I agree, but I would just leave the price and not drop it why? because games like this are for a niche market. The people who will buy this game are people like mrbass and myself. We love our board games. Jason Fieldman, the dev of Theseus, has stated that his sales didn't increase when he dropped the price of his game from 4.99 to .99. The reason being that the people that were really interested in that game didn't care about the price as much as they cared about the quality of the app. I would suggest handing out a few promo codes to senior members that can be honest about the game. A good word of mouth always helps sales increase. Good luck!
Actually, Shogi sales initially spiked with a price drop of $1.99 to $0.99 (where it sits now). It's starting to taper off again. Which leads me to believe the biggest issue is just to get exposure ala the Top or Most Recent lists. I'm not sure how I'm going to experiment with this one.
The benefit of the price drop approach is you also get listed in AppSniper which is very popular. Some authors will do 24 hour sales every few weeks to promote sales and reviews. This is how I get virtually all my apps.
That's a great thing to know. And it makes a lot of sense when I think about my sales experience in the app store thus far. Currently, Xeno Sola is undergoing final polish. There are a few lingering minor issues that need to be cleaned up...
Cool! It's been stuck at about 95% done for a while now. Final testing revealed a memory leak that's been causing the game to crash after ~20 minutes of play (about 3 matches in a row). I'm still in the midst of hunting down the issue. Hopefully I can find it, fix it, and get the game in the App Store soon!
Just to update folks on this... I had to reboot the code from scratch due to engine limitations, hence the big delay at the last minute. I simply wouldn't release a game that had a memory leak! It's now heading into the polish phase. A few things will be different at launch: it will have a different name (I'll share later), new artwork that is no longer anime-cute, and will run very fast and stable.
Starcassonne Things are moving along nicely, so once again I feel comfortable posting a preview. Xeno Sola has been reborn as Starcassonne. I've incorporated much feedback and experience into this partial-reboot. The goal is feature complete this week, polished next week, and available the week after that.
Might want to reconsider name. You can always try it but for example KenKen I think 2 or 3 were pulled from the appstore because that had Ken as part of their name. Trademark infringement.
I think I'm in the clear. You'd have to argue that folks are confusing the board game with the iPhone app due to the similar names. "Star" and "car" are pretty distinct, both in sound and logo appearance. But then this is America, so you never know! Do folks like the direction we took the art?
I've submitted this game to Apple today. When it's available, I'll put a post up in the other forum. It's been a long development process and the quality will show in the final product.
I got Carcassonne when it was on XBLA for free. Great game, especially the multiplayer. If this holds up then it's a must buy for me.
Wow quite the 3 week approval process ..used to be 1 week, then 2 weeks, now 3 weeks if not a whole entire month.
I really want this game to come out. I played a lot of Carcassonne on holiday last week with my cousins so I'm eager to play this game!
Sign up for a free account and play the java version free here http://games.asobrain.com/ or try out the demo on xbla which has a nice tutorial.
you are up brother! although me and another beat you to a post, hahaha. actualy i was beat to the post too, though i think it's because we both were posting at the same time and in mine i included all 5 screenshots, where he only did 2, sneaky sneaky beat me to it so mine gets locked hahaha love that it's carcassonne yet not, can't wait to get down and dirty with it, and multiplayer is a blast on the 360, so can't wait to get in on some of that with this game too!
