another 'going free' assessment

[Flickitty]

With the increased popularity of GOING FREE analysis reports, I decided to post my figures.

Flickitty has seen its success and failures since its release in November, and overall I can't complain about the sales. At this point, I'm not hoping to raise more awareness for Flickitty nor gain more sales, I think it has completely run its cycle.

NOVEMBER PROMOTION

Back in late November, I decided to make Flickitty free for 3 days. This was basically self-promoted. I posted the news here at TouchArcade and reddit.com. Several sites including pocketgamer.co.uk and toucharcade added Flickitty to the front page news of games that were free for the weekent. After each day of the promotion, I reported my numbers and status. This is the first of those reports (http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=34695)

Here is a short synopsis of that report: Flickitty reached #53 it Top Free Adventure, with 1418 USA downloads in a 24 hour period.

CONTRAST

My latest promotion through freeappcalendar.com (http://freeappcalendar.com) was a little bit different than my previous promotions. I had a site with a captured audience to back me. I did not announce the news that Flickitty was free- instead I pointed people directly to freeappcalender so that they could discover it for themselves. I only posted the news at Twitter, I did not use toucharcade or any other means of promotion.

Yesterday I saw 5063 downloads in the USA alone, with a postion of #19 in Top Free Adventure Games. No, these numbers aren't huge, but that eclipses the previous promotion by a large margin, and it required far less effort.

Does this tell us anything? Well, it was surprising to me that there is still a slight interest in Flickitty. I didn't self-promote, so my downloads were achieved strictly through freeAppCalendar alone.

I think this shows the power of indies banding together for promotional reasons. Even with the support and front page news at pocketgamer.co.uk and toucharcade, my original promotion pales in comparison.

My ratings were bumped up by half a point, which is kind of strange to see. Oftentimes, negative reviews are the scourge of free promotions.

Overall, I'm not sure how this will affect my sales, but I'm not really concerned, either.

A WARNING

Currently we have 3 different Free App sites (that I know of). I think this is good balance and I urge developers to resist the urge to start another site. Instead, join one of the existing sites. We don't need more fragmentation in the industry.

[The prez 12521]

i know 4, freeappaday, the one from qwiboo, the freeappcalendar, and then the OF one is like freegameoftheday

[drewse]

With the increased popularity of GOING FREE analysis reports, I decided to post my figures.

Flickitty has seen its success and failures since its release in November, and overall I can't complain about the sales. At this point, I'm not hoping to raise more awareness for Flickitty nor gain more sales, I think it has completely run its cycle.

NOVEMBER PROMOTION

Back in late November, I decided to make Flickitty free for 3 days. This was basically self-promoted. I posted the news here at TouchArcade and reddit.com. Several sites including pocketgamer.co.uk and toucharcade added Flickitty to the front page news of games that were free for the weekent. After each day of the promotion, I reported my numbers and status. This is the first of those reports (http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=34695)

Here is a short synopsis of that report: Flickitty reached #53 it Top Free Adventure, with 1418 USA downloads in a 24 hour period.

CONTRAST

My latest promotion through freeappcalendar.com (http://freeappcalendar.com) was a little bit different than my previous promotions. I had a site with a captured audience to back me. I did not announce the news that Flickitty was free- instead I pointed people directly to freeappcalender so that they could discover it for themselves. I only posted the news at Twitter, I did not use toucharcade or any other means of promotion.

Yesterday I saw 5063 downloads in the USA alone, with a postion of #19 in Top Free Adventure Games. No, these numbers aren't huge, but that eclipses the previous promotion by a large margin, and it required far less effort.

Does this tell us anything? Well, it was surprising to me that there is still a slight interest in Flickitty. I didn't self-promote, so my downloads were achieved strictly through freeAppCalendar alone.

I think this shows the power of indies banding together for promotional reasons. Even with the support and front page news at pocketgamer.co.uk and toucharcade, my original promotion pales in comparison.

