Hey, for those of you developing for the App Store, or thinking about developing, I thought I'd share my story, how I've gone from not even owning a Mac, nor knowing any Objective-C, but just having an idea, to a ready game that is now earning me a solid income.
The games I've developed are iAssociate and Associate This, both word association games, with iAssociate being a version that is selling for $1.99 and Associate This being a free version that includes a small set of the levels found in iAssociate.
I submitted my first version of these word association games back in April this year, and since then I've gone from getting just a few sales per day to getting hundreds of sales per day, in fact far surpassing my salary from my day job.
If you are interested in reading the full story behind this then please continue reading below (warning, this is a long post)
Fredrik Wahrman (Developer of iAssociate and Associate This)
If you want to check out the games in iTunes you can find them from the following links:
iAssociate in iTunes
Associate This in iTunes
The story begins
When I initially got into developing games for the iPhone one of the things that attracted me to the platform was reading about success stories such as Trism and iShoot. After reading about them it seemed as if it would be possible for pretty much anyone to just launch a game and wait for the money to come in.
That was then.
Now, about seven months after launching my first game, Mercury Mind, on the App Store I must say I think a little bit differently about the situation. When I launched my first game I think I was a little bit too optimistic about what kind of sales to expect, I was thinking that Id real fast earn back the money I had invested in getting into iPhone development. The investments I had made to get started were :
So, when I finally got Mercury Mind approved and marked as Ready for Sale I was pretty much hoping to earn this sum back in almost no time.
First day sales
After the first day had passed I was anxiously waiting for my first sales report to come in. I was pretty much constantly refreshing the reports page, hoping to see the report there. When it finally appeared I almost didnt dare take a peak, I knew that Id get a lot of sales, it was just a matter of how many, 200 ? 500 ? 1000 ?
Imagine my surprise when I finally took a look at it and saw that my sales were as high as 9! Yes, thats right, 9 sales! (At $2.99 each) What makes it even worse is that out of those 9 sales a couple were to friends of mine, so basically I had earned almost nothing on my own. I obviously immediately panicked, thinking that the only solution to this was to drop the price to $0.99 as everyone else was, as surely then the sales would start to come in.
And sure enough, the next day when I got the report my sales had increased. To 19, so nothing much. After that the sales dropped at a steady pace, so that on the 8th day they were 0, followed then by 1-2 sales per day. After the first couple of weeks my total sales were 64, earning me around 45 euros ($60)
Lite version
After those two weeks my Lite version was finally approved and marked as Ready for Sale. I was once again expecting to follow in the footsteps of iShoot, after all, that story goes that once the Lite version of iShoot was released the game skyrocketed to the Top 100 lists and the rest is history.
For me it didnt go quite that well. Sure, the first day downloads were better than the sales I got with the full version, they were just above 400. But they were still nowhere near what I was hoping for. But, being the ever optimist I was sure that theyd start climbing upwards immediately, so no worries really. What followed was then a day with around 300 downloads, then 200, then 150, then 100 and after that back to under 100, settling down at about 40 downloads for a long time.
Lite conversion rates
Despite really low sales, the addition of the Lite version at least showed me that the idea of my game, word associations, was good. I got pretty good conversion rates of people switching from the lite version to the full version. Depending on the country those varied quite a lot, but in the major, english speaking, markets I managed to get a conversion rate of around 15%, even a bit more, meaning that now I was at least earning a few bucks every day.
Enter iAssociate
After looking at those kind of stats for a while I decided it was time for a change. I decided that Id try to re-brand my game to something a bit more easy to understand and remember, something that would be easier to sell basically. Thats when iAssociate was born. I felt that with the name iAssociate I had a much better chance in succeeding, the name both uses the popular i prefix, as well as describing exactly what the game was about. So, my hopes were again really high when the release of it was nearing.
Results from name change
When the first day sales for iAssociate were due I was once again really nervous to see what theyd be. This time I was sure that Id make a much bigger impact, after all, the name was now perfect so nothing could be in my way. When the stats then finally came, I saw that yes, I had indeed managed to sell more, it was nevertheless quite depressing to see that it was just 13 sales. And even though the sales didnt drop as fast to 0 as before, they still dropped to 0 after just 2 weeks, just before I got the lite version of iAssociate out.
