This is the experience I had with my game "A Snake" being featured on FreeGameOfTheDay.com. I wrote A Snake with the goal of making it the best snake game on the iPhone, and also having it free and without ads. I wanted to provide a good experience and a fun game to people. The Facts A Snake was first released in mid December last year, and started off getting around 500 downloads a day worldwide. The game is a non starter among the TouchArcade crowd - The official thread for the game only has 22 posts, and 15 of those are from me, basically begging people for feedback. I put out a few updates, and the day before being featured and taking off it was getting around 2500 downloads a day, about half of those were from being #1 Free app in Norway. During the day I was featured on www.FreeGameOfTheDay.com, I got 43,463 downloads. The next two days the downloads went up and up. After the 2nd or 3rd day A Snake made it to #1 free app in the USA, which I guess means it was probably #1 in free worldwide downloads. Now after a week A Snake has had 1 214 116 downloads in total, but the downloads are tapering off dramatically. The Openfeint people never mentioned any revenue sharing stuff, so I can't talk about that aspect. The sales of my other games have increased, but I doubt it will last, and it hasn't been enough to get very excited about. My paid games went from around 5 or so downloads a day in total to around 50 downloads a day in total, so I have maybe made $200 - $300 in sales What I think went right If I had put the game to paid after the feature day, I would have missed out on the million downloads that came afterward. If you have had a phone in the last 20 years, you can pretty much tell from the icon what A Snake is going to be about. I put out a few new versions of the game before I got featured, and got the game to a position where it was fun and good value (not a waste of time to download). I had a version of AppIRater in the game, asking people to leave a rating after 20 games. This really helped offset the many 1 star reviews that came from people who hated the controls. If you look at the reviews for A Snake, it has lots of 4 and 5 star reviews, whereas the ratings are hovering around 2.09. I think without AppIRater my review scores would be averaging around 2 as well. I didn't succumb to greedy feelings when the game went to #1, and pump out an update with ads in it. I think this sort of bait and switch really sucks, but can totally see why people do it. What went wrong There is a group of very vocal people who don't like my controls, and it destroyed their lives and made them angry. This accounted for around 99% of my 1 star reviews. My "More Games" button had a flaw that sent people to the app store for the last app they had looked at, instead of to my games. This no doubt hurt the flow on effect my other games got. Conclusion I'm very happy and grateful that OpenFeint gave my game the publicity boost it needed to have its day in the sun. Personally, I think if you are going to have DLC, then put it in from the start, so people don't think you are doing some sort of bait and switch. The same goes for ads, either have them in from the start or leave them out forever.
I got it and after several matches, I got the hang of the controls. I loved it mostly for the achievements. Anaconda took me a great challenge.
Thanks for sharing your experience Shen. I've been looking at "A Snake"'s performance, but I didn't realise it had been around for so long before being featured! I switched over to your official thread and took a look - *tumbleweeds*. Just goes to show that so many people wanted exactly what you'd delivered. It's very difficult to get access to the "mainstreamers" without charting. BUT --- why do you say this? I've been looking at unobtrustive in-game advertising for my current title (and future titles). Why do you conclude that putting ads in will be bad for your game? Put them in at the end of each game (instead of constantly bugging the player and stealing the screen real estate), and you could have a nice revenue stream.
I think it is fine to put them in. I think it is a bad idea to release a game without ads, and then you put them in. It might make you some money, but I don't think it is cool. It is basically saying "Thanks for downloading my game everyone. To replay you I'm going to make the game experience worse"
If you are talking about the leader board for play time, I track the number of frames displayed by the game loop, and divide that be the frames per second. Otherwise, I track stuff like that using pinch media. Here is a list of the beacons I use Action Occurrences Started Game 4,118,563 Crazy Game 2,236,352 Classic Game 1,806,074 Finished level 1,079,134 More Games 204,047 (how many times the more games button has been clicked) Declined Review 30,008 (the review pop up arrived, and was declined) Gave Review 5,677 (the review pop up arrived, and was accepted)
I've noticed a few interesting things about network usage - I've had 1.9 million downloads. 1.2 million devices have shown up on pinchmedia, meaning they have played the game with an internet connection The OpenFeint leader boards have around 600,000 scores. This means around 60% of people are playing with an internet connection, and about half of those making use of OpenFeint. The OpenFeint numbers may be a bit lower due to people quitting and deleting the game before submitting a score. Make of those numbers what you will.
take into consideration that many people will download something because it's free and only for that reason. they might not even run the app. no chances to even guess any percentage of this, but Im sure that the amount of users who download app and then forget/dont bother to run the app must also be significant
A few more Openfeint stats. Ground Effect has had over 500,000 downloads, almost all of these were during the 4 day free period (through Freeappaday), it's also had over 30,000 downloads of the Lite version, I mention this because it logs on to the same 'app' on Openfeint so does contribute to the figures. We have had 136,000 (around 25%) of users submit a time for the first level. I have no way of knowing how many online users didn't log on to OF. Only 39,000 have submitted a time for the second level. This is the most depressing statistic of all because level 1 is a boring flat oval tutorial level that most people can finish in a few minutes. It's kind of sad that 3/4 of people who play it get bored so quickly and never see the banked turns, jumps, exploration levels etc. 1077 people have posted a time for the last level. This means that only 0.7% of users got to the end of the game and says pretty clearly that the game is too hard for the casual market that makes up most free downloaders. Interestingly, before the influx of new users after going free I only had 4000 users, only 14 had finished and half of those were part of the dev team or people I knew from TA forums! That meant that 0.3% of users had finished the game. It seems the added competitive element of more people a player knows playing the game makes people more likely to play to the end, which contradicts what I said above about casual users and seems to imply that the free guys are twice as likely to be into the game. The Openfeint figures took a while to come in, the last 36,000 have signed up since the end of the free period. This implies to me that it sat on a lot of devices unplayed for 1, 2, 3, even 4 weeks. Even now, a month after the freebies we're getting more new OF users per day than downloads. In 500,000 downloads we had well under 2000 one star reviews. This implies that less than 1 person in 250 was unimpressed enough to delete the game AND press the 1 star button. Maybe I have a low view of people but I'd expect at least 1 in 10, possibly more, to rate 1 star as they deleted. Is it possible that relatively low number of 1 star rate-on-deletes is because people aren't actually deleting it? It would match quite well with my own app-management, well over half the apps on my phone are games I intend to look at again someday but never get round to. This suggests to me that an update might still get looked at by a hell of a lot of people and is a good reason to make sure I do one.
Nice. The current version of Ground effect has 26% 1 star reviews at the moment, A Snake has around 45%. Maybe the quality of Ground Effect is shining through, and even the most cold hearted, download and dump players are giving you 2 and 3 star reviews. Do you have anything in Ground Effect asking players to leave a rating after x number of games? If not you should consider it for future games / releases. It helps increase the number of 5 star ratings and reviews drastically. A Snake is sitting on a 2.4 star rating, but the reviews are mostly 4 and 5 star. It is important to help the people who like you game to get the message out there, to counterbalance the rate on delete and weird haters.
