It may not be a bad idea to drop the full game to free for a few days. There are a TON of sites that monitor price drops, I am sure it would lead to a lot more downloads. and potentially more IAP's. At a minimum it would get more exposure for your name and give you new users to add that you can cross-promote to with your next game
Thanks for the feedback. The fixed-length levels are not where you collect your Unicoins. You typically play the Endless level for that. It's very easy to collect hundreds of Unicoins on a single run. This also makes the Unicoin Doubler make sense. The interesting your comment brings up for me though is whether other people realize that they should be playing Endless mode to collect the bulk of their Unicoins or not. Maybe a popup message to that effect would be helpful. I did a lot of analysis on games like Temple Run and Jetpack Joyride to see how fast you gain coins versus how much things cost and then used that data to price my IAP items. I priced the IAP a bit cheaper than Temple Run. If anything, I've been told that collecting Unicoins is far too easy, which is maybe one reason the game is not making much on IAP. I've been told by several other developers to increase my prices. Regarding the different unicorns, I do have several others I would love to add, but unfortunately, I am limited by more than my imagination. There are over 50 individual frames of animation for each unicorn that have to be hand drawn. It's not cheap to get that artwork done, and with the limited IAP income, it's not a reasonable investment at this time.
@MindJuice I was playing the level called "Endless", just below level "Tutorial". I just tried playing it again. I got 24 coins then fell and re-spawned, another 7 coins before falling and re-spawning and a further 6 coins or so before dying. I am not that good at temple run or jet-pack joyride actually maybe your testers are skill gamers where as I would say my enjoyment comes from nice effects, customised vehicles, new levels etc. I understand your constraints regarding the different unicorn types. High download figures but poor monetisation is a very interesting problem to have. People obviously are looking for unicorn games to play and enjoy playing yours. You have managed to get 300k people into your "restaurant" but all they are ordering is water I wish you the best in your next game and thanks for sharing your figures.
So sorry, but yeah, that's actually pretty bad! I just played a quick game without focusing that much on it and earned 143 coins in about 3-4 minutes. It's hard to know whether increasing the amount of coins/decreasing the prices would be better or increasing the prices would be better. I can also change the number of coins I give in a coin pack. Need to figure it out though!
N.Y.Zombies 2 went free recently (we did not use a service with this free campaign - just dropped it to free one day) and is hovering around the #200 games in the US (very strange for us actually - its not following the typical rise for 2 days, and then plummet into obscurity that we're so used to with free campaigns and new release launches ). Its also doing well in Germany (top 10), and pretty average in a lot of other countries. Getting about 50-70,000 downloads a day. We're making about 1% of our daily downloads in profit (give or take a tiny amount). Comparatively, NYZ2 was making 25% of what its making now when it was paid in the 400-600 games range on the paid charts. So if I just had to estimate, if we held on at the same ranking on the free charts that we were when on the paid charts, we'd be making 2-3x as much (as a free game). But also remember its really not that black and white... the free and paid charts are totally different beasts, and its hard to establish which chart your game will be able to stabilize better on. Sonic Dash is a good counter example... when it was a #3 paid game, it was at the #50-60 grossing spot. Now its the #1 free game and has been in the #90-110 grossing range. There are just a ton of factors that make it hard to determine which route is better for you. I'm not convinced, personally, that releasing freemium is definitively the way to go quite yet... I think it depends a lot on your game, your audience, and just how smartly you can monetize your game, among a ton of other things (like, luck ).
So many apps are now released with the freemium model that I think paid is a better choice than it was several months ago. All the competition is racing to free, leaving the paid apps with less new opposition than before.
I agree that paid is less crowded now, however, I would argue that consumers have gradually gotten used to the idea of freemium and expect it out of most games. I think for consumers to fork up the money for a paid game they are expecting a lot more quality/content than they were previously
So my game is finally being reviewed by apple! It took about a week of "Waiting for Review". I am expecting a decision by the end of the day today or tomorrow. If all goes well and it is approved I am planning on launching on wednesday. I will update this again with the numbers for the first 24 hours, 1 week, and then 1 month. I can then update it after longer periods of time if there is interest in the data.
Thanks! Unfortunately the first version got rejected due to a small oversight on my part "We found that while your app offers In-App Purchase(s) that can be restored, it does not include the required "Restore" feature to allow users to restore the previously purchased In-App Purchase(s), as specified in Restoring Transactions section of the In-App Purchase Programming Guide:" I had it set up to automatically check for previous purchases but did not actually put a "Restore" button.
When I launched Dream Tim, while it was not free, I got about 400 downloads in about a week, both 1.99$ and 0.99c. When I made a price drop to free the outcome was this: Price Drop night : 2,101 Day 1: 19,745 Day 2: 15,059 Day 3: 10,038 Day 4: 6,656 After day 4 downloads started falling at a rate of aprox. 1000 a day until it started stagnating at about 500 a day. Total downloads so far : 86,600 Appstore. If I also count pirated copies there would be around 150.000 total users.
.. which is a bad idea anyways as it will prompt the user to enter his login credentials whenever he will hit your store section for no apparent reason = freaked out user
The most popular one is the coin doubler, as expected. After a few days while the app was free IAP sales started to grow, we had about 2% conversion rate.
Stats for Music Quiz Guru Hi, here is some lifetime stats for our Music Quiz Game. All-time downloads: 46,836 Day 1: 49 Day 2: 721 Day 3: 847 Currently gets about 200 - 500 downloads per day.
Cool to actually see some stats. I also will be launching fairly soon and really have no idea what to expect. For my previous game the lite version has about 180k downloads to date with only about 10k converting to the full version.
Interesting, your game seems to have the opposite sales figures as everything else I have seen. I.e. sales where low on launch day and then gradually grew higher instead of spiking on launch day and then slowly dwindling. Did you do anything to market it?
The day 1 downloads were so low because the game launched just couple hours before midnight. None marketing was done when launched but we have tested fb mobile marketing two times. You can see those two spikes in downloads stats when we were advertising via Fb.
What type of return did you get with the facebook advertising? It is something I have been contemplating myself. Do you feel it was worth the money invested in it?
