One day before the feature in New and Noteworthy was about to run out, we decided to take a risk and make it FREE before the weekend.
Why oh why would you do that?
Why oh why would you do that?
The game had been featured before. The last time our ranks and sales dropped to almost zero in a couple of weeks after the feature ran out. [We think this is due to the fact that Into The Blue is a quite "special" game that doesn't appeal to a wide range of users].
This time we didn't want to say goodbye to the upper ranks so easy. At least not without a fight. If the ranks/sales will drop soon anyway, why not getting the app more known and get some more buzz before going down?!
What we didn't know...
...was that after last Thursday we were still in the last slots of New and Noteworthy AND What's Hot. So the timing for going FREE was not that great after all.
The Positive Effects
- Going FREE while being featured last Thursday & Friday brought us around 30k free downloads and a way larger user base than we had before (~2k)
- Our customers who bought the former release could grab the new release for FREE (we want our customers to be happy)
- Media Buzz: lots of twitter messages, news posts, a review and few more covers and youtube videos
- Increased visibility due to reasonably high free app ranks (#58 free games, #6 free strategy games in U.S)
The Negative Effects
- Lost sales (since the game was still featured the next days)
- Ranks dropped quite a bit
- Bad ratings due to users who don't like the game/genre anyway
Lesson learned
it's hard to say what would have happened without going FREE. Most likely though we would have been able to keep our rank a bit longer and have a few more days with higher sales.
I conclude that going FREE either makes sense if the ranks are down anyway or if the app gets enough coverage (100k+) by being featured in one of the free-app programs. The latter would definitely increase the chance to get the ranks up again more easily after switching to paid.
But this is probably something that really depends on the game.
I looked up the ranks of about 10 games lately that were featured before by one of the major free app programs. The result was that only one of these games could increase sales/ranking after the free period. So it's probably more about getting a game known than getting more people to buy it.
Pricing
after reading the great post from Matt about pricing today i wanted to say a few words about our recent price changes as well.
Going on SALE for $0.99 definitely helped with the number of sales but i would estimate that it only increased by 15-20%. Making it $1.99 (the introduction price) would have been the more viable revenue option while being featured.
Going on SALE is possibly a question of going to the top or not. And by now we know that ITB is not a game that appeals to everyone - thus we probably could have stayed with the regular price tag ($2.99) and just enjoyed the ride while it lasts ;-)
In the last days we changed from $0.99 to $1.99 again and whilst we have about 25% less sales the revenue is higher.
Lite Version
we also released a lite version for Into The Blue SD a few days ago. Actually i'm not sure if having a LITE version out there does us any good. But more about this in a future post...
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