Hi again, We also would like to share with the community our experience of what it takes to succeed in the AppStore, what kind of money people are really making and how the AppStore works. You can read it in depth in our last blog post: http://candycaneapps.wordpress.com/2008/12/09/the-insouts-of-life-in-the-appstore/
I just want you to know that I dislike you as a developer for cheating the appstore. You are not justified at all because other apps did it, and it's not like it happened by coincidence, that was your plan all along. And your game is ok, average at best, too slow paced. I believe there was a thread on your game that talked about how much you lied and chested to get your app to sell, like switching free to paid, having a hot chick pretend to be the dev, etc. Just my two cents.
I don't really understand this garbage about switching it from free to paid. Giving an app away for free provides it with like 100x the downloads than if it's .99c so if you want people to download it, and show it off you need to make it free. Then I can look at the screenshot and go "hm looks cute" I can download it, and go show it to my friends who like "Fuzzle-style" games, and they will look it up and see that it's .99c, oh well, they buy it. Success. This process is totally logical and reasonable. Just because the Appstore had a flawed system were download count didn't reset after a price change doesn't mean that it should be banned. Also the whole concept of it being cheating in any way is absurd. It's like saying using the word "free" on a coupon is cheating if there are a lot of strings attached. This isn't a battle of honor, it's a game of money. If there is an exploit to the apple store that isn't illegal, then you better be taking advantage of it, because your sense of honor wont stop all the other devs who are in it for the dollars from doing it.
My sincere thanks for the article. A good read for anyone who's only read the Trism success story so far.
gaming the system? Hey, I'm glad some users appreciate our attempt with our article to give an alternative perspective on the AppStore to the more well publicized runaway success stories. In response to Rocketman919 etc, it doesn't sound like you guys read our blog post too carefully? It actually explains that Apple's switching from free to paid 'bug' had basically nothing to do with our success. Giving the game away for free for a short time succeeded in getting the game in the hands of a lot of users (at the cost of never being able to sell it to these users), and thus generated a lot of website reviews and gave the game some publicity etc, but I fail to understand how that equates to cheating/gaming the system'? In any case, the point of the article was more to provide people with some insight into the AppStore in general, rather than to get into arguments about what people think of our particular company/game.
This was a very interesting read indeed! I didn't knew free apps were that much popular (30k a day?!?) Do you think it makes sense (and will it help penetrate the US store) to make a free demo of 1112 (Somthing like full access to the first 2 room for example)? In my experience (released 15 days ago with an average of 500/unit a day WW) everytop 100 are feasible just by word of mouth EXCEPT the US store where you have to move 400/days just to be in the top 100 apps... So smaller devs like us who doesn'"t have a huge user base like EA or gameloft may have a bad time to penetrate the US store.. I wonder if a free demo would be well perceived by the public...
Hi aghartastudio, free apps generally do seem to be pretty popular, and 30,000+ a day for a popular free app I suspect is pretty common for say top 25/50 free apps ... but I'm just guess now .... in our particular experience doing a free 'lite' version helped a lot, so I'd think it could be worth a try for you as well .... I don't know too much about the experience of other developers though, although a fair number of the top-100 apps do have 'Lite'/'Free' versions. I've also noticed some developers have apparent success doing free, advertising supported versions and then following with paid, advertising-free versions, although I guess that works better for small, cheap apps.
that's true, I hope it can help gaining exposure... The problem is that 1112 is an adventure game so a free version would be very limited to the first puzzle.. (From the start until you get your medication for exemple) I'm afraid people will complain it's really short for a "lite" version.. but still it's nice arts and music for free so maybe it will do... I think we'll give it a try! alex
