Edges - A Puzzle Challenge Is Now Free

7 years 6 months ago

A one month autopsy of the launch of my first iOS game.

This story is probably shared by a lot of first time app developers I'm sure.  I fully thought people would pay a dollar for Edges.  I rationalized it to believe that people could make the leap that $0.99 was not that much money and that 100 levels of a puzzle challenge would be worth it.  The sales started pretty strong, relatively with friends and family.  About a week in they were sustained a bit with Facebook ads.  A week later after the Facebook ads started they started to really dip.  Finally, after a month the sales of the game were almost non existent.

I was devastated and I am still kinda feeling that disappointment.  There was a bright spot though, it seems that in app purchases were actually happening.  It got to a point where in app purchases were accounting for more than 50% of the total revenue that the app made.  Instead of working towards the next game, I took a weekend to retool the game a little and reconsider the price.

We worked on an update to add game center support and a new theme for purchase.  The update was released about a week ago and we made the game free.  Immediately we saw a jump in downloads.  From 1 or 2 a day to 100 to 6000 on one day!  It seems like we got a good spike from all the sites that crawl for price drops.  That spike has since leveled off and we are getting about 30 installs a day. It is still cool to think about 30 new people a day playing what we created.

So, we now move on to the next game taking with us what we learned.  Mainly, at this point, it is hard as hell to get anyone to pay for a game outright.  Free to play is here right now and it seems to be the law of the iOS land.  Moving forward our games will start free.

Edges - A Puzzle Challenge is still alive and well though, and it is a hell of a deal for $0.00.  You can get it for iPhones and iPads at edgesgame.com/get

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