Thank you! We've received a great amount of coverage so many thanks goes out to all the reviewers/bloggers, etc.
Yeah you have! Great work on that part I think unless you can get mentioned a couple of the major iphone game blogs, its very hard to break double digit numbers even for first day sales. How was your experience getting a response from those reviewers? How much lead time did you send them stuff before the game came out? How long to respond? What kind of message did you send? Did you attach images, or zips, or nothing? (lots of questions I know There's a great conversation on twitter yesterday with Jared from TA sharing some opinions about what he does/doesnt like seeing in a 'tips' email.)
Happy to answer what I can! (...in my experience...) How was your experience getting a response from those reviewers? Great actually. I'd say about 80% of the reviewers responded within 3 days. As for the other 20%, some have gotten back to me within 1-2 weeks and others didn't at all...which I of course understand. But I think a big part of it was also Twitter. I'm a huge Twitter junkie and follow a bunch of peeps and review sites. I pretty much live on Twitter lol so I had the honor to meet some of these mighty men of tech world prior to contacting them via email. How much lead time did you send them stuff before the game came out? Two weeks. And another follow up 3 days before launch. What kind of message did you send? If you're asking whether it was a press release, absolutely not! I don't try to be someone I'm not. I'm not a huge company and I won't talk like one. So my email was very basic and personal. I didn't email anyone I haven't spoken with prior or who's site I don't follow on a regular basis. I kept it short and sweet and to the point (2-3 paragraphs with some bullet points). I tried to make sure I provided the reviewer with absolutely everything and anything he/she needed to know. Basic apps details, short desc, video link, screenshots, contact info. Did you attach images, or zips, or nothing? I've attached images for some and used a link to a zip file for others. Some guys prefer it one way while others the other. Typically screenshots as an attachment and a video as a link. I also put together a "marketing package" and offered it on our site. It's an organized way of showing the reviewers that you have every intention to make their job a bit easier Jared's cool! I talk to him on Twitter here and there. He's given me great tips and played a role in getting DEO on TA. Although I also owe it Troy! Hope this helps PS: Jared or Eli, if you guys are reading this and disagree with something, plz do point out. I still have a long way to learn
Portaball http://bartoszciechanowski.com/2011/08/portaball-post-mortem/ (2010) Numbers are at the very bottom of the post.
Thanks for sharing , this is great info! I only wish I knew all this things before launching our first game ! Eli's blog has a lot of valuable tips! Here's the link for those who have not read it yet! http://a-13.net/
You know, I have to say I don't totally get why folks treat their sales numbers as sensitive data. Here's Cavorite in its entirety. So there you have it. Cavorite peaked at 332 all games (US) and had ~220 downloads that day. You can correlate every spike with a "major" review like Appolicious, AppAdvice, TouchArcade, etc. The last spike was a 1-day $0.99 sale. Our big mistake was we didn't get all the reviews on the same day. But on the flip side, we were already featured by Apple in one of their promo boxes. So I don't know if rank visibility would have added that much. I'm hating the big lull in sales right now. Hopefully our Fall strategy will push that back up.
Hey guys, nice thread. We've just posted a summary of our first month on the appstore with our debut title Wooords. Has some interesting figures on UK and US sales for iPad top 50. http://strayrobotgames.com/2011/08/one-month-on-the-app-store/ Cheers
this one is not ours http://www.thundergameworks.com/ranking.tgw but they were kind enough to post it on their website
Hey, I'm the guy who made Trainyard and my blog is the struct.ca one... To the guy who wanted to know how rank relates to sales... It's a little tricky because worldwide sales actually make a big difference too, and sometimes your rank there will either be ahead or behind your US rank. So anyway, these are pretty accurate. Oh and these are dollars earned *after* Apple's cut. Rank 300 overall - $1000/day Rank 25 overall - $2500/day Rank 10 overall - $5000/day Rank 5 overall - $15000/day Rank 2 overall - $30000/day Rank 1 overall - $40-50k/day Right now Trainyard has dropped way off the top overall chart. It ranges from rank 50-100 in games/board and 75-150 in games/puzzle. It makes around $100/day at 99c and has been steady at that level for the past couple months, which is actually pretty sweet considering that I haven't updated it in over 8 months (a new update is finally waiting for review right now). Hope this helps explain some stuff, let me know if you have any questions. -Matt
thanks everyone! I've been updating the first post with these so it will continue to grow into a comprehensive list.
