So long and thanks for all the spam. That unofficial website is a blog-directing conception with no legitimate basis. I would wait for the in-game leaderboards, as others ought to do, if I played this game competitively. Besides, those scores are ridiculous for a game with randomly generated levels. No offense if you are just the messenger.
Dude i just pasted the link from semisecret's twitter post! And the linked worked back then! http://twitter.com/semisecret/status/4884387664
OK my bad. Seems to be semi-official, to the extent that twitter feeds reliably convey unhacked game data. Anyway, it seems that spam in semi-pro gaming is here to stay, since no one wants to do anything about it.
Hook Champ vs. Canabalt Have any of you tried "Hook Champ"? I don't know about you guys, but I seem to like it more than Canabalt, despite being in very similar genres. I think this because of the shop mechanism where you can buy upgrades. Obviously, this cannot be easily applied to Canabalt, but... Hypothetically there are coins that you can pick up during a run. There is a shop in the menu where you can use these coins to buy things such as different characters, different "skins" for the background color scheme, and basically things to make it look cooler. Maybe you could take a page from Hook Champ and have avatars you can buy with these coins that show up next to your score on the online leaderboards (when they come out).
Sorry ifftopic, but couldnt resist sharing.. Happens to me all the time Mostly noobs though. They pm me and tell me they`ll review my game in iTunes for a free promo code. I just send them this promo code: REKRUL2BMUD1 Once they try it and find out that it`s not working, they pm me again telling me there`s something wrong with the code. I reply them asking to write down the code in reverse and then enter it in iTunes as iTunes sometimes send the code in reverse order due to a glitch in their system. And then......
I see the game is dropping down the chart like a stone tied to a lead anvil, despite still being on the App Store front page in the headline "New And Noteworthy" category and having all sorts of other advantages over other apps. (Long-standing market awareness through the popular flash game, great reviews, epic thread here.) It would seem that the argument for higher prices on simple games - as far as longevity of sales goes - has taken a bit of a kicking. (It's even lower than that chart now - currently at 75 in Paid Games, completely out of the overall top 100 by sales, and 67 and falling fast in Top Grossing.) Only Semi Secret will know if the extra money they've made during the brief period of popularity will ultimately be more profitable than continuing to sell the game for weeks and months, like the dozens of inferior games above it which have held their chart positions for far longer and happen to sell for 99c. I hope Semi Secret HAVE made a good chunk of money, because it's a great game. But I'd rather Canabalt had stuck around for longer and had a bigger audience, and that's never going to happen at $2.99.
i've never seen such a bizarre sales chart on appshopper. it drops off relatively early which is common with new apps, then spikes up ridiculously out of no where, only to drastically drop off again. it's like somebody dumped a cashload into the app one day just to get it to spike one more time only for it to drop off quickly. i wouldn't be worried about the devs though, i'm pretty sure they made out with thousands of dollars in profit. not bad for a couple weeks work eh?
The second spike is where it appeared on the App Store front page. It was dying a rapid death until then, but that's the biggest boost an iPod app can get.
You do realize they have the option of dropping the price at some point in the future still? In which case they have the benefit of both worlds. and here's Run's graph, which is at $0.99. Note that it is also unsustained, despite being at $0.99. Why isn't it still in the top 100 despite being at the magic $0.99 price point that you seem to think will guarantee success? In fact, almost all games have a unsustained top 100 run. Those that sustain are the exceptions. And looking at the longest top 100 runners: Bejeweled 2 - $2.99 Tetris - $4.99 Scrabble - $4.99 Solitaire - $0.99 Monopoly - $4.99 Pocket God - $0.99 Flight Control - $0.99 Zombieville - $1.99 Flick Fishing - $1.99 Stickwars - $0.99 It looks like most of the sustatined top 100 games are > $0.99 If you want to look at it another way. Run has 656 reviews, Canabalt as 486. So if you assume there is roughly the same correlation of reviews to purchases. Run has 34% more sales than Canabalt, but is priced at 1/3 the price. So the Canabalt developer made 2.2x the money that Run made despite selling less. So, in conclusion SpungoMcGee.... yes, you may want to try to claim that your desire to save $2 is bad business, it actually seems like it's good business. So, let's try not to hide the fact that you're simply looking to save a couple of bucks behind some uninformed veil of it being in the best interests of the dev. arn
I thought it was funny that stickwars had stayed in the number 30 spots for about two months, then as soon as he advertised his next big update, it's sales dropped tramatically . Don't forget the moron test too, despite all the bad reviews it still manages to gets lots of sales... *Sigh*
its not MJ?? i thought the shoes were a dead give away edit: I will say that after owning this for a week or so, 3 bux was a tad pricy, im thinking 1.99 is the sweet spot .. its really fun and nice production but there isnt any content that justifies that 3rd dollar, music? Production: $1 Music: .45 Programming: .75... then round it out... thats my opinion neway
...blah blah blah. The two things aren't really comparable, because Run didn't have any of the other advantages I mentioned - no Flash version raising consumer awareness, and as far as I know it never got the App Store rocket either. And four out of the six higher-priced apps you list are existing IP with enormous brand presence, and therefore a huge and obvious advantage over anything else in the App Store. I'm sure we did this exact same thing earlier in the thread - you can't compare apples (incredibly well-known existing brands with in some cases DECADES of prior consumer awareness) with oranges (indie games nobody's ever heard of). And of course they have the option of future price drops, but they've directly said they won't be doing that. I hope they change their minds.
Run was featured by Apple too. And re the top 100 basically there are only a few sustained $.99 Games on the list which means you are still wrong to suggesting that not being $.99 is the reason for canabalt drop when it is basically the normal pattern. Again you are just raging against not wanting to pay $2 when all evidence seems to suggest that it's better for the devs in this case. It's just not better for you. arn
