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This is the second in a multi-part blog about our adventures creating "Nameless: the Hackers RPG". You can read our first post for our pre-launch efforts here:
Gamasutra Blog: Breaking In - Nameless the Hackers RPG
When we decided to make our first game "Nameless: the Hackers RPG", we couldn't find much information about how well premium games did on the iOS AppStore. We did however find tons of articles talking about how important it is to be ranked. There is a strong co-relation between revenue and rank.
Below, we are sharing our launch experiences and metrics. We were not featured by iTunes and did not have much money to spend on Marketing. We're hoping our information will be useful to other developers looking to make premium games on iOS.
Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS
iTunes Link: http://nth.box.cat
Reviews & Mentions: http://box-cat.com/
Rank by Downloads Between March 16th (launch) and April 18th
- On March 18th, we reached Rank #5 in Role-Playing for two days
- We attribute this to our 680 sales on 3/17 and 3/18
- We stayed in the top-150 for the entire month
We were breathless when we saw Nameless rising in the charts. We have no viral/social elements in our game design.
We can confirm, by experience, that the AppStore ranks have an exponential affect on our sales. As we lost or gained position, we could dramatically see the sales change as well. You can compare this to our sales graph here:
Copies Downloaded Between March 16th (launch) and April 18th
Rank by Downloads with Categories
- On March 24th, we switched our secondary category from Simulation to Adventure
- We found there is a competitive difference in each category
- Role-playing seems less competitive than Simulation
- Adventure is more competitive than Simulation
After switching categories, we noticed a visible difference between Simulation and Adventure. On 3/25 we were at GDC, but at night we were debating a storm at the "lovely" Motel 6. We started digging into ranking metrics on http://Appannie.com to compare multiple categories.
We found the following details based on the games in rank 20-30 for March 25h, 2013.
- Action & Arcade seem to be the most competitive categories
- Adventure
- Puzzle
- Simulation
- Sports
- Strategy
- Kids & Family seem similar
- Racing
- Board
- Role-Playing
- Card, Casino, Dice, Education, Music, Trivia, Word are the least competitive
We made a very large image to explain what we saw. (Click here)
This gave us a lot of insight into our current performance. We knew our sales were not stellar and reaching rank 5 within an AppStore category felt “too simple” for the number of sales we were getting. Turns out that the competitiveness of Role-Playing is very low. We didn’t know this when we chose to make Nameless.
That being said, we took away that it doesn't take many downloads per day to achieve ranking in these lower categories. Something we will be considering in our next design.
Our Thoughts on Ranking
- We were lucky to have been in a less competitive category; we didn't plan for it.
- At the risk of having everyone flood our RPG category, we think it's important to take the volume of downloads required to stay ranked for your game type. It's something we plan to consider in our next design.
Next Upcoming Topics
We have the following topics we'll be also touching on in the next few days. It takes a while to make these, we'll be posting every few days until we're done.
Stay tuned! Follow us:
@BoxCatLLC
Facebook PageFeel free to ask us anything in the comments. =)
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We do however notice that RPG/JRPG players will usually look up a review or two before they invest a large amount of time. So perhaps they will run into our post in the long-run.
We suspect that if a Causal Freemium game did a post-mortem it would get a significant number of downloads since the barrier is free and it is not a heavy time-investment to try it out. So it could be specific to JRPGs that won't see an immediate boost due to a post-mortem.
We also didn't adhere to the 50MB rule. So those that read the article off wifi couldn't quickly do it.
At the moment the sales won't enable us to do that yet. There were some other business solutions that approached us, but we don't have the resources to push it out. Might be a long time before we move to Android. It's a cost issue.
Its not awesome and not horrible. When we started we knew we were attempting to make a long-term product. So hopefully we'll be similar to other full-fledged RPGs.
We're still trying things without spending high risk amounts. We define over $1,500 as a high risk amount. So that excludes marketing firms or large marketing campaigns.
At the moment:
Website ads: Not yet. Definitely thinking about it. 148Apps, PocketGamer.co.uk, Slide-to-Play, IGN, and TouchArcade are probably our first picks as a Premium Mobile Game.
Mobile Banners: Limited use. Under $50 dollars. We haven't experimented on this enough to say anything. Facebook Mobile Advertising seems hopeful. AdMob, not sure. iAd, not sure also... We may skip this category for our app since we're competing with mostly free apps in the banner inventory.
Chartboost: We're just starting to plan for this. This seems like the most hopeful prospect. We've played around with their technology and it allows us to filter out the [4+] age group. Chartboost only allows premium apps to do Cost-Per-Click, so the fact that we can filter out Apps that target young infants means we'll get fewer accidental click-throughs.
We're trying to not cross-contaminate our data. This post-mortem is also an experiment. So far it's been quite positive.
Our worry with ads is that there are two layers of conversions we need to penetrate. One to click, where we need to pay the advertising company. Then second, they need to decide to buy based on what's presented in the AppStore images, reviews, and price. We'll probably talk about this in greater detail later on. =)
What percentage of your users are leaving reviews? Your game looks great and the reviews are extremely positive. Industry standards seem to indicate ~0-5% of users leave reviews, with 1-2% being most common. With your 500 reviews, at 2% of your user base, at $3.99 ... ~$75K ... I'm missing something.
Yes, we were educated on this industry metric when we went to GDC 2013. A few publishers came to our kiosk and we showed them our reviews. They calculated 1% in-front of us, but we told them our real sales. One of them said "wow! you're very honest!".
On AppAnnie, "All Time" downloads is 3,514 as of May 9th, 2013. We have 504 total rating, mostly positive. So we have a review rate of 14.3% at the moment.
Nearly 3300 of these were at $1.99. We only recently moved it up to $3.99.
This makes us hopeful that there's an under-served niche market of JRPG/WRPG gamers on the AppStore. A large differentiator for us is the fact that we have no-virtual pad. It's purely designed for touch screen.
It may also say something about JRPG/WRPG gamers when looking at our Lite version. We launched our Lite version on March 28th. The full was launched on March 18th (10 day Before). We have a total of 2,843 Lite version downloads while the full is at 3,514 Full version downloads. On average, we see MORE unique users buying the full-version than there are unique users trying the lite version.
Hoping for long-term sales.