The results I then got off the lite version were actually worse than with Mercury Mind. The downloads for that version dropped down to just around 20 after only two weeks, meaning that I was still only managing to sell a few copies every day.
2 1/2 months == 500 euros ($750)
After having had my games out for about two and a half months I had barely managed to scrape together 500 euros, and at the rate I was selling games I was now earning around 5 euros ($7.50) per day, meaning that with this rate itd take over half a year until I wouldve recovered the money I spent to just get started.
Reviews, forums and ads
Even though the sales werent really as good as I had expected one thing I was still happy about was the fact that of my customers actually quite a few emailed me back, letting me know that they really liked the game. Some even went as far as stating that it was the best game they had every played on the iPhone. Anyway, all this feedback kept me encouraged to try to make something of my game, as I knew that with the right kind of publicity it might still make it.
The first try for publicity was to try to get some reviews out. I wrote a small pitch that I tried sending out to a lot of review sites, thinking that if they only tried the game then surely theyd write a review about it, as after all, even games that had no content, or were just copies of other games, got reviewed.
This actually turned out to be a LOT harder than I had thought. Of the emails I sent, I actually only managed to get a response from a couple of them, one was PocketGamer.co.uk, who said that they were too busy to review it, and the other was Appletell.com, who actually did a review of it (you can find it from here: iPhone Word Game Round Up at Appletell.com)
So, as I wasnt getting any reviews out in a hurry, the other option for me was to try to post info about my game to various iPhone and gaming forums. This was actually fairly straightforward, find a forum, create a profile, add a post with general info about my games, repeat. I do think this helped boost my downloads a bit as this way I managed to get the word out about the free version of my game, which people then could try on their own to see if theyd want to purchase the full version. Forums such as MacRumors.com and TouchArcade.com seemed to work farily well, at least my posts got a decent amount of views there.
The last thing I tried for publicity was spending money on ads. The first ad I bought was a month long ad at an iPhone game review site. I was trying to promote the free version of my game, and based on the sites daily visitor stats it seemed like a good idea. But, after getting the ad live I never saw any kind of increase in my downloads, not even a twitch. So basically that was a wasted effort, not only didnt I get any increase in my downloads, neither did I ever get the any weekly reports on how my ad was doing, so I actually dont have any data on this. (And I didnt bother to ask for it afterwards either as obviously it wasnt working). Besides the ad I also purchased a review for my game, and while I think the review itself was pretty good I here also didnt notice any increase in sales. (And based on the amount of times the review was viewed it seems as if the review sites promised number of views were greatly exaggerated)
Something more needed
While these efforst had produced a small increase in my daily downloads there was still no great reason to celebrate. I barely managed to earn a bit over 10 euros ($15) per day, so, while a nice extra income to get, it wasnt still as much as I had hoped for. So, it was once again time to work on a new strategy.
To get to my new strategy Ill briefly go into how the App Store worked at that time. Back then it was such that whenever you made an update to your game it would appear on the Whats New list, thus producing a larger amount of downloads for a few days while staying high on that list, before again dropping back to normal. These apps were sorted in such a way that every App that was updated on the same day was sorted alphabetically, meaning that my game, iAssociate, appeared in the middle of the list as it starts with an i. This meant that when I had an updated out I sometimes didnt even make it to the first page of the Whats New list, which meant that I got less downloads just because of the name of my App.
So, because of this I decided to re-brand the free version of iAssociate and name it Associate This.
Entry of Associate This
When the first day downloads of Associate This came in I was for the first time pleasantly surprised. It actually managed to get around 1000 downloads the first day. After that the downloads then slowly dropped down to around 300 per day during the following week and a half, a really slow pace compared to my previous efforts. Thanks to this it now seemed as if I finally had a game that would keep generating income at a steady pace (I was now earning around 50 euros ($75) per day). For the first time in the 4 months that I had had my games out there I was really pleased with the way things were going, patience had paid off.
