Yeah, the moment I released a Lite version, TanZen sales soared. Then I got featured shortly after that. Lite is good.
When to release a lite version Thanks for all the replies. Sounds like launching (perhaps with a 24-hour promo release price?), and then releasing a lite version later is the way to go. Although, didn't the Liquid Air Lab guys release their Rick Robertson free version before the paid version? I wonder how their sales were. The free version was very popular for a while.
If I was selling an app which is selling well in the top 10 I would also probably take it easy and quit my day job for a while, you only live once and if you love to make and play games I think it's worth it even if you can only do it for a year or two, do what feels best for yourself.
Like someone mentioned on this thread, i hope the iShoot developer doesn't shoot himself when he realize the amount of taxes he needs to pay for earnings at that level. I'm not sure any accounting "magic" is going to help him as Apple deposit the money electronically... Well... his game is doing really well so more power to him. But i believe it is a stupid idea to quit his day job. He could've negotiated a 4-day work week or even a part-time arrangement. Companies are very open to such arrangements especially when everyone is looking at cutting costs.
Set up 4 day work week? I find this ridiculous. He made $200,000 in one week. He's still making that level of money. What # would you quit at? $400,000? $800,000? $1 million? Let's say he's making $70,000 a year at his current job. That means he's making ~$35/hour. It is a waste of his time to spend 32 hours a week making $1100. And then devote only one day a week to the task that made him $200,000 this week? arn
Thought I'd add a few comments from my experiences so far: We have one game out called Bomboozle, its a collapse puzzle game... quite well polished (I think ;-) and it's pretty decent fun. However after initial release it was selling quite poorly and after a few weeks the sales had really dropped off. Just after xmas we released the lite version and the sales instantly doubled and have remained reasonably constant. It's also interesting that the sales are now coming from all over the world, not just UK, US. So in my opinion lite versions are by far the best form of advertising, I do think however that it needs to be a game in it's own right... and we'll be trying to produce better lite versions for all our future titles. Slightly off topic but I would say beware of price changes, dropping the price of Bomboozle actually hurt sales and no doubt pisses people off that bought at the higher price. From now on I will set prices based on what I think the game is worth leave it to live or die by that! As for iShoot, simply an amazing transformation and I completely agree with Ethans decisions to go it alone. What a great position to basically be secure for at least a year and to be able to put that time into innovating whatever takes your fancy ;-)
