How many sales do you make per day?

Newton's Dice 3D had 3600 sales in it's first month:

2900 in europe (90% of it in germany)
592 in the USA
54 Worldwide
25 in UK
16 in Canada (was also featured there for 10 days!)
8 in Japan
3 in Australia

I pray for getting featured in the rest of europe now....

 

My Game Lucky Cats 3D has ridiculous low sales. Its in the store now since almost 2 weeks, and i sold something like 20 copies.

I did not expect much, as this is "only" a hobby / learning project and i did not expect buyers to be in the thousands – but with these sales i can´t even get the costs for the translators in.

That´s somewhat disappointing, because to my opinion the game - for what it is - is quite nice and unique.

So, you better stay away from boardgames and stick with cars, motorcycles, planes and last but not least ZOMBIES ;-)

See it here if you like:
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=369876438&mt=8

 

Remember the Appstore is just a platform to release your games. It's up to you to do the hardwork to get your game noticed.

Freebie interest stopped shortly after the Appstore's launch and the eventual flooding of apps. Still there are people who had some success here, ask them or follow their blogs.

It's all about increasing your chances, sure you can be lucky and get picked by Apple, but if you don't do anything and just let your app rot there, you'll get precisely what you're supposed to.

 

And therein lies the rub.

In a previous life I created a full fledge business application (yes, full word with all those letters) for the Mac. Naturally, Mac business software isn't exactly the hot and hip sector you might think it is, so getting noticed by the right people was crucial and could be difficult. Marketing and PR was very important.

There's a difference though; my software went for $129 to a vertical market. For every couple hundred dollars spent in various marketing efforts, I could count on receiving back a certain number of sales. The cost factored out came out to be something like $15-20 of every sale went towards marketing. Absolutely acceptable. I found where my market "hung out" and spent my time and money there to let them know I existed. Generally speaking, it worked.

When you're selling a 99¢ game or app on the App Store, one with a unknown demographic that is scattered all over the map (literally and figuratively), the equation is very different. Money spent on marketing and PR has to overcome the significant hurdle of your low unit price, which means you have to get a huge amount of conversion purchases on that marketing effort, something I think is relatively unrealistic.

So for the app store marketing, this leaves you with:
(With an assumption that you have a product that reaches some reasonably high baseline of quality
1: If you're doing a game, you can hope like hell that TouchArcade profiles you.

2: If you're doing a non-game app. You're essentially screwed trying to easily find and speak to your target market, especially if it's not a true vertical like a business app or something like that. There are certain exceptions (Twitter, other social media, etc.) but on the whole and considering the volume of apps out there, it's a very difficult proposition.

3: Lightning strikes and you get really lucky in some other manner (Apple decides to stick you in a New and Notable, Staff Favorites, etc. Luck of the draw momentum raises your ranking enough to be seen by more people (see most of the top apps in the Entertainment area), etc.)

Getting mentioned in blogs, Techcrunch (if you've built the latest privacy-invader app) or some other largely-read venue is a bit of a crap shoot; Send your PR, talk to who you can, and hope for the best. Even still it's not something I would feel comfortable as a means of reliable PR / marketing. Get on the blog, make your money for that day or two, and then back into obscurity you go.

Finally you have the option of "poor-mans" marketing; Setup a blog, start writing, make yourself more known in a "viral" fashion, etc. That may work too, but keep in mind that just because you're doing it yourself doesn't mean you're not spending money on it. It's just that most people inherently value their own time less then it should be valued.

Anecdote:
A friend of mine made a photography app for the iPad. He released it on iPad launch for free amongst several others that were not free. Being free, he received thousands of downloads until he ended up in the Staff Favorites section. He started charging for it, and now he's making $300/day or so because he's still in the Staff Favorites location where he's fairly highly visible.

His actions were not the premeditated actions of a App store super-genius, rather one of happenstance (his paper work hadn't been setup correctly for pay apps, which is why it took him so long to charge for his app.)