Back down again
After a couple of steady weeks the downloads for Associate This then dropped for a few days in a row, dropping as low as just under 150. I was already thinking that this was it, now its again gonna drop down to close to 0. Even when it the next day got back up to 200 I still didnt feel to good about it, but as it was to be that climb then actually continued for the next few weeks, so that I eventually got up to around 500 downloads per day. The reason behind this is the App Store ranking system.
App Store Rankings
The biggest deciding factor of how many downloads your game gets is how its ranked in the App Store. Visibility in the App Store is limited to searching for a specific game or browsing through a list of all the games in certain categories. Besides these there are various list of the most popular games. There is for instance a Whats Hot list, a Staff Favourites list as well as Top 100 list in all the different categories, such as Games, Entertainment, Action Games, Word games, etc. Being on any of these lists means that you get additional exposure, which means that there is a much better chance that someone notices your app.
When it comes to the sudden increase in Associate This downloads that can pretty much be credited to the fact that I managed to get on these Top 100 lists. Every game can have two categories that it belongs to, for Associate This and iAssociate these are Word and Puzzle. In the App Store there is currently over 1000 Word games as well as somewhere around 7000 Puzzle games, so obviously getting into the Top 100 list for Word games is much easier than with Puzzle games, but at the same time being at the Top 100 list in the Word games category doesnt translate to nearly as many downloads as being there in the Top 100 Puzzle games list.
So, the reason behind my improving downloads was the fact that I had just entered the Top 100 Puzzle games list. I had always been in the Top 100 Word games list and now I had finally managed to climb into the Top 100 Puzzle games list.
Positive Spiral
Once Associate This started to get more downloads this then it started a positive trend. Since Apple calculates the rankings somehow magically based on the last X days it means that whenever I get new downloads from today it at the same time replaces the downloads from X days ago when calculating the rankings. Which means that as long as my downloads are rising then the days I lose when calculating the rankings have much lower downloads, which means that my average is getting higher all the time. That way I then again rise in the rankings, which yet again will give me more downloads, resulting in a positive, self feeding, spiral.
And besides this working for Associate This, it also works for iAssociate. Thanks to the conversion rate of about 15-20% the sales of iAssociate slowly started to climb, so that iAssociate also managed to enter the Top 100 Puzzle games list from where it also could start a climb upwards. That is pretty much the situation today, both games are continuing their climb in the rankings, while I am putting as much effort into promoting them as possible.
Current Rankings
iAssociate : 26th among US Puzzle games, 7th among US Word games
Associate This: 26th among US Puzzle games, 8th among US Word games
So far Ive only once been ranked at the number 1 spot, it was a couple of days ago when I managed to get into that spot in the Word category in the Finnish App Store. Hopefully more rankings like that would follow, I do have a couple of #2 and #3 rankings so who knows
At the end of the Rainbow
Right now I must say that Im really happy about how both iAssociate and Associate This are performing in the App Store. The income from iAssociate is now at a level that far exceeds my salary from my normal day job, even though the time I spend with this hobby is much less (well, its less due to the fact that I have to spend 8 hours a day at the office).
My daily downloads are now at a level that is almost as much as what they were in total during the first 3 months, and so far I still havent seen them trending down so hopefully I will still be able to take them to another level.
Summary
Considering that I had no skills with iPhone development or Objective-C programming when I started with this project I must say that the results are currently far above what I expected. I had initially seen this as a way of getting a small steady income every month, nothing more than a supplement to what I was already earning from my day job. What I instead now have achieved is an income that far exceeds that, and who knows, if everything goes my way I might still even be able to increase it further.
So all in all, after a lot of long days, trying to push this game out to the general knowledge of the masses I must say that it has totally been worth it. Not only because of the fact that my sales are high right now, what is actually just as important to me is the fact that I feel proud of iAssociate. I feel that Ive created a game that is actually really enjoyable, a game that almost anyone can enjoy.Ive heard back from people everywhere between 12 and 76 years old, boys and girls, husbands and wives, and everyone seems to be having a good time playing iAssociate.
So, a big thanks to all of you out there who have purchased or downloaded my games! And especially to those of you who have sent me feedback, I really do appreciate any feedback I can get, good or bad, as I will try my best to keep improving this game. So keep the feedback coming, dont hesitate in contacting me if you have anything that youd want to suggest or ask!
