Many have asked, including myself, what is the effect of having your game featured by Apple on the App Store. I found out yesterday that Charmed had been added to the Hot New Games category on the iPhone and iPod Touch list. This list does not show up on iTunes website, only on the device, but it seems that it still has quite an impact. In surveying my with iDevices friends, it seems that more than half of them acquire new games and apps directly on the iDevice itself, and they almost never use iTunes to look for new ones. I am the opposite! Anyway, I thought I would share what is happening with Charmed to give some perspective to other developers. I don't know how this will turn out in the end, but let's enjoy the ride while it lasts! Here is the graph of Charmed's ranking (from AppFigures.com) from Nov 30 - Dec 2, 2009: As you can see, we had just fallen out of the Top 200 in Board games in the US, and had been well out of the Top 200 in Puzzle games for a while. Currently Charmed is sitting at:US: #38 Board Games, #77 Puzzle Games Canada: #24 Board Games, #57 Puzzle Games Sri Lanka: #5 Board Games, #3 Puzzle Games (it was #2 earlier!) Sri Lanka is funny, because I attained the rank of #2 Puzzle Game by selling 1 copy there yesterday! Note that I dropped the price of Charmed to $0.99 to ensure that I removed any barriers that people might have for an impulse buy. I figure this could be the one big shot to get as high as possible, so I wanted to make the most of it. If anything major changes, I'll post here again, and I will also post information once Charmed is no longer featured to give you some info on how things turned out.
Wow it would be really cool to compare this to featured on iTunes not on the idevice. I know most of my friends use it on the idevice but I use both evenly.
Interesting topic. A price drop was definitely the right thing to do, I think we're all guilty of impulse buys and it's most likely to happen while we're idly broswing the main lists, "New", "What's Hot", "Top 25" and so on... I always download directly onto my iPod Touch simply because syncing is annoying. Sometimes I'll buy several games a day and to keep connecting it up to my PC all the time gets old real fast.
I tend to search for games on my iPhone as well, so you are really lucky to appear there- I hate iTunes. Your Sri Lanka comment was funny. I think we hit #1 in Russia by selling a whopping 4 copies. I'm not sure whether I should buy the game now, or wait until it starts to even out, so that maybe my one extra sale will give it a small boost when it needs it.
Congrats on getting featured! Just to add more fuel to the fire, I also download ONLY on my iPod Touch. I usually check a few lists: Hot New Games, Top 25, Top Games, Games by Release Date. Probably 50% of my purchases come from these lists; the rest are from TA news posts & forum recommendations. Anyway, keep us posted! I was featured for a week recently, and it's really exciting to check the sales when you wake up every morning.
I used to do it only on my Mac because I didn't always have wifi access, but now that I do, I verrrrrry rarely use my comp. Its just so much easier to do it straight from my device. Congrats on your Sri Lanka ranking
Ken, Charmed was at #34 in board games when I looked for it this morning, so it climbed a few more points after you wrote your initial post. Oh and my wife installed Charmed Xmas last night and wound up playing it until like 4am this morning!!! The review on iTunes from me is actually her. She's addicted now. So, is there a 12 step program for Charmed addicts yet? Congrats on the recent surge from being featured! Q PS- I am like you, I usually shop for apps in iTunes. Maybe 25% of the time it's via the on-device AppStore.
Weird! I'm surprised so many just use the iPod touch for downloads and not iTunes. It might be because I also sync a lot of podcasts so it's easier to just sync in iTunes. But I can see why someone who uses their iPod touch primarily as a gaming device would just download over wifi. Very important point to consider!
Yeah, I think it's important to consider the audience. People who primarily use their device for gaming seem to do most of their purchasing on-device, which those who use it for more mundane things primarily seem to use iTunes for shopping and syncing more often. This is in no way scientific, just the result of asking 20 or so people around the office and the family how they shop (on device or in iTunes). From this non-scientific, tiny survey it would seem if you're targeting gamers specifically getting featured on-device is a far better boon than in iTunes proper on the desktop. Q
Also size is an important factor -- I think over 3G, the maximum app size is 10mb. If your game is anywhere near 10mb, you should do your best to keep it under. I only have a Touch, but I've heard the above from other people.
My current version is listed as 10.0MB, so I wonder if it is downloadable over 3G or not. The V1.6 update I submitted last Thursday, which fixes a rather unfortunate freeze-up bug related to OpenFeint achievements, is 9.6MB (purposefully reduced in size).
Be careful with this. The size on the App Store is bigger than the size of the binary you submit. For example, the binary for Storm Attack v1.1 was 7.9mb, but it's listed as 8.6! I found some decent info here.
Here's a brief update on sales for you:Nov. 29 - 11 copies Nov. 30 - 11 copies Dec. 1 - 66 copies (Feature started this day) Dec. 2 - 200 copies Dec. 3 - 163 copies We've been sitting at #24 for a while on the Board Games chart. We still seem to be inching up the Puzzle Games chart (currently at #46, up from #48 earlier this morning), so I assume that the averaging is coming into play now. I would love for both to make it into the Top 20 before the end of the feature time.
You should complain to Apple. I think the only reason why you aren't on the iTunes page is because it never updated on Tuesday, Dec 1st. All of the games on the "Feature" list were there last week and for some reason they are getting two weeks of promotion.
I thought 2 weeks was normal. We were there for 2 weeks. Interesting numbers MindJuice, let's see if it can rise a bit. If I remember correctly, Saturday is a pretty big day for sales. I'm seeing some weird numbers with the Charmed banner within Flickitty. Flickitty (full version) reported about 300 unique hits, which is down from previous day. However, I didn't enable the new banner until mid-day yesterday. Flickitty Free reports 150 unique hits. Which is weird- there are substantially more Free versions still out there which have been upgraded. I'm assuming that most of these devices are iTouch, without a constant internet connection.
If it is for two weeks I'd be pretty happy! Those results for the Lite are a little odd, eh? Let's see over the next few days I guess.
I noticed that Charmed 1.5 has an option for iPod music. I didn't notice that feature in your free version. How difficult was that to add? We are using OpenAL in Flickitty, and I really want the option to disable the default music and let the iPod stream through.
We are using AudioSessionGetProperty(kAudioSessionProperty_OtherAudioIsPlaying,...) before deciding which audio category to set.
Use AudioSessionSetProperty to do this. We use AudioQueues, but used to use OpenAL. The trick with OpenAL is to make sure that you update the context after you set the remake the OpenAL context current and process the context.
