Nice thread!
I've been meaning to reply with a few stats to another thread, I may as well do it here.
Currently got one game out, and another small commissioned app I did a while back.
The commissioned app is for a very niche market, and sits along doing about 1-2 sales a day on average (no reviews, or PR effort or anything, it's waiting for an update before the client tries to ramp up interest).
The game was released in early Jan, and soon averaged low-ish sales numbers similar to what others have mentioned here.
We were lucky enough (& very grateful) to get featured in the 'Staff Favorites' section of the US store (along with Canada & Mexico) a few weeks back, and that had a pretty noticeable effect:
On average it gave us an approx 800-900% boost in sales (nearly all US). Remember though, were talking going from low numbers to something just little more acceptable ;) It did also help us reach around the 65th-70th spot in the US kids listings.
Just before the week as the first app in that listing was up, and we were about to get pushed further along the list, we dropped the price 50% to $.99 to see what effect in ranking that might have. It increased the download rate, and gained us roughly 5 places or so, peaking at 57 I believe in the same US kids chart. Overall revenue was slightly down compared to before the sale, but not massively. We also made it to around 80 or so in the US family charts (these rankings are off the top of my head, so may be slightly out!)
When we dropped off the first page of the feature (still on sale), sales dropped to around 300-400% of the original average, and slowly started to edge down.
At the same time, that staff feature with us on page 2 now, was duplicated to 63 other countries (unfortunately not any of the other 'big 8', but still a great acknowledgement that we're grateful for!). This has resulted in maybe a few extra sales a day on average, but no where near the increase we got in the US.
A few days later we took it off sale, which resulted in us slowly dropping out of the kids top 100 :(
We did learn a few valuable lessons from this:
- getting featured, even if its in a section that only appears on iTunes & not the phone has a noticeable impact
- sales seem to make your average star rating drop (at least in this instance, more on that in a sec)
- its seems pretty hard to climb past the top 50 or so (at least in kids) without a pretty significant boost in sales numbers. I'm guessing a lot of other categories would be even harder.
Matt & I started this for the love of it. Wanting to put our own vision out their, rather than meeting clients demands, & I'm truly thankful to Apple for the opportunity!
For now, we're holding back on any big promotion, and working super hard. (I seem to do an all nighter at least once a week at the moment!) As well as make use of every spare moment in-between client work to get iphone dev done.
We always intended to do incremental updates, as we knew it would take us years to get a game to the level we wanted (especially as this is our first). But feel we need to have a bit more content & fun in their before the majority of users are likely to want to pick it up & play daily, hence the slight drop in star rating (or so we think). That day will come, and hopefully not too far away, as we have the next couple of months updates planned and pretty much animated out ready to implement.
In summary, we've just about covered initial financial outlays (or will have, once all the payments up to now come through). Our first payment arrived last week, it may not be huge, but its a nice sign we're moving in the right direction. But to actually cover all the time & effort at our regular rates, for both Matt, myself & other friends who have helped along the way, we'll need to sell a lot more!
As a creative outlet & fun project, its amazing, & thats our main driving factor, as well as hearing the great feedback users have given. As an income to support 2 or more people, its got a way to go yet, but we're not in a major hurry, the project was done as a side hobby & learning experience at first, and is now ramping up in development speed. I'm pleased to see older apps getting featured in the New & Noteworthy, & other sections. I think if you keep putting enough effort & love into your creations people will notice you. And from the recent Apple surveys, I think they're really starting to listen to developers & hopefully continue to make changes to the store that will eventually benefit all the genuine devs out there, rather than those who choose to chuck out loads of not so polished apps (although I have been very tempted a few times, so I can't really blame anyone who does - apart from the type of devs mentioned here http://macenstein.com/default/2010/03/7-things-apple-can-do-to-really-clean-up-the-app-store/)
For now we'll continue updating, and planning a full on summer strategy, whilst using the game to promote our services to potential new clients, and hopefully draw in more paid contract work to keep the whole dev process ticking along :)