Still, he was able to take advantage of this situation that he just -so- happened to be in because of "luck" (he filled in his original docs incorrectly for pay apps.) If he had filled in everything right, started charging for his app like he planned on doing from the start, I have no doubt (and neither does he) that his current scenario would be very different. He would not have ended up in Staff Favorites, and he wouldn't be looking at a $10-15k month.

His product is good, but it's not great, and it's not bad; But his success is not one that is based entirely on his product capabilities and quality, his marketing skills or any other combination of "controllable" actions. His financial success now hinges almost entirely on how long he'll stay in Staff Favorites. Indeed, every time he moves down a page in the staff favorites he sees sales fall. When he's eventually kicked off that list his sales will no doubt go down as well. Essentially it's a roll of the dice on how long he'll still have this new source of income.

What does this all boil down to? For me as a small nobody developer with no blogs regularly covering me, the "least risk" solutions are relatively clear cut.
1: Get a high-visibility publisher that can get you noticed in more places then you can alone. Could be hard to do and it'll require significant investment on your end in developing something that a publisher would want to promote in the first place. Investment that still may not pay off or that can be made to pay off easily, if at all.
2: Roll the dice and hope for the best.
3: Create a higher volume of smaller apps that increase your chances of number 2 happening and/or increasing your overall financial intake via quantity over quality.

 

I can make your sells go up.

 

I average 0 sales a day. I think total I've sold 23.

 

my free app has 15,000,000 total downloads

 

I've changed Shaolin Training price for free. It will be 0.00 June 22 and June 23.
Let's see if the game gets some publicity this way.
See ya!

 

quys, can you tell me what kingd of software makes such charts? thanks

 

I'm using http://www.appannie.com/

 

MajikRank - it's real time, AppAnnie checks your App only once a day with MajikRank you can set the intervall to whatever you like - just keep it running in Background and it will create you such stats later. (the data will be saved on your mac). The other App I use for itunes connect data is AppViz.

I've got about 4500 sales so far since may - still not reached the break even point. I already had 2 days with zero sales the last 2 weeks

 

Good news!





As you can see, in one day for free Shaolin Training is above Resident Evil 4, Star Wars and Gangstar.

Hope this help the selling! =)

 

Shaolin Training being in Touch Arcade front page is probably a good sign =)
http://toucharcade.com/

"It's an incredibly simple game, with no such frills as online leaderboards (local only), social network integration, or fancy special moves beyond the one your monk already has. But at the same time that's really what we enjoyed about the title, it's just you against the levels, and it's a real test of your skill. Certainly recommended at it's original 99¢ price, Shaolin Training is a must try while free until June 24th."

Have fun!
Fernando R.

 

So my app was averaging something like 1 sale a day, nearly since I launched it into the Entertainment category (it's a 3D modeler app, based off of a Lego-type system of interlocking blocks and pieces.) So I decided to try an experiment.

My first thought about what happened with my app not having any pop was that it got lost in the shuffle of the Entertainment area. Right off the bat, in Entertainment my app got shoveled under by a zillion other apps; mostly little low-quality/functionality spam apps at that. I had screen time of about 10 minutes. Secondly, I figured the name (BrixBuilder) probably wasn't "SEO" enough.

Thirdly, my original price ($4.99) probably made sure the nails were in the coffin after 1 and 2 above happened.

So I decided to de-publish my app, and re-publish with a different name in a different category.

Turns out, and with perhaps no small amount of luck I would presume, that that made a big difference.

My first go-round with my app ended up in the gutter in about a day. I never even had a good chart showing.

This second round has been a vastly different experience. I renamed the app to "3D Builder Brix", lowered the price to 99¢ and put it into the Productivity category (where quite a few other 3D-type apps are.) I'm now flirting with the top 100 in the US (got up to 92), and am in the New and Notable section, to boot.

Being in (or close) to the top 100 in productivity doesn't exactly bring in much coin (only about 40-50 sales a day so far) but it's far, far, far better then my first experience.

