31 days later

One month after the release of Final Freeway 2R (FF2) for iOS, it's time to pull some numbers and see how that went, also compared to the previous two games: Final Freeway (FF) and Fractal Combat (FC).

The short story is that the sales on App Store for us (Oyatsukai) have been getting worse with each new release.

Here are some graphs of the first month of sales for each of the games.

The blue bar is for FF, red for FC and green for FF2.

FF released on August 26, 2010 at $0.99
FC released on August 5, 2011 at $1.99
FF2 released on March 6, 2012 at $0.99

They are all Universal games. Meaning that they target both iPhone/iPod touch and iPad.

The daily graph is more interesting and it gives something to talk about.

FF release (blue line) was good on its own. Though dropping already by the 4th day, it received an additional boost on the 5th day, when Touch Arcade gave it a positive review. But it quickly dropped the day after.
At the time I also released an early bug fix (rushed update). As the update came up, Apple featured the game in the "New and Noteworthy" main section.
It's important to stress the fact that this feature was in the main section. This means that the game was featured on the first page of the suggested software (apps and games, not just games).

This gave a great boost to sales, making it top to day 11 to 2331 copies on that day alone.

Interestingly, the game wasn't visible in the racing games section then. I figured that it was just some mistake or a byproduct of placing the game with the featured apps. I definitely didn't feel like questioning that too much, at the risk of losing the prominent featured spot.

11 months later, we released Fractal Combat. That required quite a bit more work to develop, so, we initially set the game to $1.99. A review came from Touch Arcade, again on the 5th day.
The game got a respectable 3.5 stars, but the tone of the review was that of disappointment. In fact, there was no boost on sales due to that (though it may have been worse without, ..who knows).
FC received some good coverage in Italy and that was the major source of sales for the first few days.
I'm happy to sell in any country, however US market is the biggest market and it's ideal to have a decent rank there.
FC was featured by Apple, but this time around it was under the games section, not in the main section.
In my experience (see the next game, too), that kind of feature is better than nothing, but it's definitely not going to help to climb the ranks. You're dying, just not as quickly.

After a month we permanently reduced the price to $0.99, and 8 months on, it's now selling somewhat..  about 40 copies per day.

About 7 months after releasing FC, on March the 6th, we released FF2. This is FF how it was always meant to be. Better in every way, with proper pixel art, excellent sound tracks, and all of the features that were missing, plus some more.
"Everyone" loves it, great majority of 5-star ratings and only one 1-star rating from an hater on the loose, obviously!
We also tried crowd funding it with appbackr, in the hope that that would bring some increased visibility (and clearly to support the development economically, though at a 54% interest rate..).

Like with FC, FF2 was also featured in the games section, and again, that didn't help to climb the rankings. In fact, for the first month, this new game sold even less than the previous game.

I don't think that this can be pinned down to one specific reason. But I can imagine how things could have gone better.
Positive Touch Arcade reviews seem to always give a nice boost, especially in the US market. But TA was busy covering the GDC when the game came out.
After about 10 days, TA made a podcast praising FF2, but that didn't seem to affect sales at all.
On the 24th day we released an update of FF with a promotional link to FF2, and made it free for one day. Touch Arcade editors picked that up and finally reviewed FF2, again praising the game.
That gave a great boost, almost as good as the new release boost.. but it wasn't enough to catch enough momentum to stick high in the rankings.

So, maybe, if TA reviewed the game soon after its release, the sum of the release boost and of the positive review could have brought FF2 high enough in the rankings to catch momentum and possibly even to get Apple to feature it more prominently. Or Apple could have featured the game better, regardless of how quickly sales picked up on their own.
I'm not trying to lay any blame here, just trying to think what could have helped the game to sell more.

Maybe FF2 is not as interesting after all.. but after one month, the game is already below the first 200 racing games (iPhone US ranking). That means that there are over 200 racing games that are faring better in some way..  even FF has a higher rank than its sequel (FF is selling somewhat less, but its positive history may be helping it in the ranking).

What I think I learned from all this is that it's basically just chaos (another name for "luck"). If you ask someone how he/she managed to strike luck on the App Store, that person will most likely tell you that they didn't know how that happened and that they didn't do anything special.

