Thanks for the link! I still think their conclusion is flawed - if they pushed half a million copies in 4 days then they had a serious following or lots of press/visibility before hand - or it was just a huge fluke. I'll agree that if you have a runaway freebie success you'll have a far better chance to cash in on it later, but AFAICT getting a free app into the free top 100 is just about as hard as getting a paid app into the paid top 100. Free-for-a-day almost certainly won't work. Free-for-a-week (month?) might, but if your app isn't getting significant downloads and showing a strong upward trend in the first couple days I'd pull the plug immediately.
I'd be curious to know about NimbleBit - their games are pretty popular and all of them have been free.
Hmmm, I havent followed it as closely as the Fling! situation, but isnt Tower Madness another free --> paid success story? The game was going nowhere until they made it free for quite a long time before switching back to paid, and now its in the top 100 paid. And, being more recent then the Fling! example, it was after an apps free rank became irrelevant to paid rank at switch over.
The Appvent calendar organized by Blacksmith games is a good venue for games to go free. From what I know, the site even crashed a couple of times before the actual event because of the buzz it created and the number of hits that resulted from word of mouth and active promotion of reviewers. Some of the participating games even broke into the Top 100 Free Games on the App Store. Here's a message from the devs over at craneball. I'm reposting it in full: "We're glad you like Blimp. It was downloaded more than 102 000 times yesterday for free as a part of #AppVentCalendar" The great thing about the event is that the featured apps would go free for a day on the date specified. Since the participating devs pooled their efforts together and helped create a buzz about the event, a lot of people have been watching the site for the announcement of the day's free game resulting in a lot of downloads and tweets. Right now the featured free game is iBlast Moki. Hopefully similar events will be launched in the future. Collective efforts paid off in the Appvent venture.
Tower Madness hasn't been free since August. I attribute Tower Madness's success to the more recent release of TowerMadness Zero, basically a lite version except it's fully functional and supported by ads.
I think the AppVent Calendar is a great idea, and I think it really shows how devs working together can really promote things (which I have been an advocate for a long time).
Its actually possible. Craneball Studios's Blimp did 105k downloads in 24hrs through AppventCalendar and Blimp wasn't in the Top 10 free app. The numbers grow exponentially as you get towards page #1. Awareness is important too, for example, I wasn't even aware Flickitty had 4 days of free promotion.
Exactly- there are huge gaps in our marketing and the people we are able to hit. We actually fell off the Paid charts for 5-6 days while I tried to untangle the App Store mess (the game locked up and wouldn't allow free nor paid downloads). As people on this board watched it unfold, we were only able to get about 1,000 initial downloads on the first day (the whole history is listed on this forum somewhere). I'm actually amazed when someone on this board says they have never heard of Flickitty- and I only say that because I find myself to be hugely obnoxious on this board, not because I think Flickitty is full of teh awesome. After our 4 day promotion it became apparent that being promoted on the front page of two of the bigger sites had little to no effect on our downloads (TouchArcade and PocketGamer.co.uk). Sure we were listed along with several dozen other games, but we were among the few that were free. The free games were even highlighted in red. Still, the blame resides with me. I think our icon is ineffective and I think our game lacks definition. I have finally settled on Platformer/Ragdoll/Physics. However, I don't really consider Flickitty to be a game in the classic sense, no more than playing with an action figure or barbie doll might be considered a 'game' by launching them into the air or exploding them.
