#INDIEpendenceDay give-aways

I'm making my game Lead Wars FREE for the first time on 4th July, and was hoping fellow indie devs could follow suit and share a Twitter hashtag, #INDIEpendenceDay.

Then we can easily find and retweet each others' links to other free indie games. And maybe hopefully various game sites and bloggers can use it to see who's got a freebie promotion on for this holiday.

Because it's a day all about American FREEdom (from rule by those pesky Brits such as myself!), I think it's most suitable for this to be used for free give-aways, not for a regular sale.

There will of course be loads of sales on for 4th July, and I of course can't stop anyone using the hashtag for a normal sale but hopefully this combined effort will help us zero-marketing-budget indies can get a look in during this time

I've scheduled in the price change in iTC to go free on the 4th, but I suppose you can go free when and for how long you like (I'll probably leave it for a few days).

 

Excellent ReignDesign - followed and will retweet your promotion on the day.

Cheers Ovogame - your experience on that thread really helps. Will leave it for at least five days, maybe let it run on into the following week if downloads stay high.

All too true about me not having any other apps to benefit from it (although I intend to fix that soon!). Wouldn't really be the idea anyway, or even so much about the short-term boost of paid sales immediately afterwards - more about just getting a larger community of people playing the online multiplayer to get the regular average download rate up a bit higher.

Don't quite know why I never tried a free promotion before, maybe I'm just too old-skool believing in the premium business model, fighting against the tide where all gaming is inevitably becoming free-to-play. That, and being worried it might damage the current 4.5 star-rating average, hopefully not by too much if it does.

 

Cheers schplurg, Lead Wars does seem to be a game that people over a certain age appreciate, as all we had for sneaky classroom gaming in the 80s was our imagination and pencil and paper - apart from the lucky ones who had a Nintendo Game & Watch (couldn't stop the loud beeping on those though!). A sports theme would work brilliantly - great idea.

Nice one bobd - and no worries, people can hijack away with their ideas. All I've done to promote it apart from this thread and post on FB and Tweet is I've got a prmac press release ready to go on Wednesday. They really do seem to work well, and well worth the $20 for a full release. So any other ideas are most welcome.

I know from having the occasional normal sale that a lot of bots pick up the price drop, and it shows up in AppShopper etc. so hopefully by dropping to free for the first time will help our apps stand out even more.

 

Press release has just gone live so have just made Lead Wars free globally (as Try This says above, if it's not showing as free give it a few minutes).

 

By the way Try This, I tried adding one of those [ appinfo ] bbtags for my game like you have to my previous post, but it seems to only be able to have one per thread (or maybe just one per page).

Strangely though, it first showed info about Desktop Army *within my post*, then on page-reload it correctly showed Lead Wars there but showed nothing in your post!

So rather than steal yours (which would be a bit sneaky) I'll just post a link to my game TA thread with it on:
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=73684

(I notice it still doesn't show free on there but worry not, it is in iTunes!)

 

In case anyone is interested, according to the Game Center leaderboard Lead Wars has had about 13,000 downloads over the last ~24 hours.

Am not really sure if that's a good number for the first day going free or a bit bobbins. I have downloaded quite a few free apps myself and not even ever run them, so at least I know they've run the game [as they've posted initial score to the leaderboard].

Another interesting stat is around 15-20% of these people appear to be deleting fairly soon after trying it (as they go 'anonymous' on the leaderboard).

So although not on target to match Ovogame's numbers I'm hoping it can sustain 10k+ for a few days given that's already nearly doubled the number of names on the Leaderboard

 

Quick stats update: official downloads according to iTunes Connect for Lead Wars on the 4th July was exactly 53,888!

Looking at AppAnnie it is now the #1 iPhone Strategy Game in 9 countries (7 for iPad). And in the top 10 Overall iPad apps in 3 countries.

14,841 out of the 53,888 downloads were in USA, and it's at #10 in Strategy games for the US. Still not even broken the top 100 overall free apps for the US - it's at 289 just below Pocket Planes. So to get anywhere near the top 10 overall you clearly have to have astronomical download numbers!

So I am extremely pleased with this free promotion so far - wish I'd done it sooner!

 

Looking at that graph (thanks so much for posting - I wish more devs were as open about their sales+downloads) - it looks to me like you went back to paid a little too soon.

It had hit an asymptote of just over 150k/day, but I suspect [read: guess] that the graph would have dropped off like a normal distribution had it stayed free (pretty much mirroring the first 4 days). Meaning it would easily have been over 300k extra downloads.

So my theory is, with these extra people playing it, when it went back to paid (say on the Wed or Thur) the paid sales would have been higher and dropped off more slowly thanks to the extra word-of-mouth / social sharing etc.

Of course I could be talking rubbish, and you probably did the right thing, but this does make me think 5 days could be a bit too early. What do you think?

 

No no I don't think I ever said I intended to make it free for a day, I must have worded it ambiguously. I have always planned on leaving it free for around a week as I've been mulling over having this free promotion for over a year now (the game came out at the end of 2010!), and have read a few threads such as yours before showing how 1 day just isn't enough to make any effect on the charts.

So I'll probably just leave it free as long as it's rising up the free charts (which I would imagine due to the chart-algorithm it could do for a few days even after actual downloads start falling).