Last night, I gave a presentation at the Stockholm Cocoaheads meeting entitled “I Can’t Believe I’m Not a Millionaire”about my experiences with Scribattle and Scribattle Lite on the App Store. Scribattle Lite had a short but intense “hit” period when it reached the #1 or #2 spot in most countries, and has now been downloaded over 1.5 million times! See more in the slideshow.
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I’ve been collecting data for both Scribattle purchases and Scribattle Lite downloads, and have some results to share. Like most other reports of this nature that I’ve seen, I’m going to be coy and not show any precise numbers, but rather some graphs that show the relative growth for these products. These charts begin on February 10 (the day Scribattle first appeared on the App Store) and March 1. Blue dots are Scribattle, green dots are Scribattle Lite. Scribattle Lite was only available during the last five days of this period.
The first chart shows a nice rising slope for Scribattle Lite, and what seems to be a complete flatline for Scribattle. This is due to the fact that the free downloads completely dwarf the paid downloads, so that none of the changes in paid downloads equate to even a single pixel on this scale.
The second chart reveals the true growth in Scribattle sales by scaling them up to match the Scribattle Lite downloads. Basically, if you plotted Scribattle sales by themselves, and then overlaid that on top of a plot of Scribattle Lite downloads by themselves, this is what you would see.
Finally, for the sake of showing both sets of numbers relative to each other, while still allowing some viewing of the smaller values in the Scribattle sales, here are is a logarithmic view of the same data shown in the first chart. The nice straight rising lines toward the end, especially for Scribattle Lite, show periods of exponential growth. What you’re seeing is basically a doubling of the number of Scribattle Lite downloads each of the last 4 days, and nearly the same kind of increase for Scribattle sales!
I’ve only had my Lite version on the App Store for 5 days, but even at this early stage I feel safe in saying that in my case, releasing a Lite version has been a huge win for sales of the full version. Not an epic win (yet), but still a huge win.
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Since Scribattle never got any “new releases” exposure on the App Store (see previous entry), I decided to go ahead an put out a free “Lite” version. Still a highly playable game, but with a few key features stripped out, and including a few strategically placed “Buy Scribattle” buttons. Hopefully this will be downloaded far and wide, and lead to some sales of the original! At some point I will post some sales data.
Read on →A while ago I posted five tips for prospective iPhone developers, and with a little more experience under my belt I’ve got one more:
When I wrote tip 5, it had been nine days since my app was approved for sale, but it wasn’t in the App Store due to Apple’s unknown delays in finalizing my sales contract. I ended up waiting another 19 days, a total of 4 weeks after I got the “your app is approved for sale” message, until the app appeared in the App Store!
OK, a four week wait isn’t the end of the world, but in these days where 5000 new apps appear in the App Store each month, every day counts. And worst of all, according to the App Store, the “release date” is not the day my app appeared in the App Store, but the day, 4 weeks earlier, that it was “approved for sale”! So, on my app’s first day in the App Store, if you drilled down into Games/Action and sorted by Release Date, you wouldn’t see Scribattle on the first page. If you clicked the little arrow to go to the next page, you still wouldn’t see it. In fact, you’d have to click that little arrow fifteen times to get to Scribattle. Which means, effectively, that no one will see Scribattle just by browsing around the App Store. I had one sure chance of exposure near the top of a category, and lost it due to the workings of the App Store.
Incidentally, I emailed Apple to complain about this, and they sent me a courteous reply, telling me that it “is operating as expected”, i.e. it’s not a bug, it’s a feature. Great feature, Apple!
So finally, the tip: When you submit your very first app, before your contracts are finalized, don’t set the release date to “today”. Put it a month or two out into the future. Then, after your app is approved and your sales contract is finalized, you can go back into iTunes Connect, change the release date to the current date, and have your first app actually show up as a new app in the App Store. I’m telling you this now, gentle reader, because I wish someone would have told me this months ago.
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At long last, Scribattle is available! iPhone and iPod Touch users can now get it from the App Store, load it up, and start blasting away at Scri and Flingers and Pent (oh my!)
It’s been quite a journey getting this game to market. I’ve had very few programming challenges, but a number of small delays due to various technical details involved to package and “sign” the app during development, test, and distribution, and a few large delays related to how Apple implements their developer program and handles their contracts. There’s a lot of extra hassle compared to releasing desktop software, but a number of friends and colleagues assure me that the system Apple has put in place is still miles ahead of the process for most other embedded and mobile platforms, so hey. I’m not complaining (very much).
Now then, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s time to go get yourself some Scribattle. OK?
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