Fredrik Wahrman
The games I've developed are iAssociate and Associate This, both word association games, with iAssociate being a version that is selling for $1.99 and Associate This being a free version that includes a small set of the levels found in iAssociate.
I submitted my first version of these word association games back in April this year, and since then I've gone from getting just a few sales per day to getting hundreds of sales per day, in fact far surpassing my salary from my day job.
If you are interested in reading the full story behind this then please continue reading below (warning, this is a long post)
Fredrik Wahrman (Developer of iAssociate and Associate This)
If you want to check out the games in iTunes you can find them from the following links:
iAssociate in iTunes
Associate This in iTunes
The story begins
When I initially got into developing games for the iPhone one of the things that attracted me to the platform was reading about success stories such as Trism and iShoot. After reading about them it seemed as if it would be possible for pretty much anyone to just launch a game and wait for the money to come in.
That was then.
Now, about seven months after launching my first game, Mercury Mind, on the App Store I must say I think a little bit differently about the situation. When I launched my first game I think I was a little bit too optimistic about what kind of sales to expect, I was thinking that Id real fast earn back the money I had invested in getting into iPhone development. The investments I had made to get started were :
- Bought a Mac (Cost me 579 euros)
- Bought an iPod Touch (Cost me 289 euros)
- Bought a couple of iPhone development books (Cost around 60 euros)
- Bought the iPhone developer license (Cost me 79 euros)
So, when I finally got Mercury Mind approved and marked as Ready for Sale I was pretty much hoping to earn this sum back in almost no time.
First day sales
After the first day had passed I was anxiously waiting for my first sales report to come in. I was pretty much constantly refreshing the reports page, hoping to see the report there. When it finally appeared I almost didnt dare take a peak, I knew that Id get a lot of sales, it was just a matter of how many, 200 ? 500 ? 1000 ?
Imagine my surprise when I finally took a look at it and saw that my sales were as high as 9! Yes, thats right, 9 sales! (At $2.99 each) What makes it even worse is that out of those 9 sales a couple were to friends of mine, so basically I had earned almost nothing on my own. I obviously immediately panicked, thinking that the only solution to this was to drop the price to $0.99 as everyone else was, as surely then the sales would start to come in.
And sure enough, the next day when I got the report my sales had increased. To 19, so nothing much. After that the sales dropped at a steady pace, so that on the 8th day they were 0, followed then by 1-2 sales per day. After the first couple of weeks my total sales were 64, earning me around 45 euros ($60)
Lite version
After those two weeks my Lite version was finally approved and marked as Ready for Sale. I was once again expecting to follow in the footsteps of iShoot, after all, that story goes that once the Lite version of iShoot was released the game skyrocketed to the Top 100 lists and the rest is history.
For me it didnt go quite that well. Sure, the first day downloads were better than the sales I got with the full version, they were just above 400. But they were still nowhere near what I was hoping for. But, being the ever optimist I was sure that theyd start climbing upwards immediately, so no worries really. What followed was then a day with around 300 downloads, then 200, then 150, then 100 and after that back to under 100, settling down at about 40 downloads for a long time.
Lite conversion rates
Despite really low sales, the addition of the Lite version at least showed me that the idea of my game, word associations, was good. I got pretty good conversion rates of people switching from the lite version to the full version. Depending on the country those varied quite a lot, but in the major, english speaking, markets I managed to get a conversion rate of around 15%, even a bit more, meaning that now I was at least earning a few bucks every day.
Enter iAssociate
After looking at those kind of stats for a while I decided it was time for a change. I decided that Id try to re-brand my game to something a bit more easy to understand and remember, something that would be easier to sell basically. Thats when iAssociate was born. I felt that with the name iAssociate I had a much better chance in succeeding, the name both uses the popular i prefix, as well as describing exactly what the game was about. So, my hopes were again really high when the release of it was nearing.
Results from name change
When the first day sales for iAssociate were due I was once again really nervous to see what theyd be. This time I was sure that Id make a much bigger impact, after all, the name was now perfect so nothing could be in my way. When the stats then finally came, I saw that yes, I had indeed managed to sell more, it was nevertheless quite depressing to see that it was just 13 sales. And even though the sales didnt drop as fast to 0 as before, they still dropped to 0 after just 2 weeks, just before I got the lite version of iAssociate out.
