Sales Stats of Best Seller iPhone Game

Firemint, the company behind the best selling iPhone game ‘Flight Control‘, has put together a fascinating report outlining the sales trends the company has seen over the last month, from March 24 to April 25. The application has dominated the App Store over the last few weeks, reaching the #1 paid spot in over a dozen countries (though it’s currently fallen to #7 in the US). Since launching on March 6 the application has been downloaded over 700,000 times.

Read the whole story at TechCrunch: ‘Flight Control’ Sales Stats Offer Fascinating Look At Inner Workings Of The iPhone App Store.

How to Market Your iPhone Game

Here are two links to articles discussing on how to market your iPhone game:

• How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games
  Recent months have seen an explosion in developers and publishers using social media to connect with consumers, media and each other.

  Some have done it well. Others are a bit unsure. And a fair few are (metaphorically) doing their best John Travolta steps and wondering why their family and friends are all laughing at them.

  With that in mind, here’s our stab at a five-pronged social media strategy for mobile games companies – how you can use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and your own blog to market your mobile games, and how they should work together (that’s the fifth prong).

• Marketing Your App is More Important than You Think
  What I experienced was the effects of the new multichannel model where the developer has had to become a social media explorer, pushing into every nook and cranny of the social web.  From gamer forums to niche blogs by 12 year old app reviewers (they do exist), developers risk ignoring these communities at their own expense.  With users fatigued by so much new product noise, it is easy for an unmonitored launch to go unnoticed by these users.
  

Meeting Player’s Expectations

Owen Goss, the developer of Dapple, an iPhone puzzle game, analyzes the feedback he got from his users, and discusses some possible solutions on how to improve:

As the designer of the game, it’s hard when people don’t like the game. I realise that not everyone likes every game; that’s obvious. However, Dapple seems to be lacking traction in the two demographics that I thought it would have the best chance in: hardcore puzzle gamers, and casual gamers. So, I want to look at where Dapple isn’t succeeding as well as I thought it would, in the hopes that I can learn from this for my next game.

…

Dapple is a game that plays like a hardcore puzzle game, but that looks like a light casual game. I think one of the problems I’m having with the game is one of perception. Hardcore puzzle game players dismiss it immediately because it looks like a casual game. Casual gamers download the Lite version and when they don’t “get it” immediately, they stop playing out of frustration.

…

I think the problem is that the average person who downloads a game for their iPhone is looking for something they can grok instantly. Dapple is a game that, once you “get” it, can be played in very short bursts and is ideally suited for the iPhone in that regard. However, it can’t be grokked instantly, and I think that’s the biggest design flaw with the game.

Read the full post at Streaming Colour Studios » Blog Archive » Dapple’s Identity Crisis.

Getting rich with indie game development?

Have you ever been interested in concrete sales figures of one of those one-man-show games sold in the app-store? Then you might be interested in Owen Goss’ blog entry. He is giving some figures and a chart showing the sales of his game Dapple over the first month. According to the data, he sold about 131 copies in the first 24 days but, according to his calculations, need to sell 9,150 copies to break even. So, there is still some way to go. But concluding from the following posts, there should be a good chance that Dapple will sell very well.

Some other figures are provided by Spiderweb Software. In his blog posts (Part 1, Part2) Spiderweb Software’s founder gives some insights in the costs for developing his game Geneforge 4 for Mac and PCs as well as the sales figures. It is worth reading, especially if you are thinking about to get into this business yourself.