My ratings were bumped up by half a point, which is kind of strange to see. Oftentimes, negative reviews are the scourge of free promotions.

Overall, I'm not sure how this will affect my sales, but I'm not really concerned, either.

A WARNING

Currently we have 3 different Free App sites (that I know of). I think this is good balance and I urge developers to resist the urge to start another site. Instead, join one of the existing sites. We don't need more fragmentation in the industry.

Thanks for the insight. Here is the 4th Free App site I know about: http://www.greatappaday.com/

Even though you said you weren't concerned with the sales afterwards, I'd like to here an estimate of how you're doing now.

[ylyu5]

Agree that the free app sites are saturated and balanced :)

there is one more site announcing app in sale: http://appshopper.com
developers no need to join the site
It will update automatically with every apps on App Store under price reduction

[Flickitty]

At least one person expressed interest in sales so here we go.

March 19th, the day before Flickitty went free, I had a total of 6 worldwide sales, with 3 of those coming from the USA. This has been fairly normal for Flickitty in recent weeks.

March 21st, the day after Flickitty went free, I had a total of 28 worldwide sales with 9 of those coming from the USA.

I chose to provide real numbers rather than claiming a 466% increase. In general, I consider only the USA sales to be relevant, as they are the only profits that I see on a regular monthly basis.

The sales from March 21st could be a little higher, since I only used the 'preview' view to check my reports. However, 5 sales scattered between 5 countries isn't that big of a difference to me.

At least the 21st made up for the lost revenue of the 20th. :) Gotta remain positive!

[Gregerh]

interesting input, thanks for sharing the information :)

[GlennX]

Here is a little more data, this time on Ground Effect.

We were extremely lucky with freeappaday as when we contacted them in late February they had an empty day on March 1st. This was all a little short notice and I wasn't 100% keen as i'd only dropped the price to 99c a few days earlier but a few emails and encouragement from Pam and I took the plunge.

We left Ground Effect free for four days. During this time we had half a million downloads. Ground Effect was the number 1 free racing game in most app stores including the US where it also got to 9 in free apps. It was the number 1 free app in several stores including france and italy.

Before the free period we had less than 4,000 Openfeint users, after it almost exactly 100,000. Two weeks later we have 128,000 users, I guess this continued rise is because people downloaded while it was free but are only slowly getting round to playing it, or at least logging on to openfeint.

As for sales since, from january 1st until the day before the 'sale' we were averaging 27 per day, some of these were at $0.99, some at $1.99. In the two weeks since we have been averaging 58 per day at $2.99. Are they tailing off yet? kind of, a little, check out the graph on appannie (http://www.appannie.com/ground-effect/ranking/history/#start_date=2009-11-05&end_date=2010-03-2) and see for yourself.

Basically, it's still selling more than it has since it dropped out of "what's Hot" in early december. I have to assume that these sales are coming from word of mouth or maybe from the "what my friends are playing" feature in Openfeint. Either way, it's that huge number of people who already have the game that are making me the extra sales now even though 97% of them didn't pay for their copy!

When I told other devs I was giving the game away for a few days certain people (posters on this forum actually) told me I was mad and that I would kill my potential market because anyone who wanted it, would now get it for free. I don't think it works like that. We need to get our games into the hands of people that didn't even think they wanted them.

[bushin]

I had a similar experience with my game Buster Red last week (wednesday's freegameoftheday). The game had single digit sales prior to the promotion. During the day of the promotion we got about 26k downloads and shot up as high as #7 action and #11 arcade categories (higher in other countries). After the promotion it was getting double digit sales which are beginning to taper off now.


When I told other devs I was giving the game away for a few days certain people (posters on this forum actually) told me I was mad and that I would kill my potential market because anyone who wanted it, would now get it for free. I don't think it works like that. We need to get our games into the hands of people that didn't even think they wanted them.

