HN user
I think you gain more publicity than competition (especially if it's not something that can be ripped off in a weekend).
Besides, to me it's more important to share data with other developers so it's worth it for me personally, even if financially it's just a wash. Not everything is about money :-)
I'm pretty sure Flower Garden is definitely an anomaly. It falls in that category of not being a super-hit, but not being a flop either.
Check out some of the other sales figures by Nimblebit http://nimblebit.com for games that did much better.
This is Noel, the author of the post and of Flower Garden.
I was planning on leaving a detailed analysis of the effect of IAP for a later post, but you're right that some people didn't like it. Especially in the Facebook group at one point there was almost a small-scale riot from people feeding off each other's negative comments. But as usual, that's just a vocal minority.
I had to intervene by explaining why I was charging for extra content (http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?topic=10677&uid=748971...) and I think that once people realized it was just me and not some faceless corporation, they were much cooler about it.
So my comment about "people loved it" referred to the fact that I got tons of positive feedback and the fact that IAP sold very well.
Frankly, I knew some people wouldn't like me moving in that direction (especially if you're used to the model of free updates for life), but I'm surprised that I didn't ruffle more feathers and most people took it really well.
Also interestingly, I think this has gotten people who had cracked versions of Flower Garden to purchase in-game items, so that probably helped too. But unfortunately I don't have a really accurate way of measuring that (I'll try for my next post).
I used AppViz for most of the charts (it's a great program to keep track of your sales and visualize them in different ways). The chart with colors it's just generated from Pages since I had to do some aggregating of the different IAP items myself.
You're right about the lack of labels (that's how the program does it), but I made sure it was explained in the sentence following the first chart. I wanted to stress that the vertical axis is profit in US$ and not unit of sales (since Flower Garden is $2.99).
Except that human bodies are not engines. Calories in != calories out + stored energies. A healthy body will store just enough and discard the rest of the eaten food.
For a much more accurate and interesting read, check out Good Calories, Bad Calories.
Great technical book postmortem! I've also gone through the painful process of writing a technical book and I agree with everythig he says.
And seriously, never, ever, think about writing a technical book for the money.
Doesn't seem to work for me with pages protected with .htpasswd. The page is blank, no prompt to enter a password. Anybody else having that problem?
John is a genius. No doubt about it. But he didn't come up with it, he just recognized it as a useful optimization: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/articles/8/
And a week and a half after release, it's up to 150 units. I guess that's more or less what I would expect of a niche app that was thrown in the App Store without any marketing.
7.5 is the ideal for me. I do a lot of running and cycling though, which make me need more sleep. When I don't, I'm fine with 6 hours.
I also experimented with polyphasic sleep and it was too much of a pain as far as coordinating a schedule with the rest of the world.
What I did take out of it was that it was very important for me to sleep in multiples of 1.5 hours. So if I'm not feeling very tired, I'll go from 7.5 hours to 6 hours, but never to 6.5 or 8.
Best thing, I don't even need an alarm anymore. I just wake up naturally, which is great.
The original link doesn't work for me. Here's a fixed link: http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...
Seems like the Economist moved it under science.
We're just using Skype for conference calls. The cost of SkypeOut and SkypeIn is something like $20/year or something. Works fine for us.