Free for a few days

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by NarrowStreet, Aug 13, 2013.

  1. NarrowStreet

    NarrowStreet Well-Known Member

    We made our game In the Deep free for a few days (from Thursday to Monday). And I want to share some numbers with you.
    For promoting we used just some forums:
    • TouchArcade forum
    • MacRumors forum
    • GamesDreams forum
    • GameZebo forum
    • iMore forum
    And one Czech magazine shared info about that on facebook. (144 downloads in Czech republic)

    We used twitter of course.

    And result is that we had 1632 downloads overall. Interesting is, that the best downloads we had from China, 875 :)
    I know, it is not as so high number, but if you imagine, that game was unknown and was not featured on websites then it is a relatively good number.

    So conclusion is, if you want have a higher downloads, you need some promoters as AppGratis, AppODay, 3 Magic Shot, Free app Magic, Daily App Dream etc. How surprising :)

    But you have to be aware that many of them want money. So if you don't have some monetization in game or iAds, you waste your money for it.

    I hope so that this information can help other indie developers, which want make their game for free to short time :)
     
  2. flathead

    flathead Active Member

    May 16, 2013
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    Were you picked up by any aggregators (the sites that look for price drops)? Seems low
     
  3. NarrowStreet

    NarrowStreet Well-Known Member

    What I know, appshopper captured price drop and few others, but we was not Featured. And that is reason why numbers has been so low. Game lost between many others games which had price drop.
     
  4. Destined

    Destined Well-Known Member

    Aug 11, 2013
    1,063
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    Did you just post in those forums or pay for advertising?
     
  5. NarrowStreet

    NarrowStreet Well-Known Member

    We just posted info on forums. No Advertising. We didn't want spend money for advertisement because our game don't have IAP. Question is if have some value sending info about price drop to review magazines :) Is here somebody who have experience with it?
     
  6. Appvism

    Appvism Well-Known Member

    Feb 9, 2013
    179
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    This is a similar experience for me also, in fact i didn't even bother mentioning it at all - as an experiment i thought i'd just set it free in the App Store for a weekend, for example, just to see if there were any (more) downloads.

    My downloads number jumped (normally its $0.99), and relatively speaking although the total number was still quite low, compared with before setting the app free, it felt like a big jump. It looked it too on the iTunes Connect graph until you actually check the y axis scale/numbers! :p

    This is also from zero exposure and marketing/promotion, etc.

    Cheers,
     
  7. hungrylizards

    hungrylizards Active Member

    This is super interesting.

    I just dropped my game from 99 cents to free for 30 days. I'm promoting as a "Back to School" special. My game has no ads or IAPs.

    From May 15th (launch) to August 14th I just crossed the 1,000 downloads threshold.

    I made it free the past two days and have gotten 2,772 downloads!

    I too just posted around to some forums, sent some tweets, and posted on Reddit. I'm not sure where the majority of the downloads came from...

    I did get picked up by Appshopper and a few other "price-drop" websites, but I can't believe that I sold more copies of my game in 1 day then I did in 3 months with heavy advertising. People really want a free version. I thought that by explicitly stating that I would never have ads or IAPs would encourage people to by the game for 99 cents. (It's also Universal and under 50MB). I'm now starting to think I should have made it free, then after x number of levels had just one IAP for 99 cents that unlocked the rest...

    I'm dumbfounded by my results. I'm also curious as to what the next 30 days hold... will I continue to get 1K+ downloads a day, slowly tapper off, drop to 1-7 a day like it was when it was 99 cents? We'll see. I'll update this post in a week or so if anyone is interested.
     
  8. NarrowStreet

    NarrowStreet Well-Known Member

    Thank you for sharing info. I'm curious which numbers you will have. It's interesting how can be hard promote that your game is free ;)

    Big problem in this market is a Freemium model. Is interesting that 0.89 $ is too expensive on iPhone or iPad but it is a cheap on PC or MAC :D And doesn't matter that it is a same game.

    Good example is Angry birds. It cost 0.89$ on iPhone but on Mac cost 4.99$ and Angri birds trilogy cost 24.99$ for Nintendo 3ds.
     

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