I would like to agree with glennx on this point - getting people to play/try your game (without being apple featured) is pretty hard in the current app store (even for free!). So getting all this exposure (and fans) through these free a day sites is fantastic for indies.

The only downside I see is that your ratings will get completely blasted! I was lucky enough to retain at least retain a 3* rating - now working my way back up...

[Stroffolino]

For folk wanting to give this a go, it's already been said, but I'd urge people not to rely solely on rss feeds to get you huge jumps in traffic after going free. If you want to get significant downloads, do your best to get promoted on one of the bigger sites with lots of eyeballs. Visibility for a giveaway in a calendar is a lot more sticky than a fleeting AppShopper price change notification that'll scroll off the page within half an hour.

here's a quick recap of some of the services out there and the pros/cons:

- FreeAppADay: costs ~$1200 up front. Given their current popularity, they can afford to be picky, and their selection criteria includes things like "has already been featured by Apple."

- OpenFeint: no up front costs to the developer, so no real risks, but their selection criteria and schedule are completely opaque, and apparently you must agree to split revenue with them after the promotional period ends. I don't know much more about this option since I never got even a canned automated response to an attempt to sign up.

- FreeAppCalendar: totally transparent about their selection criteria - any developer can participate, with public voting determining which apps are eligble to snag precious calendar slots. The site offers the ability to log in and directly set up/edit a promotional area, is fully automated, and has a responsive administrator that also happens to be a developer.

The good news is that even the youngest/smallest of these sites (FreeAppCalendar) is more than powerful enough to give your app a huge promotional boost. I decided to give FreeAppCalendar a try after seeing two card games leap to the top of the card category thanks to FreeAppCalendar.

The first day Pocket Boxing was featured was a Thursday, it picked up well over 13,000 downloads in the US alone, enough to propell it to top#3 in sports and top#8 in arcade.

Those 13,000 downloads were more than Pocket Boxer Lite had achieved in the months it's been out, despite being free from day#1. For some reason, people seem to get more excited about pay apps going free, than about apps that have always been free.

My goals were:
1. to get more OpenFeint users/competition
2. to build up a base of users that could be targeted with future updates cross promoting similar games
3. to get more feedback on the game itself, which is thoroughly retro, tough, and decidedly non-casual.
4. to confirm AppStore mechanics for transitions between free and pay and the effect on rankings
5. to spin the dice and see if going free briefly would have a beneficial effect after going free again
6. to explore what it would take to get Pocket Boxing to show up higher in search results for "Boxing."

The results:
1. there are now well over 10,000 registered OpenFeint players that have beaten Jersey Joe, about 20% of whom have managed to beat the 2nd opponent, Mad Moose McGee. Note that only a fraction of people downloading the game actually end up using OpenFeint.
2. I could have built up a much larger base of users if I'd left if free a whole week, but hindsight is 20/20.
3. I got plenty of feedback both in email and user reviews from fans. But the most useful was a 1 star user review. A fellow asserted that the game seemed unfair and devoid of any skill - that a monkey would be just as likely to win as a human. This is hardly the case as anyone browsing the OpenFeint leaderboards could attest, but encouraged me to push out the 1.3 update, which includes video help showing how to play, and to add additional tactical tips to the game description.
4. when you switch from free back to pay, your ranking is completely reset. It doesn't look like at this time any percentage of your free downloads contribute towards the new pay ranking. As an exception, there is a brief window where the AppStore's algorithms appear to be confused (particularly with order in search results) and your app retains good visibility, but then it promptly becomes invisible again and has to begin a new climb.
5. A few days later, Pocket Boxing sales are back exactly where they were before the giveaway.
6. The algorithm for search results is much more complex than the one for top pay/free charts. It's biased towards more expensive apps, with keyword and titles contributing to the order. It also appears to factor in total downloads and not just the (shorter) window of download activity that app rankings use. Immediately before going pay again, Pocket Boxing had managed to displace the pair of pay/lite Smack Boxing games. Immediately after going pay again (back on sale at 0.99), Pocket Boxer temporarily lurched to the #1 spot. This lasted about an hour.

