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Interviewed: Owen Goss, Streaming Colour Studios

Feature by Ben Briggs, June 24, 2009

Owen Goss is the founder of Streaming Colour Studios, and produced Dapple for the iPhone and iPod touch. We sat down for an interview and here's the result.

First off, what made you want to become, specifically, an iPhone developer? There's many different devices out there, why did you choose this platform?

I'll admit, when I founded Streaming Colour Studios my original intent was to start with PC/Mac games. At the time I had my iPod touch and I was enjoying playing games on it, but I wasn't thinking about it in terms of development yet. When I started prototyping Dapple I started thinking about how much nicer it would be to play if I could touch the screen. That's when I decided to try to port the prototype to the iPhone. The first time I played the prototype on a device I realized that the game belonged on the iPhone.

The iPhone is a powerful machine, and the new 3G S is even more powerful in terms of gaming capabilities. It's an exciting device to develop games for. The touch screen, accelerometer, and other features all provide an immediacy to the gaming experience, but the graphics capabilities provide the horsepower to do really interesting things with the device that not many other mobile devices can.

Agreed, the immediacy of the touch screen lends itself very well to Dapple. You've blogged a lot about the reception of the game and it hasn't sold as well as perhaps you were expecting. Why do you think this is?

Dapple hasn't sold as well as I had originally hoped, but I am pleased with the sales to date. It's hard to pinpoint why any particular game is or isn't a runaway success. With Dapple I think there were a few things that I could have done better and that I hope to learn from with future games. First, I didn't do enough to build a following around the game before launch. Second, the marketing push around the game was too spread out to be really effective. Review sites didn't get copies of the game until a few days after launch (because the game was released on a long weekend), and so reviews kind of trickled in. My ad campaign also wasn't ready to go until well after launch, so I think I missed opportunities to really push everything out at once. Finally, I have written on the blog about Dapple's learning curve. A lot of people find the game challenging. Some people get it right away, but for others it takes time. I'm not sure that this kind of learning curve is well suited for the iPhone. I hope my future games will focus on being much more immediately accessible to the player, but still contain depth.

You've previously tweeted hints about making a new game, are there any details at this point?

I hope my future games will focus on being much more immediately accessible to the player, but still contain depth.

Unfortunately, no, not at this point. My next game is still in the early concept phase right now. It's just a lot of drawings and notes to myself at this time. Currently I'm working on a small non-game app that I've wanted to make for quite some time, and another update to Dapple. Once those are complete I'll begin prototyping my next game.

That's fair enough, but it's good to hear that you are working on more games. Tell us a little bit about App Treasures - how did you come up with the idea?

The idea for App Treasures started at the 360iDev iPhone conference in San Jose in March of this year. A group of indie game developers (myself included) who knew each other through Twitter got together at the conference and starting talking about ways to get the word out about our games. We were all developers who really cared about making high-quality, polished iPhone games. We looked at the opportunities publishers were providing to developers in terms of branding and cross-promotion, and we wondered if there was a way to do the same thing without having to give up any independence or any control over our own games. Over the next few months we expanded on the idea and it eventually developed into App Treasures. The focus in App Treasures is on quality. Our goal is to provide a seal of quality that lets a player know that if you like my game, there's a good chance you're going to like these other games too.

Has it worked? Or is it too early to tell?

Our website has been active for about 3 weeks now, but we've only just started seeing games with our App Treasures game catalog integrated into them coming out in the last week or so. At this point I think it's too early to tell. We are seeing a healthy amount of traffic to the website, which is encouraging.

Have you got any thoughts regarding the App Store — good, bad or both?

I do have complaints about the App Store, like most developers do. We would all like it to be perfect and it isn't perfect yet. For example, I would love to be able to find out how people find my game on the app store; are they loading directly into the app store from my web page, or did they search for a keyword that turned up Dapple as a result? I think what most developers want from the store is the opportunity for better visibility for their app, and more transparency in the approval process.

The App Store...is pretty amazing.

That being said, the App Store is pretty ground breaking. I come from a console games background where the processes for getting a game to point where people can buy it takes a lot of time and money. The processes for approval of such a game are complex. With the App Store, you pay your developer fee, you build your app, you hope it doesn't get rejected, and it goes live for people to buy it. That's pretty amazing. Almost anyone can create an app; there's an upside and a downside to that.

What are your thoughts on 59p introductory prices?

I think it's developers trying to give themselves the best chance at getting their app noticed at launch. The App Store rankings are based solely on number of units sold, not total revenue. The best way to climb the rankings is to lower your price, but only if you're being noticed. So the best time to do that is when you appear in the "New Releases" list. Appearing in any list is critical to sales on the App Store. If you're not in any list, your sales will suffer severely. There are really only lists for new releases, and the top 100 in each category. All other lists are controlled completely by Apple. So the only things we, as developers, have control over are things like our app icon, our app description, and our price.

On the other hand, as a developer, I don't like the drive towards 59p, as it makes it harder to make a living doing this. I would rather sell a game for what I think it's worth. I tried that with Dapple, selling it for £2.99 at the start, but the market just wouldn't support it for that kind of game. Ultimately, it's the market that decides what a particular product is worth.

In five years time, what do you think the App Store will look like?

That's a tough question. It will largely depend on what we see happening with the iPhone hardware. With the iPhone 3G S out now, I think we'll see more and more sophisticated games coming to the device. The ability to do vertex and pixel shaders, along with other nice hardware features, means games are going to look better and better. I think we'll continue to see the bigger games companies investing more in the iPhone, but only if they're able to sell their games at a price-point that makes it worthwhile. Higher quality generally means a larger financial investment from the developer (usually, but not always).

What I hope to see is players accepting paying a little bit more for high quality titles, and that Apple finds a way to generate rankings that don't drive developers to the lowest price possible. If people are willing to pay a few more dollars for a quality game, then companies will be more willing to invest time and money in building higher quality titles.

I hope that in 5 years the App Store will be a thriving marketplace for top quality handheld games at prices consumers are happy with, but that allow developers to make a living creating the games.

Certainly, it's an exciting time right now, especially given Apple's momentum in releasing new devices and refining the software. I think we can expect to see some great things over time. Finally Owen, do you have any advice for aspiring iPhone developers?

og: The iPhone is a really fun platform to work with. Download the SDK (it's free!) and start playing around in the simulator. Learn Objective-C. Start reading books on iPhone development. Start teaching yourself. Take a course, if it will help. If you can't do it all yourself, find someone to work with who can do the things you can't. Just be aware that the stories of instant riches that often get printed are not the norm. Building iPhone games is just like running any other business. Expect to work really hard, create a quality product, and gradually build up a reputation. That's what I'm hoping to do.

Owen, it's been a pleasure talking to you, thank you very much for your time—and good luck with your future projects!

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