Promoting a game with 24h "free" period?

cocos2d for iPhone » iTunes Connect /App Store / Cydia

Promoting a game with 24h "free" period?

(10 posts) (7 voices)

Started 2 years ago by patrickC
Latest reply from patrickC

Tags:

No tags yet.

patrickC
Member

Hello all,
I was just wondering if anyone had any experience with making their games/apps free for a limited amount of time.
As I understand it, it will cancel the rank your app is in, but it's not a major concern for me at the moment.
I'd be more interested in hearing if it had any kind of impact on future sales.
The advantage I might see is that while the game is free many more people will download and rate it (hopefully not negatively).
Then, once it goes back into the paid apps section, potential buyers will be attracted by the numerous ratings.
Bad idea?
Good idea?

I need to pay rent :)
Thanks
Patrick

Posted 2 years ago #
ob1
Member

The only experience I have is a friend who did this.

While it was free (one week), his app was TOP 1 free almost in every app store.

After that he maintained in the TOP 50 paid at 0.99$ for around a month I think.

Posted 2 years ago #
Codemattic
Moderator

@ob1, was that before or after Apple made the number of free downloads not influence its ranking on the paid chart when the developer switches?

Posted 2 years ago #
ob1
Member

After. It was in June I think.

Posted 2 years ago #
patrickC
Member

Well, I've decided to go ahead and make Mini Taxi free for 24 hours (or slightly longer...)
I'll let you guys know how it turns out for me.
Cheers

Posted 2 years ago #
pabloruiz55
Member

Good luck!

The only negative side of that is that it may piss off some people who bought it at full price. But between free and 0.99 it isn't so much difference. For example i bought peggle for 5 dollars and the next day it was at 0.99 :(

Also because it is free you may get many bad reviews from people that just download it and play it a little (?) I read something like this around the web.

Maybe you can wait till you have a major update and do some kind of promotion with that.

Posted 2 years ago #
jptsetung
Member

This is an interesting experiment about it here : http://blog.hogbaysoftware.com/post/170655672/writeroom-iphone-4-99-daily-sales-compared-to

I think it can help too :
- More reviews (OK maybe some bad reviews, but it can help to have a lot of reviews on smaller stores)
- More people playing your game and recommending it to their friends.

Please let us know what happened.

Posted 2 years ago #
sserye
Member

Please post back about your experience...

I wish you good luck!!

Sincerely,

Posted 2 years ago #
Frank84
Member

Yes, we did this with Railroad Madness about a week after it came out for only 24 hours. It was great because we got like 2000 downloads and tons of reviews. Afterwards though we didn't see much of a sales boost. The downside of this technique, is that you lose all of those sales since they already have your app. Also, you'd be surprised how critical people can be in the reviews of a free app. For the update of Railroad Madness, we will also be releasing a "lite" version. This will generate a lot of downloads and then a percentage of those people will actually go and buy the full version. So my recommendation is that a lite version is a must-have instead of going free for a while.

Also, get out there and market to as many app sites as possible. E-mail them and try to get featured. I remember we got featured on some Japanese site and for the next week our daily downloads had doubled with most of the downloads coming from Japan.

Posted 2 years ago #
patrickC
Member

Thanks for your comments Frank, I will try some of your suggestions.

I went ahead anyway on Saturday and made Mini Taxi free for 24 hours.
The results were mixed I suppose, but ultimately I don't think sales got any kind of boost, they just went back to what they were, perhaps with a 5-10 daily units increase at the very most, although it's only been 2 days since it's gone back to being paid so who knows.

In the 24 hours of "freeness" it was downloaded around 6000 times, and hit #8 in Free Racing Games.

That lead to a total of 198 ratings and 24 reviews (numbers for all versions of the US store), unfortunately for me people can be very harsh and the "rate on delete" with default 1 star is a dangerous mechanism for a small, and perhaps not so successful game.
As a result, the average rating is now of 2 1/2 stars with 1 star being the most common rating (about 30%).

In the end, I'm not sure if it was a good or bad idea, time will tell I suppose, and should good things come of this I will share the information.

I suppose every game is different, and a Lite version is probably the best solution, but just wouldn't work for a game like Mini Taxi so I've decided against it for now.

Posted 2 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.