An unexpected result:
- while the full version was free, this unexpectedly drove up downloads of the lite version, too. I would encourage any developer that has a pair of full/lite apps to add something really cool to your lite app, and to advertise that in your full app description. If your lite can ride the coattails of your full version while the full is on free, your lite has a good chance of retaining its ranking after the full goes pay again.

[GlennX]

For some reason, people seem to get more excited about pay apps going free, than about apps that have always been free.


I think there are different markets, the freeappaday type sites appeal to a relatively small group of bargain hunters but cash in on the 'you have to get it now' factor. This catapults your app to visible in the charts where it's downloaded by an even larger number of people who never get anything unless it's free. They see the fact that it's 'temporarily free' as a sign of quality.

The market of people who are happy to pay and too cool/busy to check freebie sites is uneffected as they won't even know it's been free. These are the people who, in sadly relatively small numbers, buy your app because some percentage of your free downloaders are enjoying it and showing it to friends.

I believe, rightly or wrongly, that a tiny fraction of the half million people who got Ground Effect for free would ever have paid for it.

[Mobitron]

Hey Stroffolino...

I run the program at OpenFeint and should be able to answer some of your questions about Free Game of the Day. I apologize for you not sending a response to your submission sooner. We recently switched how we handle leads and I think a few submissions got dropped in the switch over...no good.

Now on to your other questions...

Pricing - we don't charge up front fees for the promotion if you're OF enabled. If you aren't OF enabled, then there's a one time $400 fee to be promoted. Rev share kicks in after the promotion ends, but we only share in the revenue if your paid sales actually increase following the promotion. So there's no risk on your part.

Selection Criteria - we're actually just now in the process of refining those and they're pretty simple.
1) Any game will be considered - you don't have to have been featured by Apple. We're all about getting games discovered, even new games that haven't hit it big yet.
2) Prefer apps with at least 15 reviews in the App Store (we'll take a look at ratings, but that's not the final decision point).
3) If you have fewer that 15 reviews and/or have a lower star rating than you would like, send us a Promo Code and we'll take a look and then make the call.

If you're still interested, send a message to FGOTD@aurorafeint.com. Would love to talk about the program and answer any remaining questions that you have.

[Flickitty]

GlennX, half a million users is a pretty significant number. I think between Flickitty and Flickitty Free, we may have about 200,000 worldwide with the vast majority of those being FREE.

If most people are like me, they will download a game and they do not get around to playing it until a couple days later. I just happened to have a long break at school today, and started playing some of the games I downloaded last week. So your increase in OpenFeint users seems to reflect people like me.

Stroffolino, thanks for the very thorough analysis. I think freeAppCalendar can drive significant numbers of downloads in a very short period, even when only the site itself is driving the downloads, as was the case with Flickitty. I have no doubt that if I had used other methods of promotion, I could have driven those numbers up.

I would certainly advise other developers to use ALL MEANS POSSIBLE when promoting- don't experiment like I did.

I don't want to leave out Qwiboo's work at greatAppADay (http://greatappaday.com). I think this is another fantastic site and I really enjoy the fresh layout. I don't know much about how the site itself operates.

[Flickitty]

I'd like to make a note that worldwide downloads were over 11,000 and just over half of those were from the USA. In my original posts, I didn't make note of my total downloads.

[qwiboo]

I don't want to leave out Qwiboo's work at greatAppADay (http://greatappaday.com). I think this is another fantastic site and I really enjoy the fresh layout. I don't know much about how the site itself operates.

Thanks for your support Randall. I noticed before as well that you were mentioning our site on these forums.

We were quite busy the first month with developing the site and our back-end system which we use to add new apps, but the work load finally starts to go down and we can focus more on promotion of our site. We still managed to get nice coverage from pocketgamer and are working on getting more press coverage from other sites as well.

