Postmortem: Releasing a premium iOS RPG with no iAP

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by SteveAtBoxcat, May 3, 2013.

  1. SteveAtBoxcat

    SteveAtBoxcat Well-Known Member

    Sep 13, 2012
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    Los Angeles
    #1 SteveAtBoxcat, May 3, 2013
    Last edited: May 6, 2013
    Hey Everyone,

    We are releasing our postmortem series about our experiences with our first game, Nameless: the Hackers. If anyone is interested in checking it out, the link is below:

    http://gamasutra.com/blogs/JamesLiu/20130503/191645/Breaking_in__Nameless_the_Hackers_RPG.php

    Our postmortem series will cover our experiences with marketing, sales, costs of development, boothing at GDC and other topics.

    Part 2 is here: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=187846&highlight=nameless

    Enjoy! :)
     
  2. Will be an interesting read.

    Which sites did you use to push your pre-release promo material to? Does the $237 mentioned includes the Splurgy costs?
     
  3. Sheinfell

    Sheinfell Well-Known Member

    May 14, 2012
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    Europe, CET timezone
    #3 Sheinfell, May 3, 2013
    Last edited: May 3, 2013
    Just read your piece, very interesting read for a non-developer who only sits on the other side of the fence, so to speak.

    When you refer to "less competitive categories on the Appstore":
    Your game is listed under "Roleplaying", right?

    If yes, I can give you some - if only personal - insight. Maybe there a more people like me around:
    A bit older (almost 40), no Twitter or Facebook account, so anything that happens there goes completely past me. With an appreciation for quality in a game.
    And - and I think that is very important - some actual insight how much making a game can cost, in terms of money, work and time (which all translate into each other); and from that coming with an appreciation of the effort and seeing a 20€ pricetag as perfectly fine for a good game.

    I actually see that in people outside of the business sector who only use software, that they have a hard time grasping why any piece should have several (ten)thousand dollar pricetag.
    In business software, unlike gaming, extremely high prices for high quality (or for filling a niche and being the only real option available) are perfectly accepted and considered normal.

    And that leads me back to the "less competitive categories":
    For one, I have the impression that many older roleplayers or strategy gamers share some of that appreciation I wrote about above, and thus accept higher pricetags (say >10€) more easily than the casual "wait for sale/free" crowd.
    And that narrows down your search focus in the Appstore. Higher-priced games in the Roleplaying or Strategy category draw my attention much easier than e.g. a free game in the Action section.
    So I have a narrow focus in the Appstore: I only check the RPG and Strategy sections regularly. In these categories there are few enough releases that manually keeping track of my "target group" is still possible.

    While for example with the Action section this would be impossible, my time simply does not allow for checking through the Appstore for hours on end (which I'd need to keep track of that section).

    As conclusion I think that when you aim for one of the "lesser populated" Appstore section, you have a higher chance to reach your "core audience". Stepping outside that audience and acquiring customers from outside the "core group" is the really difficult part.

    Do you have any experiences you would be willing to share, if my summary above fits with what you experienced or not?

    Might even give your game a shot now, even it does not right away look like it is down my alley... ;)


    P.S.: That was an interesting experience, analysing my browsing/searching and buying behaviour on the Appstore.
     
  4. Wizardo

    Wizardo Well-Known Member

    Jul 30, 2012
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    Starving indie developer
    New Jersey!
    Love the info. Thanks for sharing.

    Are you finding that all the Facebook and Twitter followers you've gotten as a result of your giveaways are engaged on your sites? Are they actually liking, commenting, etc?
     
  5. lazypeon

    lazypeon Well-Known Member
    Patreon Bronze

    It's hard to tell for sure, but eyeballing the graph, am I correct that there are ~5,000 sales, or about $10,000 in revenue before Apple's cut? If so, that's somewhat disappointing, given the amount of time spent. No wonder people are switching to freemium.

    I've been closely following numbers of paid titles on the app store, as I'm working on another title that I expect to be a paid app. Looking forward to the rest of your insight.
     
  6. JamesAtBoxCat

    JamesAtBoxCat Active Member

    Dec 6, 2012
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    #6 JamesAtBoxCat, May 4, 2013
    Last edited: May 4, 2013
    http://Splurgy.com/ is free. It's not the only service either. There's also http://www.rafflecopter.com/ .We looked at a few of these and tested them internally before we picked Splurgy. Felt easier and less complicated. All of them are free.

    Yup! If you have an AppAnnie.com account (it's free), you can see that we switched sub-categories and noticed a difference. Our next post will be about the categories and AppStore ranking changes that we noticed for Nameless.

