fact is there’s a very fine line between an overnight indie success like Flappy Bird and a flop.

And that fine line leaves a vast majority of developers on the wrong side, out of cash and out of ways to sustain an app business.

The industry has been attempting to correct these issues for some time. Accelerators have been launched, millions of dollars in funding have been promised to offset acquisition costs, but the answer remains the same: success in the mobile market is directly related to the size of a developer’s marketing budget.

So as indie developers, what are we to do? Instead of accepting the status quo and fighting amongst ourselves for downloads, we should support the industry and each other as much as we support our own games.

Here are four ways we can start coming together to make all indie apps more successful:

Supporting open-source

Unity may arguably be the most popular game development engine, but getting locked into a proprietary platform like Unity means any innovation and learnings within the context of the technology are also in turn locked into that platform.

There’s a very fine line between an overnight indie success like Flappy Bird and a flop.

There are several alternative, open-source options out there that indie devs should carefully consider, such as Cocos2D-x and Haxe.

These open-source options can provide a lot of impressive functionality, while also providing a platform for developers to contribute to the future viability of that technology – which has a cascading effect for other indie developers looking for polished, yet economical technology solutions.

Supporting the open-source community really means the entire games industry, not just the major publishers that can afford to hire a team to dedicate thousands of hours to create their own engine, can benefit from the time devs pour into creating a game’s codebase.

Moving beyond the app stores

It’s a popular (and frankly worthwhile) prospect, but the idea of completely ditching app stores isn’t something that’s going to take off any time soon. There is so much control locked into the App Store and Google Play at this point that it will take a massive industry shift to change how centralised app distribution is today.

As indie developers, however, we should look for ways to make incremental moves away from that model through avenues that help with the biggest problem caused by centralisation: app discovery.

By joining a network of other apps and coming together over the shared need to get in front of an audience – we all have an opportunity to share the burden of attracting users.

Embracing cross-app connections

With the evolution of technology today, there are more opportunities than ever to collaborate through digital avenues.

It’s important to actively acknowledge the plight shared by all indie developers.

Beyond joining app networks, that includes small-scale opportunities like collaborating across social campaigns to share acquisition costs to more dedicated approaches like utilising shared in-game currency as part of a shared economy of apps.

Some are working to achieve this type of ecosystem through blockchain, but the technology is still three to five years away from making a true impact, not to mention the hurdle of consumer understanding and adoption.

Instead, we need to look for ways to connect in-game economies today to encourage users to engage with apps across such an economy, knowing they will be rewarded with a form of currency that can be used beyond a single app.

This type of symbiotic relationship will certainly be much more viable than today’s ad-based approach, which forces developers to spend an exorbitant amount of money to poach users from one another.

Changing the status quo

It’s also important to actively acknowledge the plight shared by all indie developers.

Whether it’s contributing your experience to industry blogs, being willing to meet with a budding developer over coffee, or simply downloading and engaging with apps made by other indie devs – we can all do a better job of sharing the knowledge and resources we have.

Because the more we invest in each other, the more we’ll be able to change the status quo.

How are you supporting the indie community?


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