The results I then got off the lite version were actually worse than with Mercury Mind. The downloads for that version dropped down to just around 20 after only two weeks, meaning that I was still only managing to sell a few copies every day.
2 1/2 months == 500 euros ($750)
After having had my games out for about two and a half months I had barely managed to scrape together 500 euros, and at the rate I was selling games I was now earning around 5 euros ($7.50) per day, meaning that with this rate itd take over half a year until I wouldve recovered the money I spent to just get started.
Reviews, forums and ads
Even though the sales werent really as good as I had expected one thing I was still happy about was the fact that of my customers actually quite a few emailed me back, letting me know that they really liked the game. Some even went as far as stating that it was the best game they had every played on the iPhone. Anyway, all this feedback kept me encouraged to try to make something of my game, as I knew that with the right kind of publicity it might still make it.
The first try for publicity was to try to get some reviews out. I wrote a small pitch that I tried sending out to a lot of review sites, thinking that if they only tried the game then surely theyd write a review about it, as after all, even games that had no content, or were just copies of other games, got reviewed.
This actually turned out to be a LOT harder than I had thought. Of the emails I sent, I actually only managed to get a response from a couple of them, one was PocketGamer.co.uk, who said that they were too busy to review it, and the other was Appletell.com, who actually did a review of it (you can find it from here: iPhone Word Game Round Up at Appletell.com)
So, as I wasnt getting any reviews out in a hurry, the other option for me was to try to post info about my game to various iPhone and gaming forums. This was actually fairly straightforward, find a forum, create a profile, add a post with general info about my games, repeat. I do think this helped boost my downloads a bit as this way I managed to get the word out about the free version of my game, which people then could try on their own to see if theyd want to purchase the full version. Forums such as MacRumors.com and TouchArcade.com seemed to work farily well, at least my posts got a decent amount of views there.
The last thing I tried for publicity was spending money on ads. The first ad I bought was a month long ad at an iPhone game review site. I was trying to promote the free version of my game, and based on the sites daily visitor stats it seemed like a good idea. But, after getting the ad live I never saw any kind of increase in my downloads, not even a twitch. So basically that was a wasted effort, not only didnt I get any increase in my downloads, neither did I ever get the any weekly reports on how my ad was doing, so I actually dont have any data on this. (And I didnt bother to ask for it afterwards either as obviously it wasnt working). Besides the ad I also purchased a review for my game, and while I think the review itself was pretty good I here also didnt notice any increase in sales. (And based on the amount of times the review was viewed it seems as if the review sites promised number of views were greatly exaggerated)
Something more needed
While these efforst had produced a small increase in my daily downloads there was still no great reason to celebrate. I barely managed to earn a bit over 10 euros ($15) per day, so, while a nice extra income to get, it wasnt still as much as I had hoped for. So, it was once again time to work on a new strategy.
To get to my new strategy Ill briefly go into how the App Store worked at that time. Back then it was such that whenever you made an update to your game it would appear on the Whats New list, thus producing a larger amount of downloads for a few days while staying high on that list, before again dropping back to normal. These apps were sorted in such a way that every App that was updated on the same day was sorted alphabetically, meaning that my game, iAssociate, appeared in the middle of the list as it starts with an i. This meant that when I had an updated out I sometimes didnt even make it to the first page of the Whats New list, which meant that I got less downloads just because of the name of my App.
So, because of this I decided to re-brand the free version of iAssociate and name it Associate This.
Entry of Associate This
When the first day downloads of Associate This came in I was for the first time pleasantly surprised. It actually managed to get around 1000 downloads the first day. After that the downloads then slowly dropped down to around 300 per day during the following week and a half, a really slow pace compared to my previous efforts. Thanks to this it now seemed as if I finally had a game that would keep generating income at a steady pace (I was now earning around 50 euros ($75) per day). For the first time in the 4 months that I had had my games out there I was really pleased with the way things were going, patience had paid off.
