Monday 17 October 2011

More sales talk

After my last post the sales have slowly started going up on a bit iPhone. But now I'm freaking out because I just can't figure out what caused the bump, or if I can count on it continuing.

At first it seemed like nothing I did helped at all. I joined Twitter and some retweeting group; posted a press release on prmac which got copy pasted all over the internet; the trailer got posted on gametrailers and I finally got a somewhat positive professional review. But all it did was to keep the sales at a somewhat steady 10 units a day for a while (it sold a whooping 14 units on launch day). It was only a few days later it started going up, going from 10 a day to 20 > 50 > 50 > 80 > 75.

The last bump could possibly be explained by the release of an update (though I'm not sure how that would actually affect anything, as I was mistaken in thinking updates would appear on the release list in the AppStore). I can't find anything new written about it on the internet, or even any new user reviews, and I doubt it has made any toplists or gotten featured by apple. The sales seem to be fairly evenly distributed wordwide as well.

I don't really understand how the App Store works; how do people find games outside the toplists? Is it normal to get random sales bumps? Or can I actually expect for the baseline to continue at 50-80 a day? Even though it's still not much (especially with the crazy swedish taxes) I could make a meager living if those sales continue and then hope to increase my income after a few more games, but with any less than that it seems a bit hopeless.

4 comments:

  1. Well first i have check video of ur game in toucharcade looks good. I think u should reduce the price too. I would love to try but there is no lite version of this game. Best of luck

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  2. Well progress is progress. good luck

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  3. I think it's an awesome game! I downloaded the first version and it suffered somewhat from a bad control mechanism. The first release of my own game also had some control issues and I received some bad reviews. from that on my climbings on the charts were interrupted... If you have not done it yet you should send a pressrelease to Macworld (Sverige). They seem to put almost every Swedish game on "app of the day". It gained me a few hundred downloads over a couple of days (before the trolls started to pick on the control mechanism :).

    I´m about to release an update of my own game shortly and some of the improvements and adjustments are strongly inspired and influenced by Matt Rix success story about Train Yard. http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/ I think one of the most important thing is to make a "free" version. And as Matt points out it is most likely most rewarding to be generous. Besides that I'm spending a lot of work into the trailer, icons, screens and appstore texts. I follow you on twitter with big interrest and I would be delighted if you started follow me @aleathegame. Go Skövde!

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  4. Maybe it went higher on games list or got featured

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