We are currently running a free promotion for our game Doodle Bomb (http://bit.ly/doodlebomb). We set the game to free late Thursday and it steadily climbed in rank yesterday landing in the top 10 of both the puzzle and arcade categories last night. When I checked on it this morning, its rank was significantly lower. It looks like something happened around 4:00 a.m. that dropped it significantly. Anyone else every experience something similar? Its on the rise again, but feels like we lost some steam with this We moved about 30K copies yesterday being free.
The reason ratings dropped was because people who payed get angry when a game they spent they're money on goes free for a day. Especially if they bought it a few days before. I'm one of those people myself, I purchased Doodle Bomb and then it went free, but the up side is that people will tell they're friends that it's awesome and they'll pay for it and you make more money. It's either go free for a day and drop in ratings but make more money later on, or leave it the way it is and keep your rating.
Well... moot point I guess, we have made our way to the #6 free app on the store moving more than 123,000 copies yesterday! MJ
I've found that sometimes early in the morning (around 3-4am), there will be big drops in rank, and then they'll pick back up.
And being #1 can get you 325,000 copies a day! To the OP, I download Doodle Bomb on my 3GS running 4.0, and the game crashes every time I try to launch it. It just stays at your loading screen. Maybe I was running low on memory, so I'll restart my device and hopefully it works! It looks like a really fun game
Sorry but one or two people whining because they paid for something that others got for free has a totally insignificant effect on ratings.
Free apps will always get a lower rating average than a paid application imho, this is because people who aren't really 'interested in them' will sometimes grab them just to take a look. If they aren't grabbed by them straight away then they'll remove them from the phone and (unless you're on iOS4 I believe) be requested to leave a rating for them ... which in the circumstances is likely to be low.
Yes... there are many more one star ratings coming in while its free, but also many more 5 star to help balance it. I can post some of our more detailed stats if anyone is interested? MJ