In general, I also just see too much competition (120 new games per day ?!).
In a different time, a game like FF2, priced at $0.99, would have been unmissable. Now it's just another game that has to struggle to make up the development costs. Of course one could raise the price, but nowadays it's very hard to try to sell anything for more than $0.99 on mobile.

A positive thing is that we've been fairly lucky in the long term. FF is still selling in decent numbers after one year and a half. FF2 may continue to sell poorly, but steadily, and that would be great. It may also find new popularity at some point, though that's unlikely.

Another positive note is that Google's Android market has improved a lot in the past year.. and all hopes now are for FF2 to get some attention at least on the Android side.
Of course, things on Android are even more confusing. There is no Touch Arcade equivalent and it's anyone's guess if and how one can get featured on Google Play (the new name of Android Market).

I honestly don't like any of this. I don't like to have to think in terms of getting millions of people to buy my games and I especially don't like the randomness of it all. It seems like there isn't a proportional gain on the effort that one puts into a title.
I'm not saying that one should give up on making quality games.. but rather that quality is necessary but not sufficient, and economic success is nothing but luck. All you have to do is to stay afloat and wait for the day when all the planets will be aligned just right.. but I don't see that happening on the App Store for me now..

Have fun !

Android finally paying off

15 months after the initial Android release of Final Freeway, the game is finally starting to pay off!

Last November I mentioned how the introduction of the racing games category, the web interface and to ability to setup even prices for each currency was helping the sales.

Things are even better now, since the opening of the Korean market.
In Korea gaming is obviously big and Android is big in Korea because of local brands such as Samsung and LG. The market, though, used to be closed to mobile games distributed by Android Market and App Store, because by law games had to go through an approval process that wasn't feasible for mobile apps (I'm guessing it wasn't feasible because of the sheer amount of work required by Apple and Google to have each game validated by whatever entity it had to go through).

For some reason this big barrier went away recently.. and that helped to get some extra sales, but didn't do as much until we translated the store description in Korean and rounded up the price to something that doesn't look like an automatic currency conversion.

Those two things (but mostly just the translation) gave quite a push to the sales.
I don't have a detailed report, because for some reason Google doesn't allow connecting its data feed to sites such as appFigures unless one is a US (and UK ?) developer (Thanks, Google !)..  ..but I can definitely tell that most of the purchases now come from Korea and that the monthly income has been on the rise.

Here's the graph again (it's from Yen converted to Dollars at the current rate, so it's slightly different from the previous graph, because the conversion rate was different at the time):

But before getting too excited.. it's worth nothing that this income has to be split between partners. And also the sales of FF and FC for iOS are slowing down.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy now that we made the effort to port FF to Android. Even if it took a while for sales to take off, it was a good investment. Also porting other games is now easier because much of the platform specific code doesn't need to be touched again for the foreseeable future.

Last but not least, 3 days ago I submitted the 1.0 of Final Freeway 2R to Apple. With some luck, it will be out by the second week of March.

I expect this new title to sell well.. and it will be interesting to see how it goes.

Can it sell as much as FF, or was that a lucky shot ? Is there still enough room on the App Store ?

We'll find out.. one thing I know for sure, this sequel is sensibly better than the first game.. and I have high hopes for it 8)

Drugs and crowdfunding

I was always against drugs. They are bad for you and so on..  well not necessarily all of them, but in most cases they are bad.

I still remember Rome in the 70s and 80s.. it was common to find used syringes around this or that corner. Heroin was a huge problem in Italy, but it slowly faded away and I'm told that cocaine is now the hard drug of choice for Italians (aren't you feeling a little bit like a VIP now ?)

But the real point is crime. Drug is possibly the largest source of crime.. by using drugs, people actively fund criminals in their own country and in other countries as well.

For example, Mexico is currently a crime ravaged country, were drug cartels murder each other with daily. From what I hear form the news, the situation is pretty horrible (as times goes by, the movie Traffic looks more and more like a documentary).

Sure, liberalization of all drugs would help to reduce if not eliminate crime related to drugs.. but while that's not happening, anyone that uses drugs (and buys them directly or indirectly) is actively funding criminals.

Crowdfunding is getting quite common nowadays.. you pay a little something to the right people and you get some product that you'd like to see realized.