I think we managed to do something amazing so far anyway, going from 0 visitors to a solid 2000 uniques a day and 6000 pageviews a day in a month would be considered miracle in a web world :) That's quite a solid number of people seeing your app - not including the 300 people reading our rss feed and our fans on facebook and twitter. Your app is featured in the main top box for 3 days and then for next 5 weeks in the calendar under the feature box.

Our system automatically picks up price or game info changes, so if you decide to make your game free again it will be marked as free in our calendar automatically. Or if you change the screenshots or game description - they will be updated - so you don't need to worry about people finding old information about your game. This is just one of the features that is making our site unique from the competitors.

Next step for our site is to make the process as easy as possible for developers. For this we will include feature request form on the site and explain what are the conditions to be featured. Alongside this addition we have more additions for the users of the site to be able to interact more with the makers of the games and build up community. I won't mention these because our competition already copied few our ideas :)

The conditions to get featured are very simple: your game needs to be free at least for one day and you need to mention our site in the beginning of you description for the period of the promotion. There is no cost whatsoever for the developer.

I would also like to ask all developers interested in getting their games featured on our site to drop us a line at qwiboo@qwiboo.com. We will consider every app/game.

Thank you,
Vladimir

[MindJuice]

I think we managed to do something amazing so far anyway, going from 0 visitors to a solid 2000 uniques a day and 6000 pageviews a day in a month would be considered miracle in a web world

Hmmm...freeAppCalendar.com is actually much higher than that in daily uniques, but Alexa still ranks us lower than greatappaday.com. Curious.

[ultimo]

Thanks for the insight. Here is the 4th Free App site I know about: http://www.greatappaday.com/

Even though you said you weren't concerned with the sales afterwards, I'd like to here an estimate of how you're doing now.
How are there 4 sites?

Isn't http://www.greatappaday.com/ the site from qwiboo?

[Pamx]

How are there 4 sites?

Isn't http://www.greatappaday.com/ the site from qwiboo?


Freeappaday (FAAD)
OpenFeint
Freeappcalendar
Greatappaday

[PixelthisMike]

Freeappaday (FAAD)
OpenFeint
Freeappcalendar
Greatappaday


And the OpenFeint one is also known as Freegameoftheday, in keeping with the general theme :)

[steelfires]

Just wondering, is there a line between getting publicity and having so many people download it that your potential customers shrink?

[GlennX]

Just wondering, is there a line between getting publicity and having so many people download it that your potential customers shrink?

Clearly there must be a line somewhere but after 4 days free and over half a million downloads, we have over 3x the paid downloads and almost 4x the revenue compared to before the free period.

I believe they are different markets. Maybe the kind of people who actually pay for apps are too cool and their time to precious to trawl the free app charts and check the promo websites every day. Maybe the only buy on word of mouth and if that's the case, half a million extra users come in very handy

[Flickitty]

Just wondering, is there a line between getting publicity and having so many people download it that your potential customers shrink?

I think this would depend on the app and how many downloads are acquired. If you get 20,000 downloads and worry that you've screwed up your market for potential customers, then you really didn't have much of market to start with.

It is unlikely that you will ever hit 100% of your target in any given industry, and it is delusional to think that one could.

Look at the top apps in the App Store. You would think that after months of being in those upper tiers that they would have saturated their potential to zero. But they haven't.

Games like Geared have been up there since August and are still going strong. I'm actually grateful for developers like Bryan Mitchell and his staying power with Geared.

There are certain warnings that should be heeded when making the decision to go free for a limited time. But worrying about losing potential customers isn't one of them.

[steelfires]

A lot of people use freeappaday since they have the most impressive track record. Plus great games. SUch as the tower defense one, chalkboard stunts, and now creeps.

[Pamx]

I think this would depend on the app and how many downloads are acquired. If you get 20,000 downloads and worry that you've screwed up your market for potential customers, then you really didn't have much of market to start with.

It is unlikely that you will ever hit 100% of your target in any given industry, and it is delusional to think that one could.

