How does giving away an app for free temporarily affect ranking?

200 sales a day? be happy

 

In addition to what mobile1up said (I absolutely agree with that too)

Do not change it to free now. You'll lose your paid ranking, and will NOT get it back when you switch back to paid. Worse, you'll be squandering your best bit of free advertising ever (the Apple feature) by giving away your app.

 

200 a day is very solid. I don't think I've had a week where I've averaged much more than 150, and that's certainly not most weeks!

 

Like others have said, 200 is pretty good.

Giving your app away for free is bad right now because you already have a lot of publicity from Apple. After a week or two, most apps drop back down once it's dropped off the N&N list.

You haven't said whether this is a game or app. If it's an app, it could stay on the charts for a very long time. Other developers have had bad experiences when they tried to raise the price. Also, lowering the price to shoot up the charts and then raising the price back up may not work either. This is just a warning in case you're thinking of messing with the price, because it's hard to get back on the charts once you leave it.

 

Also, don't drop the price while you are featured. If the sales start to fade out, you might consider it, but be careful.

I dropped the price of Charmed too early when we got featured, and I am certain that it cost me $$$. I should have waited until it peaked at $2.99 before considering to drop it to $1.99.

 

I wouldn't change anything at all until you are done being featured.

Don't change price, don't change categories and try not to change your app info unless it is something very minor (bragging about your upward momentum and position). Leave everything right where it is as the Feature itself does its magical thing.

 

This is a time when you should be pushing marketing to get up the charts!

Too many developers think their only options are to lower price, switch to free, generally just thinking of iTunes as their only marketing option.

 

Two-hundred sales per day! Wow!!! I guess that shows how important getting featured in iTunes is...

My first app, although out only a few days, is definitely struggling at $0.99. I know that the game is easily worth that price, but it's a real challenge just getting word out about it.

Definitely appreciate your thoughts -- I'm learning the hard way that the post-developmental process is the most challenging!

Tom

 

First step in getting the word out is to not lose the opportunity to name drop your game in a post! The second is to make sure you have it linked in your sig so that people know what you've made

I had to click your name, go to find all posts that you've made, and then go to that thread to know what game you released. That's far more effort than you can expect the average person to make. Your game is interesting looking, the video helps a lot! I'll probably check it out, It'll only be the third or fourth game I've bought today

 

I'll speak from experience: refrain from giving your app away. I thank blacksmith for the opportunity to 'test' what going free would mean while on a larger stage than usual, but it seems that almost any game that temporarily goes free ends up paying the price in bad user reviews.

The 'Rate on Delete' has hammered our game ('Imp or Oaf?') into the ground.

(It's as if people thought they were getting a dirt bike and when they ended up getting a banana-seat Schwinn they were so pissed they threw it off a bridge. Obviously, the people that picked the game up when it was free didn't get what they expected.)

In one day we went from having a four and a half star rating and a lot of amazing praise to having hundreds of one and two star ratings and few really jerky tear-up reviews.

Anyway, I've heard from a lot of developers on the subject and, unanimously, it seems that going temporarily free does more harm than good.

 

Is that necessarily unfair? Maybe the majority of people simply don't enjoy the game. If you're charging a price, then the only people who buy the game are the few who are sure they're going to like it, their positive reviews are just misleading Joe Public. To me, Rate-on-delete just means hammering the "No Thanks" button. I'd only bother choosing a star if I actually had a positive or negative thought on the game, in which case that star is well-deserved.

 

'Joe Public' may or may not be searching out a particular type of title....the people/demographic who are searching it out and are looking for it aren't being 'fooled' by good reviews that talk to things they appreciate, but they may curb their purchase if they see 5 reviews that say "Sukkks! Worst krap game evar made!!" by people that feel they were 'duped' into getting a game they hated...for free (huh?).

I'm not saying it's unfair, but I am saying that you run the risk of getting a lot of people to download your app who might or might not like it.

Minisquadron is an amazing game...and has received very few (if any) bad reviews after being downloaded free the day after imp/oaf something like 50-80K times (I'd assume) .

 

I think this is completely irrelevant. They downloaded the game FOR FREE. Nobody forced them, there was no trickery or product-swapping involved.

Imp or Oaf? was offered for free, giving thousands of people the opportunity to try it. I think this is a generous gesture. And then thousands of people decide to turn it around and shit all over it.

That isn't right.

I'm not saying people should rate it highly or that Gilded Skull deserves praise just because Imp or Oaf? was free. I'm saying they should just delete it quietly and let it go with no rating whatsoever.

As it is, nobody wins this battle. Developers will simply stop releasing games for free because it isn't worth it. And it isn't worth it. I will say it loud and clear and tell every developer that is willing to listen. Whether they decide to make it free is up to them, there is no value in releasing a game for free.

Even to promote another game. IT DOESN'T WORK.

The only way this can be fixed is if the ratings are only reserved for people who actually purchased the game. That is fair BOTH ways. We won't see any shills rating the games high nor low.

 

As a iPod touch owning gamer, I get a lot of value out of games that are released for free.

I've been playing mini squadron for the past few days, and even gave Imp or Oaf a minute of my time.

I tend to check out every game that I see drop to free, and if the screen shots look decent I'll download it and give it a go.

 

YOU get value, but the developer doesn't.

Have you rated all the free games you've downloaded? Written reviews?

You know what, don't even BOTHER doing those things. The single best thing you can do with a free game is talk about it. Tell others about your experience. Tell them what you get out of Imp or Oaf? and why the music is so damn catchy.

Imp or Oaf? is designed for children, yet I get amusement and satisfaction out of playing it. I enjoy the artistic endeavor, and I am disappointed when I get one wrong- but even those sound effects are amusing. I've caught myself whistling the main theme on many occasions.

 

It wasn't so long ago that you were saying the value to the developer of dropping a game to free was getting the game into the hands of a bunch of players that would never have seen the game.

I'd agree that there isn't going to be a financial reward for most developers in dropping their game to free, but I think a lot of game that drop to free are selling so badly that they don't lose much either. I enjoy the couple thousand extra players my games get when I go free, and think that outweighs the extra 1 and 2 star reviews and the loss of 1 or 2 sales a day I might normally get.

I think it makes things better for the players who paid for my games too, since having a larger community makes the global high scores more interesting.

I had a hard time accepting that my games, which I poured a lot of my heart and soul into, were never going to earn me more than a few bucks. The opportunity cost of making them was tens of thousands of dollars. Going into development, I had hoped that I could at least make enough to cover my cost of living while I made them. Instead I made enough to cover my cost of living for about 1 day out of the 4 months I worked on them.

You can get angry about a couple of low star ratings, or ungrateful idiots posting stupid angry reviews. Or you can get satisfaction from the people who do play your game, and enjoy it. I think a service like pinchmedia that tracks actual play time is good to help with this.

My game [app]GumDrops[/app] still has like 600 people playing it every day in Japan, where it got popular about 6 months ago the first few times I dropped it to free. It has had over 7 years of play time logged now.

My simplest, most kiddy game, [app]Upsi Runner[/app] has had a few people who have played it over 1000 times. That is a lot better to think about than the many people who downloaded it for free and only played it once.

I no longer care about making money with my games (it would be nice if it happened though), and it feels great to let it go and move on with life.