So what can you take away from this little experiment? Name, price and categorization matter... a lot! That, and a fair amount of luck and timing, if you ask me. I would say this better ranking has almost more to do with my app's "screen time" on the front page of new releases then anything else, and that's all just luck of the draw.

BTW, app is now http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/3d-builder-brix/id378070263?mt=8

 

It's wonderful that you shared this with us!
This game is a great idea =)

 

Sales for our first iPad game „1on1 Action Hockey HD“ after 3 days. Released worldwide last Friday (8/6/2010).

the good:
The game jumped into the top75 or top100 in the subcategories Action/Arcade in some countries.
BE 52, CH 62. MX 65, DE 97. AU 122, GB 134.

the bad:
it only needed 1 sale to reach the chart positions! And there are no subcategories visible on the ipad, so it's kind of useless.


We sold 3 on Friday, 5 on Saturday and 2 on Sunday.
28 promo codes were used, we got two reviews in the us store, 4 stars each.

We expected not much, but I had hoped for 10 sales worldwide on the first day as long as the game is in the news. Maybe next time...

game website:
http://www.intulo.com/1on1ActionHockey.html

 

Wow. Thank you all for the info.

I'll throw some of my experiences in.
We're looking at Unity now as a development tool due to the cross platform capability. I've held off for the last 4 months because of the TOS but would really like to pursue it. Soon. I just wish I had some answer from Apple before I do because I will have to invest in people as well as software to scale my company.

The games we've published so far were done the old fashioned way. Additionally our business model is a little different than you indie guys. (I'm a little jealous of the freedom.)
We made a business decision to start the company working with license partners and split the revenue.

Our first partner is Highlights children's magazine and the first app is Hidden Pictures based on their illustrations with hidden objects. I'm sure a lot of you remember them from the dentist office. It was released Oct. 09.

http://mobadgames.com/games.html

We've been as high as #3 in kids paid iPhone when Apple featured us in 'Apps for Kids' and been up and down since but consistently in the top 25 for kids. Some very good reviews, a parent's choice award, featured in the app store, remain in 'apps for kids' section and recently a USA Today article listing us as one of the top 50 games for kids have all created sales spikes.

Price has ranged from .99 to 1.99 where we've decided to leave it.
Additionally we created an in-app store to sell more 'puzzle packs'. Each pack is an additional 8 illustrations for another .99 and is very economical for us to produce now that the backend server and process are defined.
Our second app My First Hidden Pictures uses color illustrations instead of the black and white in the original and was released last week.
The third was submitted yesterday, Sticker Fun.

All three use color variations on common interface elements to keep cost down. All 3 have the same in-app purchase model.

Last month Hidden Pictures averaged about 400 per day total sales. 300 for the app, 100 for the puzzle packs. The longer it goes on and the more packs we do the higher the percentage of in app sales gets.
Still waiting for reviews to come out for My First HP and sales the first week are around 35 per day so far.

All three apps will use the same in-app store backend.

We'll also be releasing lite versions of all 3 in a couple weeks to cross promote and hopefully bump sales through upgrades.

A huge part of the continued sales for Hidden Pictures has been that Highlights is a great partner. They put stickers on the front of their magazines and books so if you're going to travel this path, make sure your partner will help you market, otherwise, it's not worth it.

Our other app, life matchgame, based on the life series from our partner BBC Earth... don't ask.

Since I have a little different perspective than most of you I hope you all find this as helpful as I found your posts.

If you're in the LA area and looking for work as a Unity Dev, ring me up.

cheers
Kory Jones
CEO Mobad Games.

 

400 a day or 400 total ?

 

For the Hidden Pictures app, 300 per day average.
High day was when the USA Today article came out we hit 791. Low day for the month was 182.

Add in app sales of additional puzzles for HP of 120 per day average.

 

A little update: After a slow start (some posts above) our iPad-game “1on1 Action Hockey HD” has reached 1000 paid units in 66 days. Not a million in ten days, but still more than we have expected. There was one refund (crap, I guess that makes 999 sales then ).

