My first indie game on iOS App Store started out well (up to 600 daily downloads), but after the first month the downloads dropped suddenly to low double digits. I am trying to understand why. Have any of you also experienced this? It's a free game so I can't spend much ad $$; any other options? Also, the number of daily active users is decent but not many reviews/ratings. I don't show any pop-ups asking for reviews and the 'Rate us' button is also not upfront. If it's more visible, are users more likely to rate it? I mean, do users normally rate games? Most successful games have such a large number of review it almost seems suspicious to me! Sorry if these are naive questions but it's my first game. For those interested, it's a word puzzle game named Joggle (free for iOS and Android). I would appreciate any feedback or suggestions you might have. Many thanks!
I wish my first game had those numbers. I think I remember hearing Apple does give a nudge to new apps. So you start off more likely to appear in search results. In my limited experience, it is also very hard to get authentic reviews. Most people who come back to rate something, it's because they have a problem. Takes a lot of users to get one review. There are services that will spam your game with reviews but you risk getting booted from the developer account if you do that. And some of these operations will scam developers. I think Apple will only start enforcing this rule the second I ever attempt it. But if a new game has thousands of great reviews and the game is like "Pay to Win Whale Hunter 3000", that's probably not legit.