Back down again
After a couple of steady weeks the downloads for Associate This then dropped for a few days in a row, dropping as low as just under 150. I was already thinking that this was it, now its again gonna drop down to close to 0. Even when it the next day got back up to 200 I still didnt feel to good about it, but as it was to be that climb then actually continued for the next few weeks, so that I eventually got up to around 500 downloads per day. The reason behind this is the App Store ranking system.
App Store Rankings
The biggest deciding factor of how many downloads your game gets is how its ranked in the App Store. Visibility in the App Store is limited to searching for a specific game or browsing through a list of all the games in certain categories. Besides these there are various list of the most popular games. There is for instance a Whats Hot list, a Staff Favourites list as well as Top 100 list in all the different categories, such as Games, Entertainment, Action Games, Word games, etc. Being on any of these lists means that you get additional exposure, which means that there is a much better chance that someone notices your app.
When it comes to the sudden increase in Associate This downloads that can pretty much be credited to the fact that I managed to get on these Top 100 lists. Every game can have two categories that it belongs to, for Associate This and iAssociate these are Word and Puzzle. In the App Store there is currently over 1000 Word games as well as somewhere around 7000 Puzzle games, so obviously getting into the Top 100 list for Word games is much easier than with Puzzle games, but at the same time being at the Top 100 list in the Word games category doesnt translate to nearly as many downloads as being there in the Top 100 Puzzle games list.
So, the reason behind my improving downloads was the fact that I had just entered the Top 100 Puzzle games list. I had always been in the Top 100 Word games list and now I had finally managed to climb into the Top 100 Puzzle games list.
Positive Spiral
Once Associate This started to get more downloads this then it started a positive trend. Since Apple calculates the rankings somehow magically based on the last X days it means that whenever I get new downloads from today it at the same time replaces the downloads from X days ago when calculating the rankings. Which means that as long as my downloads are rising then the days I lose when calculating the rankings have much lower downloads, which means that my average is getting higher all the time. That way I then again rise in the rankings, which yet again will give me more downloads, resulting in a positive, self feeding, spiral.
And besides this working for Associate This, it also works for iAssociate. Thanks to the conversion rate of about 15-20% the sales of iAssociate slowly started to climb, so that iAssociate also managed to enter the Top 100 Puzzle games list from where it also could start a climb upwards. That is pretty much the situation today, both games are continuing their climb in the rankings, while I am putting as much effort into promoting them as possible.
Current Rankings
iAssociate : 26th among US Puzzle games, 7th among US Word games
Associate This: 26th among US Puzzle games, 8th among US Word games
So far Ive only once been ranked at the number 1 spot, it was a couple of days ago when I managed to get into that spot in the Word category in the Finnish App Store. Hopefully more rankings like that would follow, I do have a couple of #2 and #3 rankings so who knows
At the end of the Rainbow
Right now I must say that Im really happy about how both iAssociate and Associate This are performing in the App Store. The income from iAssociate is now at a level that far exceeds my salary from my normal day job, even though the time I spend with this hobby is much less (well, its less due to the fact that I have to spend 8 hours a day at the office).
My daily downloads are now at a level that is almost as much as what they were in total during the first 3 months, and so far I still havent seen them trending down so hopefully I will still be able to take them to another level.
Summary
Considering that I had no skills with iPhone development or Objective-C programming when I started with this project I must say that the results are currently far above what I expected. I had initially seen this as a way of getting a small steady income every month, nothing more than a supplement to what I was already earning from my day job. What I instead now have achieved is an income that far exceeds that, and who knows, if everything goes my way I might still even be able to increase it further.
So all in all, after a lot of long days, trying to push this game out to the general knowledge of the masses I must say that it has totally been worth it. Not only because of the fact that my sales are high right now, what is actually just as important to me is the fact that I feel proud of iAssociate. I feel that Ive created a game that is actually really enjoyable, a game that almost anyone can enjoy.Ive heard back from people everywhere between 12 and 76 years old, boys and girls, husbands and wives, and everyone seems to be having a good time playing iAssociate.
So, a big thanks to all of you out there who have purchased or downloaded my games! And especially to those of you who have sent me feedback, I really do appreciate any feedback I can get, good or bad, as I will try my best to keep improving this game. So keep the feedback coming, dont hesitate in contacting me if you have anything that youd want to suggest or ask!
Fredrik Wahrman