In early September we released the first content update and our iPad-game got featured in Staff Favorites in AU/NZ/DE/AT. What an exciting time it was! It went well in DE and AT, it climbed the charts to #12 in all paid games (62 units/day in DE). On the same day an ugly review came up in the appStore, sales were down 50% on the next day. I'm not sure if the review was the only reason, but I guess it has a part.

After 66 days:
- 1000 sales (best day 82 units, worst day -1 (it can be worse than 0)
- 1 refund
- two serious requests for contract work
- 2 very good reviews (appvader.com and simonblog.com)
- some good, one bad user review in the appstore
- we met new interesting people and had a lot of fun

It is still far away from break-even, but overall it's a good experience.

 

Hmmm 2.99$ is high price for such of game, the game looks cool, but for me is not worth 2.99$ sorry . Maybe if it price will be 0.99$ than it will be fair price , but as I say 2.99 is over to much.

 

Lucky Cats and Lucky Cats+ together had around 400 Sales total so far. the ipad version only because it got sort of featured for a while in the German iPad store. i mean sort of because i got one of those coverflow places on the highlights 1 page. But not under games. weird.
Furthermore, this was only on the german store. Since 3 Weeks, the feature is gone and since than it had... one sale. So it´s dead.

Especially because the iPad store has no subcategories on games so the app is burried way down.

(ups, just saw that itech above this refered to me... Well i spend half a year part time on that and the translators did cost money. I guess i will never translate anything to italian and french and spanish again, as there were no sales anyways. But since the game is almost dead know, i will make some free deys or lower the price.)

 

Any new numbers? Interested in how the sales are going these days.

 

I have about six apps on the app store, only one of them makes me any money... about $150 to $200 per month, and its been that way for about 2 years now.

Some facts:
The one that sells gets good reviews, the other ones get no reviews.
The one that sells is selling with no marketing or advertising.
The one that sells has been, on average, making the same amount each month for about 2 years now.
The one that sells isn't a game (neither are my other apps).

What does this tell me?
Apps that people like will make, at least some, money.
Apps that people don't like will, basically, make NO money.
Apps can be a fairly steady source of income (in my case a couple hundred per month for the last 2 years).
Apps can make money without being advertised.

My thoughts?
If this app can steadily generate a couple hundred per month, then a game that has more mass appeal should be able to make 10x as much. I think a decent game that people find fun and appealing could easily make $1500 to $2000 per month. I think there are a lot of games on the App Store making $1500 to $2000 per month.

 

The market has grown immensely - cracking the top 100 apps in the US means more than twice as many downloads per day than it did a year ago. Of course its not any easier to break into, people expect more and more for their dollar with so many choices available.

 

You know what would be nice?
Having a new thread with constantly updated information. Since Pumita (the one that started this thread) showed no activity in the last two months, I do not expect him to update this one, so, guys, if you still want to share this information that motivates new comers and actual developers, please, follow this link and leave a comment so we can make a more friendly list of Iphone sales numbers

I've already place some info taken from this very same thread, but it's likely not updated data.

Go check it out here!

 

My First Game "HOveR CrOss Racing" only sold 8 on first day, now I'm waiting for the second day...

 

My game wormholes, see my signature sold 60 on the first day, 40, 30 ish the next couple, but had now dropped to 8-12 per day. It has been on for 5 weeks now and I am at almost 700 downloads. I am planning on releasing an update shortly so I am hoping that will boost sales.

 

I've been able to sell 400 copies of 'I Leave This Company' (http://itunes.apple.com/fr/app/je-quitte-cette-societe/id434121434?mt=8) since end of may. It's very strange because it's just a countdown (with Facebook and Twitter interface - Thanks Prime!).

First problem : the keywords. You can't change them once published. In my case, I've been able to make this app universal (iPhone/iPad) and the message you can publish is not only about leaving a company - you can choose whatever message you want to publish : but I can't change the keywords to reflect this :-(

Anyway, I'm quit happy with an app that tool me 3 days to develop

 

just to add something : the look and feel is the most important. the interface, the graphics will make your sell, more than the concept.