a little tip from my side. i just released two apps so far. both of them are priced. when i set the pricing to free for the first time i got about 5k downloads in two days. if you want to go free anyway. i would set a low price in the first month, and after this period set it to free. there are a lot of apps and websites out there which look for price drops and will give you free reputation.
I've read quite a number of times this approach to drop to free in order to get picked up by relevant sites and such like. I guess this would aid exposure and help increase downloads but does it increase sales? But good tip anyway - especially if you are planning on going free anyway... @theFootballPlaybook Yeah, just quickly knocked up my site really fast with little testing! (I use to do frontend web dev work) I did use css media queries to present the site better on different sized screens, which is probably why it looks ok on tablet... Cheers,
In my experience going free does increase sales long-term but only if you get in the order of 100k+ downloads while free - otherwise the extra userbase isn't really significant enough to get noticeable word-of-mouth exposure.
@phil128i don't think i can do that with this game. My main competitor is free plus the pricing model I have is that you get the first level pack for free then you hit a paywall for more level packs. I could have a paid version with a few level packs already unlocked but I couldn't then make it free. Strange thing is that my main competitor released a pro version for 69p shortly after the free version. The free version is fremium with in game currency. Any ideas why they did that?