Look at the top apps in the App Store. You would think that after months of being in those upper tiers that they would have saturated their potential to zero. But they haven't.

Games like Geared have been up there since August and are still going strong. I'm actually grateful for developers like Bryan Mitchell and his staying power with Geared.

There are certain warnings that should be heeded when making the decision to go free for a limited time. But worrying about losing potential customers isn't one of them.


100% in agreement with you Flickitty. :)

[CurlyBrace]

Is it possible in any way to make an app free in just a selected store? I've entered the top-10 position in the Dutch app store and am seeing very nice sales because of that, but it has zero effect on my sales in other stores. I'm very reluctant to mess with the pricing in the Dutch store. My experience is that being free for a day generates a lot of traffic but is really bad for ratings. If it's a paid app catering to a specific audience, people will think before they buy. If it's free, a lot of people will download it even though they know beforehand it's not their cup of tea, and will leave 1-star reviews upon deletion.

[nattylux]

Is it possible in any way to make an app free in just a selected store? I've entered the top-10 position in the Dutch app store and am seeing very nice sales because of that, but it has zero effect on my sales in other stores. I'm very reluctant to mess with the pricing in the Dutch store. My experience is that being free for a day generates a lot of traffic but is really bad for ratings. If it's a paid app catering to a specific audience, people will think before they buy. If it's free, a lot of people will download it even though they know beforehand it's not their cup of tea, and will leave 1-star reviews upon deletion.

No way to do that, unfortunately. It's one price across the board. And I agree with you - I definitely wouldn't drop to free when you're top 10 in NL.

[Rocotilos]

Well, one of my app went from USD0.99 to Free and the rank goes from #300++
to #7 in Photo category within a day.

Ranking for overall app is ~100+

Now it has dropped out of the top 25 now. Im continuing to improve it as time progresses coz for me, customers are no.1, even they havent paid me anything.

iQuikSplash (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/iquiksplash/id359017259?mt=8)

[CurlyBrace]

No way to do that, unfortunately. It's one price across the board. And I agree with you - I definitely wouldn't drop to free when you're top 10 in NL.

I suppose I'll wait until I drop below a certain threshold, and then try going free for a few days.

Also, I think you should do a followup with a new version immediately after doing the free one. The 1-star reviews from people who have downloaded the free one "just because it was free" will obviously stick around in the full ratings history, but the counter is at least reset for the new version. The people who got it for free and bother updating to the next version apparently have some affinity with the game, and are perhaps less likely to leave simple 1-star reviews.

[Stroffolino]

I distributed an update to Pocket Boxing shortly after it had gone free briefly to address some concerns:
1) a user had requested a rematch feature
2) some users had complained the gameplay was too difficult; there is now video help after losing a match, where you can watch a demo mode showing how to pick that opponent apart.
3) to rebase "reviews for this version", per your thoughts below.

I've had mixed results with (3) so far, which was released immediately after the app reverted to pay. The average user rating has inched up a bit, but the update still has gotten an even mix of (76) 1,2,3,4,5 star reviews - all anonymous. This really does point towards the benefit of using a framework like iAppRater to help steer fans of a game towards the review area where they can give their opinion a voice.

Don't count on an immediate update to quickly rebase your reviews. There are many people that will grab your app while it's free, grab the update, and only get around to actually trying it later. You're probably better off waiting at least a full weak after going pay again before releasing an update for that purpose.

I suppose I'll wait until I drop below a certain threshold, and then try going free for a few days.

Also, I think you should do a followup with a new version immediately after doing the free one. The 1-star reviews from people who have downloaded the free one "just because it was free" will obviously stick around in the full ratings history, but the counter is at least reset for the new version. The people who got it for free and bother updating to the next version apparently have some affinity with the game, and are perhaps less likely to leave simple 1-star reviews.

[steelfires]

Would giving your users who paid a paid DLC help with the ratings? perhaps even make them higher?