The Anatomy of an EPIC App Store Sale: The story of Ow My Balls!

Excellent read. I am always soaking up this kinda stuff whenever another dev goes through all the trouble to document all the ups and downs of their experience in this crazy marketplace - kudos too for actually giving figures!

We just released an app (our second) and are at the beginning, I hope, of a similar journey of some sort, we'll see. Lots of experimentation, being edgy, and trying to (drastically) temper expectations garnished with a heavy degree of patience and thoughtful stick-to-it-ivness seems to be the order of the day.

Good luck with your continued perseverance And that's awesome how high you climbed!

 

Excellent post. Enjoyed reading it, thanks.

 

nice story. I agree that free+DLC seems to be a right strategy for the games that simply didn't sell otherwise - free downloaders still get a nice amount of content for free (I mean, it was initially meant to be paid), and if they like it, devs will likely get some money out of the free exposure.

 

Thanks a lot for sharing all this information! Great read, a lot of good lessons here.

 

That was a very nice read, thanks for sharing the information!

 

You lamented the fact that you hadn't added DLC to the app before putting it out for free, since you now can't monetize against that user base. But is that the case? If you add DLC to the app won't those 1.1M users have the opportunity to upgrade, and thus have access to the DLC?

For sure the exposure would not be the same as it would have been had there been DLC at the moment. Only a portion will upgrade, and a large portion have probably already moved on. But it is an opportunity nonetheless, and you are in a better position than most with > 1M user base.

 

Thanks for that article.

 

Really nice writeup. And I agree that users seem to be generally uninterested in 'lite' apps these days.

I think the reasons include:
- there have been a lot of lite apps that are ad heavy or stripped down that they're almost unpleasant to play.
- there are tons of quality, free, already-ranked, complete games available in the AppStore. It's hard to complete with that.

As this experiment shows, there's currently tremendous interest in pay apps that get discounted down to free. But I'd bet on this trend going away over the next six months, as more and more developers attempt to take advantage of this.

 

That's great information. Thanks for sharing the info. It's good to see such detailed analysis.

 

Great read, thanks for the write up... and congratulations on the success of the sale.

 

Wow, great article. Lots of information there, thanks for sharing!

 

Very good article, but I one thing I noticed is that if you make your app free, ratings WILL go down (and yes there are exceptions, but not many), so I was wondering if my little idea to counter this would work.

1. Have an update prepared, and submit it so it hopefully is released after the sale
2. Make your app free, and if you get famous, like this, watch the rating goes down.
3. After the sale ends, Reward the people who kept the app and who liked it with a nice update, which gets rid of the flood of 1-star apps, and gives them incentive to up their rating.

 

Yup. This works to a degree. There is still an average star rating for all versions.

You can also do what that Gangstaz and similar apps do. Give the player something in-game for leaving a 5* review. I think this is far more effective.

 

How does Gangstaz and similar apps give player's something in-game for leaving a 5* review? I'm not familiar with these apps and just curious what the code/mechanics of this is. How does the app know if you left a 5* review?

 

Hey, lots of useful information in there! Thanks for the awesome writeup!