I was surprised to see such a quick followup to Owen’s original post at Streaming Colour Studios regarding his brutally honest sales numbers and figures and the reaction that followed.  The guy got hammered pretty hard not only by Slashdot, but it seems a good majority of the blogging and geek world.

I should also state right now that, no, I do not own an iPhone or a Mac.  However, I do support independent game creators wholeheartedly, no matter the platform.

In going back through my own soapbox-like reply and comparing it against the new information, it seems that some of it was in error, at least by a small margin.  Most of it was due to lack of information in the original post about certain things.  Owen did, in fact do the programming and design on Dapple.  The “farmed out” work was for sound, music, and art.  This I can agree with.  Programmers, unless they are also great artists (not likely), should seek the help of those who are masters in their respective fields.  By many councillors shall ye be wise.

Given the nature of the written word, and the nature of blogs being somewhat from the hip in terms of prose style, it’s also very easy to interpret his original post as nothing more than a whiny, “waaah, I made this game for the iPhone and it wasn’t an instant hit making me a millionaire” screamfest.

There was a silver lining to it all though.  Even with the Slashdot community slamming him hard, he still saw a 4.25x increase in sales during that short period.  So good on him for that.  For every one person complaining, there’s probably four other people lurking that see it and say, “What the heck, I’ll give it a shot.”

Here’s how things can be easily misinterpreted.  This quote, from today’s post:

I also received a lot of mail telling me that I was misguided (although much of the mail I received was far from this polite) in my assumption that I would become rich as soon as I released my game. Again, I never made this assumption. When I started this company, I knew that I would have to put a lot of work into it to make it successful. I never assumed that my first game would sell millions of copies. My goal has always been to gradually build a sustainable business by producing high-quality games and apps. My hope is that over time the company will develop a reputation for quality and that people will see that.

In the original post, this is where it might be misconstrued:

I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear. As I said, I was hesitant to post anything about Dapple in a less than stellar light, but at the end of the day, if I were a publicly traded company, I’d have to make this kind of information available anyway. I hope that it might serve to help set realistic expectations for other developers.

I remain convinced that there is money to be made on the App Store, but I suspect we’ll see fewer and fewer stories about people getting suddenly very rich. My hope is that we’ll start seeing more developers putting out quality titles in the hopes of gradually growing a sustainable business.

Perhaps it just wasn’t worded right, who knows.  Some people reading blogs skip words or whole sentences and let their minds construct what they want to read about and expect.  I suspect that more than a few went into reading it with a chip on their shoulder to begin with and only read what they wanted their eyes to see.

Perception is everything in this business also.  If you are coming in late to the game, you will be seen as a “me too” type, even if you are being innovative.  Which can give you one more hurdle to overcome to get your game accepted and bought by each customer.  And so it was with Owen and Dapple.

However, I still maintain that Dapple, while it might be better than all of the other games in the App Store of that type, is still fighting an uphill battle all along the way.  Maybe a new version of Dapple will come out that will have new features that will differentiate it from its cousins.

The other side of this is in the concept of targeting the iPhone platform itself.  It doesn’t look like Dapple is specifically tied to the platform for its unique abilities, but, would it also be difficult to make it available for OS X as well?  I don’t think so, but my experiences with Objective-C have never been pleasant to say the least.

It’s entirely possible to make that initial leap to a similar platform such as OS X, that I am sure of, and it also opens up another avenue for revenue generation to recoup costs faster.  He would, of course, need to find another distribution method, either through his own site with a transaction processor (a lot of time and more money up front), or go with a Mac-based, indie-friendly online distributor such as Macgamestore (hint hint).

So Owen, I do owe you a mea culpa, at least from my perspective.  What I had discussed during the post would have made sense with the information at the time.  But good on you for continuing your fight to get your company up and running.  And maybe someday you’ll port something to Linux or the PC and I’ll have a chance to play it.