I released Astavoid on the 19th April 2012, a Thursday. I am led to believe that this is important as far as the Appstore is concerned as this is their changeover day so launching on a thursday allow you to build up downloads, recognition etc over the week so more chance of getting featured the following week. A wives tale I'm not sure.
I wrote a very basic website to support the launch on my main Parachuting Frog website as well as create a gameplay teaser on YouTube.
To be honest I'm not that happy with it as I don't have anything more than an iPhone 4 and a GorillaMobile tripod so the quality is pretty amateur but heh I'm learning.
For prerelease I also have two twitter accounts mygamingproject and parachutingfrog that help spread the word and keep people you to date.
For launch I released to Google Play, GetJar, Amazon App Store for Android, Amazon Appstore for Kindle, as well as the Appstore for the universal app for iPad, iPhone and iPod including Retina support up to IPad 3. So I had most bases covered apart from Nook Color which I am still waiting on administration.
I started off with a soft launch because there were some key upgrades I wanted released and approved by Apple before telling the world. Alas there review process takes so long (7 days for first version and a further 6 for the update) makes a coordinated multi platform release quite tough.
So on day of launch the only marketing was tweets and the trigger process that kicks in over the internet when new apps are out. The weekend of 21 and 22 April I did two things. I submitted my app to about 30 sites android review and probably 20 for Apple. The frustration I have found with review sites it would appear is that nobody is prepared to write a review for free unless you have connections or prepared to pay for it, or wait a long time for it to become popular. A little chicken and egg.
The reason I didn't want to pay too much in marketing in the first instance is that my game is free so I needed to understand what the click rates would be and recycle it into marketing. The exception to this was a PR release I did via prMac. prMac has various packages but for a reasonable $20 you can release a press release which can be distributed to over 700 press agencies. So I did that and here is my press release.
So now you know my prerelease and marketing efforts lets have a look at what the first week's downloads look like.
| 19th April | 20th April | 21st April | 22nd April | 23rd April | 24th April | 25th April | ||
| iOS | 1130 | 379 | 157 | 130 | 75 | 36 | 18 | 1925 |
| Android | 3 | 1 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 5 | 2 | 19 |
| Kindle Fire | 1 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 2 | 4 | 0 | 15 |
| 1134 | 386 | 160 | 135 | 79 | 45 | 20 |
As you can see, and to my surprise, I had a massive launch day surge. I can only assume this came about from twitter accounts and "watcher" services that broadcast when new games are out. I have quite an eye catching icon logo and unusual name so seemed to catch the imagination of some.
The interesting thing is that iOS tailed off dramatically after that first day. Android, however, given the same marketing efforts has had pitiful downloads.
So this is all very interesting but what does this equate to in terms of hard cash. Well as I mentioned I am doing the first one as free so revenues are purely down to advertising revenues. I have positioned ads on the front menu screen, pause menu as well as the game over screen. This should mean that even the shortest of games should put in two ad requests. The problem however with ad revenues is you get nothing for impressions but only for those that are clicked on.
The next area of analysis of how the people are of my app are engaging with it. This is where Corona SDK provides a very useful tool called Launchpad that is by default is switched on for pro subscription developers that provide insight into these trends.
So what does this look like for revenues. As you'd imagine nothing life changing! I have implemented an aggregator into my code which first uses Admob and if this can't fill for whatever reason trickles down to Inneractive. The reason for these two being used is in some part limited to what Corona SDK supports but also those that are around most countries.
As you can see from the stats again its supporting the the number of downloads to ad requests. But what is important is that there is only about one impression per download. This means some people may not even be playing the game which seems a little odd. Most important though I have only made $6 in revenue which is the equivalent of roughly having about 14 paid download apps. As you'll see from the clicks there weren't a great deal despite the reasonable impressions.
The final thing is to look at how the downloads faired across the world. I am using the excellent Appannie to give me stats. Also try the excellent Majicrank for realtime stats if your app reaches a rank of 200 or better.
For iPhone I had a reasonable spread across countries if not ranking that high ...
| Store | Action | Arcade | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of top 500 stores | 6 | 7 | ||
| # of top 1000 stores | 19 | 19 | ||
| Turkey | 166 | Apr 19, 2012 | 375 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Mexico | 385 | Apr 20, 2012 | 341 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Cyprus | 465 | Apr 19, 2012 | 403 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| South Korea | 479 | Apr 20, 2012 | 394 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Sweden | 481 | Apr 19, 2012 | 593 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Spain | 485 | Apr 20, 2012 | 437 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| France | 513 | Apr 20, 2012 | 472 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| United Kingdom | 599 | Apr 20, 2012 | 380 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| China | 602 | Apr 19, 2012 | 549 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Netherlands | 641 | Apr 19, 2012 | 634 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Brazil | 654 | Apr 22, 2012 | 603 | Apr 22, 2012 |
| Armenia | 705 | Apr 21, 2012 | 599 | Apr 21, 2012 |
| Italy | 706 | Apr 20, 2012 | 670 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Japan | 724 | Apr 19, 2012 | 643 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| United States | 747 | Apr 20, 2012 | 664 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Germany | 759 | Apr 20, 2012 | 611 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Canada | 760 | Apr 19, 2012 | 688 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Switzerland | 805 | Apr 20, 2012 | 728 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Egypt | 945 | Apr 19, 2012 | 844 | Apr 19, 2012 |
and for iPad a little greater success where in 4 countries got into top 100. This of course is supported by the stats in the other graphs
| Store | Action | Arcade | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| # of top 100 stores | 0 | 4 | ||
| # of top 500 stores | 10 | 15 | ||
| # of top 1000 stores | 10 | 15 | ||
| Turkey | 104 | Apr 19, 2012 | 86 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Ireland | 104 | Apr 20, 2012 | 88 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Italy | 104 | Apr 19, 2012 | 195 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Romania | 109 | Apr 19, 2012 | 80 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Denmark | 116 | Apr 19, 2012 | 110 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Spain | 130 | Apr 20, 2012 | 88 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Japan | 172 | Apr 19, 2012 | - | |
| Brazil | 173 | Apr 20, 2012 | 153 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Sweden | 187 | Apr 19, 2012 | 171 | Apr 19, 2012 |
| Israel | 194 | Apr 20, 2012 | 167 | Apr 20, 2012 |
| Netherlands | - | 170 | Apr 19, 2012 | |
| Mexico | - | 176 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
| El Salvador | - | 177 | Apr 24, 2012 | |
| France | - | 180 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
| Saudi Arabia | - | 190 | Apr 21, 2012 | |
| Switzerland | - | 197 | Apr 20, 2012 | |
As I said at the outset this is a warts and all reality of indie development. I have learnt a lot in this second week about how I could have done it differently for next time but not sure I can retrieve the situation without some investment in a marketing budget. But that is for another week.
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