Now, imagine someone wanting to become a narcotrafficker posting his project on Kickstarter 8)

He'd make a compelling video of himself showing what kind of guns and fast boats he'd buy. The kind of drugs and their purity, and maybe showing someone from his early team, including killers, resellers, smugglers, lab workers.

To give some guarantees, he'd reassure the would-be funders that he has the right connections with corrupt politicians and police officers.

That would be outrageous.. how could anyone give any money to someone like that.. to bring death and terror in their own city and abroad. Yet, that's exactly what people do.. they fund all of this every time they buy and use drugs.

So, are people crazy ?

Well, you basically have to be selfish and overall stupid. Because those levels of indirection between your action and the reaction is enough to make you ignore that reaction.

Perhaps it would be interesting to have a system of achievements and visualization of progress for every time that one buys some drugs. Something like: "Congratulations ! You've just pay off for a gun for Mr. XYZ"  ..oh but "guns don't kill people", so that wouldn't be clear enough.

I also believe that people simply like crime. If this weren't true, it wouldn't be 90% of the non-adult entertainment. We like gun fights, stabbings, gore, people cutting each other with chainsaws.. it's what we love to see on TV and at the movies.

But when does actual crime become real to us ? Nobody likes to be beheaded, and in most cases that does't happen. So, a few beheadings make for interesting news. We think it's horrible but it's also something interesting to read in the news.

My conclusion is that drugs crime is supported by a mix of things. There is the indirection with violent crime on one side, and when the realization of the connection to violent crime surfaces, then the buyer/user will feel the thrill and to some degree thrive on the idea that he/she is the end user of a product built on some serious criminal action, just like on TV.

Incidentally, I'm a big fan of The Wire 8) ..I found it very interesting !

Rants Service Pack #1

XML is shit.. but when everyone eats shit, then I guess that shit starts tasting good, and most (?) people now just looove it !
Oh, but it's human-readable ! Yes, a string of hex values is also human readable..

C++ is pretty much shit as well.. but there was no alternative and I had to move on from 'C' ..sigh..
But if could be fixed.. all you need is a time machine and an hacked-up Terminator handy.

Unity/Unreal Engine/OMG-I-Just-Want-to-Make-a-Game Tool... are just a way to be somebody's bitch. One either is a developer or is a user.. if you use Unity/WhateverEngine, then you're a devuser.
OK, it's not all so black or white.. that's true, in fact Unity is just brown 8) (..conceptually, because I wouldn't know the first thing about those canned engines).
The engine companies don't want you to make games.. they just want people to waste money and depend on them (aka "being a bitch of").
So, man-up and write your code !! And don't start crying about how hard it is, or how long it takes on how you don't want to "reinvent the wheel" (the lamest meme of all).. it's all about you learning how to get things done.

Men wearing hats indoor, because they just want to look cooler.. are another category of "people that ought to be strangled in front of their children" (cit.)
Useless fedora hats or those condom-looking condom-hats that are so popular in Japan.. they just look lame.. especially if I'm sitting behind you and trying to look ahead !

Men should really not wear shorts.. and sandals, and baggy t-shirts. Just dress properly, nobody wants to see your legs !
Also I don't really care about your t-shirt.. if you want to send a message, leave a suicide note and jump off a building. I'll be reading the news 8)

I've developed a full-on hate for TV now. Before it was the commercials, so loud and in your face. Now it's 99% of what's on. Serial TV which you have to learn to like. Guns guns guns and more guns. Or lots of knives and gang yakuza beatings if you're in Japan.
The sad thing is that the American serial TV are rather realistic.. people just like to shoot at each other, they like crime, murder and so they think that it's cool to actually do it (death is exciting !)
Inability to separate human instincts and curiosity from reality is a very dangerous thing.. and not all cultures are at the same abstraction level on that.
So, TV is shittier than ever and luckily we don't need it anymore. Dear TV, please die soon !

Politics is... ahhhh... what can I say. I'm constantly amazed on how people can reason on one side and the act completely dumb on the other.
Politics is a reflection of people's inability or unwillingness to be consistently coherent and logical.

People that want to become game designers because they are good at games and know all about them.. are simply doomed to fail.
You don't wake up one morning and become a movie director and not everyone in the movie industry can be a damned director ! Some will become directors.. just not you ;)


And, that's it for now.. (^_^)

I Still Blog You !

