MicroCars for iPhone, sales and downloads
Just a follow up about those two iPhone game developers that generously provides their sales info.
MicroCars for iPhone downloads and sales are going down very fast. I would like to understand exactly how it happens. What factors (blogs, IM, news, anything) made the App reach high rankings in the store and what made it go down after?
iLightning is hardly getting a sale a day. I bet Jabavu just forgot about it.
Martin C. published the sales of his MicroCars iPhone game on the BOS forum.
As you will remember for my previous post, MicroCars nice, well written and complex game was close to the sales of iLightning small gadget 2 weeks after launch.
Well, one month and 10 days after its launch, MicroCars has sold 1035 units, more than iLightning performance in 6 months.
What happened?. Simple. Martin launched a “Lite” version of the game, and that free version got damned popular in the store… As I’m writing MicroCars lite is in the 16th place in the category Games->Racing (top free).
Let’s see a simple graph of Martin’s sales. Can you guess when the Lite version was launched?
As you might have guessed, the Lite version was launched near August 5th. The effect is impressive. Before that sales were averaging 12 a day and looking at the graph we can see a downward trend. After the launch of the Lite version, daily sales average jump to 43 a day and, at least to the naked eye, the trend is going upwards.
We are talking of an exceptionally well written game here. The App Store holds near 65.000 apps, most of which must be games. For a game to make the first places on one category, it has to be good.
Anyway, we have a clear morale here. For an iPhone app, the Lite version is a must.
As this July 15th article says, App Store has served 1,5 billion downloads… and there are 65,000 applications.
“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality” said Jobs. Well, at least the scale part is already clear. Something is going on here, a lot of people in obscure corners of the world (greetings from Chile here) are wetting their hands on Objective C and Cocoa to produce enormous quantities of applications.
Lots of the 65.000 apps are no doubt very small gadgets, mostly for a moment of fun. One of those is iLightning by Javabu Adams:
http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning
It’s a small app that when you tap or shake the iPhone shows a lighting and shouts “lightning bolt”…
Java is very generous and he publishes the daily sales of his app.
http://www.shinyfish.com/ilightning/sales/
I have summed the sales by month:
|
Month |
Sales |
|
Feb |
262 |
|
Mar |
201 |
|
Apr |
145 |
|
May |
117 |
|
Jun |
109 |
I suppose that Java isn’t doing any efforts to promote his app. He just identified an idea, created the product and sent it to the App Store.
On the other side, I suppose some of the 65.000 apps are complete and well written applications or games. In the BOS forums I’ve found an example: MicroCars:
http://www.microcarsiphone.com/
The game is very good. Labour of Love. Even the sound is nice. Hundreds of hours must have gone into it.
Well, the sales on first two weeks were 228. On the first two weeks iLightning sold 216 units.
iLightning started in Feb 09 while MicroCarsIPhone started in July. In the meanwhile the number of apps in the store grew by 3x. One must think that, as the app number grows, it will be more difficult to get noticed.
Humm, I need good stats here, like what was the change in the universe of iPhones + iPod touch…
Anyway, I would like to know how the sales of MicroCars… move. My gut feeling is that simple, one moment gadget apps like iLighting will have a decrease in sales while more stably appealing apps will get reviews, word of mouth and will get growing sales.
Since January I’ve thinking of my first iPhone application… It took a lot of time to sign in the iPhone developer program. As I am in Chile, and te Apple store doesn’t operate here I had to send a fax and the fax at Apple was busy for three or four months… (sad as it sounds).
Now I’m signed, I have my new iMac and my iPod Touch will get here on Saturday. I’m learning objective-C, Cocoa and getting to know the iPhone development environment. So far so good…
But I need an idea to start. Here’s the history of my ideas…
First one: a medication reminder. Sounds good don’t you think?. Sorry. Two problems;
Ok, it seemed a good idea, then I thought about a little stupid but well, maybe that’s the way to go… My new idea, an iPhone insult generator. Orginal, isn’t it. Well, it’s not, at least 10 apps. There even exists a “Shakesperean Insult Generator” Greetings thou botlesss…
Third idea, a wheel that makes decisions for you !! Cool, don’t you think. You write as many options as you want, spin the wheel and the chance decides.
Why program it? it’s easier to buy it on the app store…
http://kirktech.com/336/wheel-of-chance/
