Apple recently launched their new Mac App Store. It works like the iPhone/iPad app store except it’s for Macs instead.

Previously developers could list their games on apple.com and would keep 100% of the revenue and also the customer emails. Now Apple is controlling that process and developers get 70% of revenue. It may sound like a worse deal, but Apple are pushing the Mac App Store (it’s built into OSX 10.6.6 – Snow Leopard) and it’ll probably get quite a bit more traffic than before. However, another downside (for developers, not customers) is that generally the prices on the Mac App Store are lower than before when games/apps were sold independently. Of course if you sell more copies, this downside is somewhat negated.

I know some people who are doing pretty well from the new Mac App Store and so naturally I was keen to try it out myself. I paid the $99 annual fee to join the developer program and then looked into how to get my games on the Mac App Store. Turns out it’s quite a pain, but luckily other people have trodden that path before me. My games are in BlitzMax and needed some special tweaks but not too bad. I still haven’t finished the process, but I’m in the last stages of it now, wish me luck!

One thing I’m not bothering with (yet) is the whole validating of receipts because adding that DRM is a whole extra layer of work. However, if I ever add in-game micro-transactions, I’d need to make the receipts thing work properly I believe.

Meanwhile, here are some Mac App Store Tutorials that I found useful:

Mac App Store Tutorial 1 (for Unity, but the information is generic enough to apply to other languages.)

Mac App Store Tutorial 2 (very thorough, and contains a list of app/game categories in the appendix.)

Mac App Store Tutorial 3 (on BlitzMax.com but contains useful general info).

If you have any more tutorial links, please post them in the comments and I’ll add them to the main article! Thanks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 19th, 2011 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.