If anyone would like to enlighten me on how much it really costs to make this kind of game, please, do chime in.
I would guess it'll still be more than $40k... to get a game like this out this quickly, they would most likely need multiple developers. If they spent, say, six weeks in development time, using a typical development team for a video game of ... 30-40 people, but not all full time, and it came out to maybe 6 full time equivalents, then six weeks of 6 FTE's is approximately 0.7 FTE years, which would probably be about $70,000 just in employee costs. So I would guess even a short game made by a pro team is going to cost... $150,000-200,000 in development, even exclusive of all the costs one can avoid in a distribution model like the iTunes / App Store.
But you're definitely right, in that these iPhone-only games generally have low development costs. The ones that are done by small-timers -- outside of professional game development houses -- probably cost a
lot less. And most of them aren't really
worth $10.
Games by bigger pro houses like Spore: Origins are harder to cost analyze -- Spore as a whole sounds like it was incredibly expensive to develop. Obviously most of that cost should not be amortized on the iPhone sales, but it's still reasonable to amortize more than just the porting costs (which are probably low) onto the iPhone game's sales.
