As soon as the page is up, I'll start promoting it through Twitter. Ken, have you talked to @enhuski lately? (reviewer/blogger at http://www.appsized.com)
Thanks for doing this to help out indie devs. email sent. Please include my educational game, GeoBlox, into your list.
Im definitely interested to sign up for all my apps. Count me in! How do I join in? Do I wait for the website to launch first? Or can i just email everything to you?
You can send email to [email protected] to get into the queue for now. More information will be requested once the site is ready to go live.
bundling as an alternative option Just wanted to share my opinion on the whole free for a day thing: I think this is generally bad for the app store (but great for savvy consumers). I think anyone who pays to put their app on one of these sites is crazy, and am glad there's a free alternative. In general, here's what I suspect free for a day gets you: a tiny rise in sales the next day, but back to normal levels within 3 days. You'll increase your audience base by 10,000 people, loose a chunk of perceived value and possible customers, and reduce your apps rating by a star. Please let us know your results. I've become increasingly convinced that free for a day is a really, really bad precedent for the app store. There are now three different sites doing this, which means that many people can likely fill their app cravings for free, all the time. That said, I'm biased because I offer a different alternative which I believe is a better deal for the app developer (app bundling, at www.stuffedturkeyapps.com). I think free for a day can make sense in a few specific cases though: - When your app has high DLC adoption rates and can earn revenue that way (which often means your free anyway) - When you are able to heavily cross promote between many other games, and a sheer increase in traffic is useful. Note that in both of those cases, you're giving your app away to say 10,000 potential customers in exchange for a likely 0-5% conversion rate. So if you do really well and your conversion rate is very high, you're still looking at an upside of maybe a few hundred dollars. This is why I believe our bundling strategy has more legs; one day in the top 10 will easily earn you that much even when split between 8-10 developers, and apps rarely jump into the top 10 for a single day, they tend to hover there for a while before sliding back down. We also gain momentum from the publicity of all the apps in one of our bundles, rather than being a single entity. Food for thought..
I share some of your concerns, but I'm going to participate anyway with one or more of my older games as an opportunity to gather market data firsthand. Some comments: - if the internet becomes saturated with multiple 'free app a day' calenders or calenders start advertising unappealing or already-free games, they will quickly lose whatever momentum they might have otherwise had. There is already a great way to find free stuff - it's called the AppStore's free list. And there are already plenty of sites tracking discounted apps including TA. - if a game already has chart placement, making it free for a day will kill whatever visibility it had. But if a good app already had no visibility, this isn't a big deal. - it's true that some games will suffer in user ratings by being made temporarily free. But this isn't true across the board. It depends on the type of game. Games that are particularly challenging/hard are more likely to be impulsively deleted by frustrated users Anyway the main reason I'm chiming in is because I fear App Bundling has a lot of problems, too. - bundling games together does not necessarily increase the perceived value ; it can do the exact opposite. If you saw a crate of wine on sale for 99 cents, would you think you were getting a great deal, or would you shy away? - bundling games can hurt visibility; you've got one app in the appstore with one icon and one title. Keywords are limited, and it'll be far harder for people that may have really wanted one of those games to find it whether searching or browsing - bundling games ties a user's first impression to the first game they happened to try. If even one poor game is included in the bundle, that game may end up driving user ratings. - if the bundled games are from multiple developers, the revenue split adds some awkwardness. Everyone presumably gets paid the same regardless of who contributed the most value. - a bundled package is more likely to trip over 10meg limiting downloads to wifi.
Hey just wanted to let you know that Spokko also sent an email to participate in this project. Hope you guys still have some room. As for the free app a day conundrum, we haven't paid a dime to the guys, I guess just being one of the first people to talk to them about it made them drop the fee for us (still the fee does sound kind of shady). We'll be happy to share our results with you guys here.
Full disclosure: I'm not a dev, but quite interested in this topic. According to App Shopper, 'Charmed' has changed price 8 times since inception approximately 4 months ago. It started at 2.99 and is currently back to 2.99. I'm anxious to see if Mind Juice Media believes enough in this strategy to set their own premier title to free (possibly on launch day?) as they've now been at various other pricing levels of .99, 1.99, & 2.99. Exciting to see this all unfold I'm inclined to agree with slipster216 in that with the ability to download several free apps per morning, the thought of me having to get that certain paid app is becoming less desirable. You know... maybe it'll be the one that goes free tomorrow! and I deffinately don't ever feel pressured by the 'Hurry up, this is a limited time offer!' - sure, whatever. It's just my opinion, but I wouldn't count on 15 year old ipod owners buying all your other games because the free one was so good. Good luck!
@struffolino Well, we don't require our devs to remove their apps as individual entities in the app store, in fact we prefer them to exist independently as well. In this regards, the bundle is more of a low risk upsell for the consumer rather than a discount. The logic is "hey, I was going to buy this game anyway, but for a bit more or the same price I can get 9 other games with it", or "I'm interested in 2 of these games and the rest look decent, so why not?" in theory, a well balanced bundle will pull all the devs in it up, and with the sales curve based on ranking being as sharp as it is, it's quite possible to earn more in a bundle than alone.
I signed up our game, Twistum, for FreeAppCalendar. Nice looking website! _________________ Twistum. http://www.enlevel.com/twistum Phuong
Can't wait too, guys! Let's all have a full blast marketing (word of mouth) when the site's ready to launch.