We are heavily being advertised on Stick Sports from next week hopefully so I will let you know what difference that makes to sales of Screen Invaders.
First week of Punch a Hole, numbers are near the end. http://bartoszciechanowski.com/2011/09/the-first-week/
Waouh. 100 sales on day one. That's crazy for a game that got reviewed by TA. So basically it confirms that either you make more than 200k$ with a game, or it's max 2000$ after a year, by selling 20 games a day... Damn. This industry is frightening. Good luck with the game though, I'll give Touch A Hole a try, looks cool.
Well I'm still hoping for N&N tomorrow . I still haven't given up, I think that Punch a Hole just needs a (very) strong push to succeed.
well, our game scream`n`run started ok (02. august, 75 sales) and is now at 5-15 sales a day. mostly in asia. we reached the 500 salemark after one month and one week. our other game (the great leaping lambrettinis) needed roundabout 10 month for that (and we had some really good reviews at big sites). it`s not a blast, but i think, it`s ok. the game is really special, you can`t play it in the public. , and we haven`t any review at bigger sites and didn`t do any promotion (oh, we will part of the appmadness tournament this month, but this is more for fun). at my birthday (20.08.) we set the app on free and had incredible 19.000 dl. next day, we had roundabout 100 sales and the rest of the week 10 each day. we will see, if the sales will be steady at 5-10. oh, the lambrettinis are at 1250 sales after two years, we still have 5-9 sales a week.
I decided to make everything about Frosties public from what we did/do for marketing to sales numbers. First-10-days post is live now and I plan to feed sales numbers as they go. Maybe I'll even find a nifty joomla plugin to have a graph with latest data constantly visible on my blog
Nice thread. There is a french website with a lot of sales number : http://www.picolozine.com/divers/divers/82-iphone-les-chiffres-de-ventes-des-jeux-et-applications.html The links inside the page : http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/16/iphone-app-sales-exposed/ http://www.fourdoorlemon.com/2010/08/28/quizquizquiz-iphone-sales-numbers-us-eh/ http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=58661 http://blog.endloop.ca/blog/2010/08/12/100k-in-4-months-a-niche-apps-path-to-app-store-success/ http://goldenhammersoftware.blogspot.com/2010/07/big-mountain-snowboarding-history-and.html http://www.owmyballsthegame.com/?p=728 http://www.iphon.fr/post/2009/03/13/Developper-une-application-iPhone-n-est-pas-forcement-rentable http://www.applicationiphone.com/2009/12/ipilule-chronique-application-iphone-developpement-promotion-ventes-appstore/ http://www.iphonegen.fr/capcom-bioware-expriment-ventes-jeux-iphone-actualite-3091.html http://www.blogiphone.fr/2010/02/25/plants-vs-zombies-300-000-ventes-en-9-jours/ http://my-mobiblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/les-chiffres-de-liphone.html http://gamesfromwithin.com/making-a-living-comfortably-on-the-app-store http://struct.ca/2010/the-story-so-far/ http://struct.ca/2010/the-week-that-was/ http://toucharcade.com/2010/10/14/chillingos-cut-the-rope-hits-one-million-paid-downloads-in-just-ten-days/ http://blog.mundue.net/2010/10/pricing-and-ranking/ http://majicjungle.com/blog/?p=283 http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/11/gdc-2010-canabalt-postmortem/ http://www.pocketgamer.biz/r/PG.Biz/Halfbrick+news/news.asp?c=33346 http://www.aspyreapps.com/blog/ios-android-windows-phone-7/ http://www.smartpassiveincome.com/taking-control-benny-hsu/
Hi guys: I started a new thread yesterday about an iOS game revenue survey I'm running until Sept 26, 2011. Please check it out and add your games' info to the survey. The more data we get, the more useful the survey will be. I'll be posting the collected results next week after the survey closes so that the whole community can learn from the data. http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=107602 Thanks! Owen
