The Road To 1000 Downloads
Today is a day of celebration, the cumulative downloads of my 3 iOS games broke the one thousand mark arriving at 1005 downloads!
It is exactly 153 days since the release of the first game.
I don’t know how representative this is of an average indie developer’s experience, but it’s certainly very different than the numbers of Rovio or Supercell. Of course, in all honesty, my games are also less refined. Generally speaking I’m happy, as every one of my releases has racked up downloads faster than the previous ones, and more importantly I have received positive feedback from the gamers.
Below I have added the downloads graph so far. All the games have followed a very similar pattern. The downloads shoot up at release, but crash down within a couple days.
Game of Roads was reviewed by 148apps (http://www.148apps.com/reviews/game-roads-solo-review/) which lead to a nice increase in downloads for 2-3 days. Also, making the games free lead to a temporary increase in downloads, this is due to the fact that numerous price monitoring websites notice the drop and people (mostly U.S. gamers) find it this way.
One of the most interesting things for me regarding sales has been following how it’s being downloaded all around the world. Below you can find a map where the darker shades of blue mean more downloads.
I’ve localized 7 of Clubs and Finnish Dog to English and Finnish. Game of Roads is at least currently in the version 2.0 only in English. I could imagine downloads might pick up in other countries with localized content, since all of my top countries except Finland are English-speaking countries at the moment.
There’s not much here that hasn’t mentioned in other articles before, but it really fits right in with most articles I’ve read on the topic:
- Release dates are highly important.
- Price drops give temporary increases in sales.
- Free games get WAY more downloads than paid ones.
- Reviews give temporary increases in sales.