The AppStore is bringing math back again to game developers. Lately there we had Jeff Atwood thinking out loud, why setting the price to the lowest possible, 0.99 cent, is the best way to go for iPhone-developers. Adam Saltsman now takes the turn and doing math the other way round: If you sell a certain amount of games, a higher price might be better, just because revenues grow as sales grow. He writes the whole turn at Gamasutra:

The best case scenario here is that we’re all working from home and have cheap mortgages, and only need maybe $5,000 per month for living expenses (before taxes). We’re going to ignore health insurance and stuff like that for now too – very rosey best-case scenario! So, quick mental math, we need to recoup about $30,000 in net revenue just to break even, much less earn a little extra to put toward the next project.

So, let’s check out the bottom three pricing tiers (in USD only for sake of simplicity):

50,000 copies x $0.99 = $49,999 – 30% = $35,000

50,000 copies x $1.99 = $99,500 – 30% = $70,000

50,000 copies x $2.99 = $149,500 – 30% = $105,000

Which brings me somewhat circuitously to my main point: selling your game for $0.99 means you have to get in the top 10 to make it worth your while. Selling your game for $1.99 or more means you can get by and maybe even fund your next project even if you’re only in the top 100.

Simple math, isn’t it? What do you think?

(via)

Pixeljam are back. After Dino Run they made in cooperation with Adult Swim Games the game “Mountain Maniac“, a strange mixture of Frogger, Pachinko, a fun casual game and some irritating storytelling. You play the “montain maniac” and have the goal to score points by destroying the city below the mountain. You do this by shooting of rocks out of the mountain. Insane stuff. A very retro-gameplay, if you ask me.

What once again is so cool about the Pixeljam-style is the “neo-retro” artwork, that are blocky, pixeled, but at the same time huge and detailed as well. The games are somehow “airy”.

Great idea! Great Execution. A Winamp skin, expecially for the upcoming Blip-Festival. Get it here: .wsz. (via)

(Did you know, we have an Interview with Justin Frankel about the “early years of Winamp” available?)

The Space Invaders project continues and continues. And for the opening of an exhibition in London the Invaders discovered a new medium. The went on “hundreds of helium balloons” that were “displayed in the streets of London”. At this occasion also six new space invaders appeared in London, “including the biggest one ever put in this city”.

I was lately stumbling into NodeBox, Python-based creative code “out-of-the-box” for Mac OS X, and I really love the workflow. Instant code-based drawing in seconds (I think most of you know NodeBox already). While I was inspecting the libraries, I came about RoboFab, some “Python code for manipulation and storage of font and glyph related data“. And they had a very nice introduction on their site, where Erik van Blokland from LettError gives a talk about this tool.

The opening of the presentation is a theory-topic. It is about “Why make new tools?“. This is worth watching. Although, the presentation is also nothing new (it was recorded over a half year ago) I thought: Well, why not share this content? And here it is:

Arcs21 by Lia

iPhoneArt is a still small website, dedicated to artful iPhone and iPod Touch apps. Right at the moment there are only 12 apps listed, most of the creators should be familiar to you: People like Lia, Joshua Davis or Delaware released for the iPhone. Let’s see how this project will progress. Somehow I have to think on two other sites: Artzilla.org – a site dedicated to artful browser-software and PlayState.org – a still fresh project from me, it’s about iPhone, gaming and tools.

Well, the Roboexotica is taking place in Vienna (I think just at this moment). And as you might know, most of this event is about “Cocktail serving robots”. One of the submissions this year takes Super Mario into the duty. A combination of old NES-hardware, water-pumps, an NES-Emulator, some hardware devices and a server written in Python turns this old game, into an “immersive experience”, that also serves alcohol. Voila, what do gamers want more?