    You're absolutely correct. I'm in the similar group as yourself. I joined twitter only for BoxCat. We realize the AppStore has a bias for "compulsive buy" and less people are looking to fully detailed reviews. We'll go into this in greater detail on a future post on Gamasutra. Some interesting stats we'll talk about is like how our "Lite" version is getting fewer downloads than our "Full" Version. We're noticing some elements on how the AppStore works that may be pushing down the type of games we love. Perhaps over time the audience on the AppStore gets use to this.

    Some of them were engaging with us, not all of them. A few ended up becoming hardcore advocates which was very cool. Some were there just for the iTunes gift card, but their extended network may have had people interested in RPGs.
     
  7. Sucks to say but 10k$ is actually decent. Basically you must be featured by Apple for a paid app... it's pretty much do or die right off the bat with that factor and if you're not it's an uphill battle from there to convince players to shell the $ and for reviewers to bother checking it out.

    There's no guarantee either with a feature to be a hit but you at least have a good headstart and can get some lasting organic exposure + word of mouth if your game is addictive.
     
  8. JamesAtBoxCat

    JamesAtBoxCat Active Member

    Dec 6, 2012
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    #8 JamesAtBoxCat, May 4, 2013
    Last edited: May 4, 2013
    Very close! =) Between 3/16 to 4/18, we had 3,323 downloads on the iTunes store. We launched at $1.99. Apple takes 30%. We're at $3.99 now and still ranked under Role-Playing. Phew!

    Our next post will talk a bit about the Freemium push. We feel there are a few things that seem pushing this trend.

    1.) The way the AppStore is structured make Ranking a very important element of visibility, therefore sales.

    2.) Freemium has a low barrier of entry. People are willing to try it like a demo version. This also promotes Apple's hardware.

    3.) Downloads used to be the main ranking driver until recently? We believe the AppStore made an adjustment for this recently. "Session Play" seems to have a larger weight now.

    We're assuming they made this change to remove the download bot services. Which we think is a good move, but still may not fix the AppStore's tendency to push-out Premium apps with Fixed Hours of Gameplay.

    We were never featured on the AppStore's main page. Got into "What's Hot?" a few times, but in the 100's, so there wasn't much affect. We checked every Thursday crossing our fingers.

    Yup, we're relaying on Organic at the moment. Pretty tough. Takes away from dev time on the next game.
     
  9. #9 DungeonPlunder, May 4, 2013
    Last edited: May 4, 2013
    We're pretty much on the same boat where we did decently for games which had no feature.

    If I may recommend from my experience: since you're selling at $3.99 you still have a good marketing tool by adjusting the price. While strong established franchise titles like Carcassonne have the luxury of not doing so, for us small indies it's a good way to climb up the rating. Do so after a good update (if appropriate to your game) that might get featured by press on top of it.

    There is definitely price-savy players who have your app on Appshopper's watch or similar sites + some sites do list weekend price drops. Friday seems to be a good day to do so. Here's a link to my game's download ranks so you can see the effect of drops (days of them seems to be off on Appannie - basically they correspond with the spikes):

    http://www.appannie.com/app/ios/dungeon-plunder/ranking/history/?account_id=55465#start_date=2013-03-05&end_date=2013-05-04&view=rank&store_id=143441&device=iphone&vtype=day

    Twitter effect of the drop:
    https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=Dungeon%20Plunder&src=typd

    Just did one today with the hope of maybe reaching top 5 and thus be displayed whenever a player goes to the category without scrolling but it seems to have stalled at around 10-11. We'll see how it goes for the weekend's remainder.
     
  10. JamesAtBoxCat

    JamesAtBoxCat Active Member

    Dec 6, 2012
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    Agreed! The price drop is definitely important. We noticed the same affect using our productivity tool. When you drop the price it get picked up by feeds and syndicated. http://new.appsfire.com/ is one of them.

    Constant price fluctuating was a consideration, but not sure what frequency should be good. We're afraid it will promote users to just wait until we become free. We made a hard decision to never go free. Not sure if it will serve us. We'll see. =)

    By far, discovery is definitely our biggest obstacle. We're A/B testing a few other methods now.
     
  11. Here's my idea on how to counter it that I am licensing to you for free :D Reward early adopters with special things for a limited time before any drop. On my game I gifted a unique goblin rogue skin (for early iap buyers) and an intermediate rune (for all downloaders) to those who bought the game early on. These things are no longer available now.

    This way, when the unavoidable price drop happens, these vital early adopters that still make non-freemium indie games possible will have something cool to show for even when they boot up the game a year from now and will know that you care for them and will look toward doing the same on your followup titles.

    I will follow the same logic for my next game and if anything push it even further.
     
  12. MarkFromBitmenStudios

    MarkFromBitmenStudios Well-Known Member

    Apr 4, 2011
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    IT Architecture, Development Project Manager
    Austria, Europe
    That's actually a cool idea, will keep this in mind for my next game.
     

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