To cross post with my post in the "General" section: What has been a preferred or successful "lite" demo? How have they driven sales for the full version?
Well, Stick Escape lite has downloaded over 700,000 worldwide and it has pretty low ratings/reviews. That proves that the game doesn't have to be liked to be popular. I didn't market SE lite besides posting a thread here at TouchArcade, so from my experience, it took off by itself. It definitely had an affect on the full version, but it wasn't anything huge, it probably tripled my sales for the paid version
Both of our games (Zombieville USA, OMG Pirates!) have had success with their lite versions. Zombieville USA Lite is up to 1.3M downloads, and has clearly contributed to the full version's long term success. OMG's Lite version is barely a week old and has already made an obvious and quantifiable improvement in sales. I think if your app is appealing, and you don't give away too much in the demo, its almost a gaurantee that you'll see an increase in revenue by doing a lite version.
I have never done a lite version of any of my games, but I plan to for Cascadia Kart. I am curious to see the sales impact. My plan is to only include 3 tracks and disable the mirror mode option. I might also limit the player to picking from only two karts instead of all 4. Should be a fun experiment.
Yeah, go for 1 track and 1 cart. Make sure they know there are more tracks and carts available in the full version!
Just fired off that Lite version. One track and no option to choose kart. Also a nice big button to get the full version (alas separately, no DLC in my code yet).