I've been meaning to write a free-style blog post in a while.
The past blog posts have been too focused on mobile game dev and marketing.

A lot of things that one used to gather in a blog post, nowadays end up scattered around Twitter and Facebook (I have FB setup so that my tweets end up in there as well).

Most of the pictures I take are also by cell phone and they end up on Twitter (see the recent images gallery.. but what if I want to see all of them ? mumble mumble !)

As 2011 wraps up, I'm still going forward as an independent mobile games developer. Holding on, but it's certainly a struggle.
Without a monthly salary and with the marketing and PR of your own games in your own hands, anything that you do or don't do has an effect to you being able to live well or struggle to pay the rent (which I now realize is so expensive !).

At the same time, the marketing stuff is so up in the air. Does writing a post in some message board or a tweet somewhere actually make a difference ?
I've seen that having a natural connection to the Italian market (friends and family and translating a game to Italian) does have an effect. My latest game Fractal Combat sold relatively well in Italy and was high in the charts there for the first couple of weeks of the release.

On the other hand, how does one have an effect on the biggest market, the American one ?
Does advertisement space make a difference ? If it does, it's not in the immediate, because it's really hard to correlate any increase in sales when spending hundreds of dollars in ads space.

Ads are tricky, I like to believe that there is a meaning behind spending money on those. The meaning would be that the game gets noticed in some way and that there is some potential butterfly effect.
Otherwise, if one sees the cost of an ad, and the people that click on the ad, then if all the people that click through the ad, actually buy the 99 cents game (extremely unlikely), one would simply make back the initial investment.

So, ads must serve a secondary purpose.. maybe some sort of reinforcement of a brand of a game name that may translate into a purchase at some point.
Maybe one has to launch a heavy campaign that generates interest on all relevant sites all at once in a short window of time.. Or maybe they are just useless 8)

I don't like these things, because they are chaotic and practically impossible to predict !
This is the exact opposite of programming, where everything goes by the rules, and time isn't unstoppable (when programming, one gets virtually infinite chances to try all possible ways to do something in the exact same state).

Then there are the usual problems of working by yourself at home.. mostly discipline. On one side, I practically work every single day, on the other side, it's hard not to give into distractions and focus is really hard to obtain.. also because I have to do some much work that I wouldn't normally like to do !

Recently I've been trying to broadcast some sessions of programming/stage editing.
Nothing special, actually, mostly boring, because it all seems to happen at a rather slow pace. This is the mostly boring programming bits, when stuff just needs to be done. But knowing that someone may be watching (live or later on), keeps me on my toes.
So far, this has helped to prevent me from stepping off and grab a snack or get lost in some strange corner of the Internet.. or maybe do some other interesting programming, that however isn't what I'm supposed to be working on 8)

So, well, this blog post ended up being about work as well.. but it's a post nonetheless !

Have fun !

Android sales improving for Final Freeway

Almost one year after the release, the Android sales for Final Freeway are finally improving !
The Android Market has improved a lot since I initially complained about it. In addition to the web interface  (as I noted in a previous post), it's now possible to set different prices for different currencies, to have well rounded numbers for every currency.

But the main difference in terms of visibility and sales was the introduction of the racing category. Since that, sales improved 5-10 times and we're now consistently selling  more than 20 copies per day. Which is not amazing, but certainly promising.

Here is a simple graph of the Google Checkout monthly payouts for Final Freeway for Android.

We released on the Android Market towards the end of December 2010 and reached a first sales peak in January. Probably mostly due to the fact that the game was a new release.

Sales then went flat for a while, and at that point we were pretty much disappointed.. until the racing category was introduced and the game started showing in there, floating between the 12th and 16th position.

I'm not sure how one does get to a fairly high position to start with. The game has not been featured on the Android Market front page, so no help there.. but it's a fairly popular game on iOS.

It also somewhat helped when I decided to try to put FF for iOS free for one day (I'll talk about this in a future post), because that gave a spike of visibility to the game in general. Two platforms can help each other's sales.

What about piracy? The 1.0 of FF for Android is still out there, but not the latest updates, where we put a little bit more effort into protection.

One nice thing about Android is that the protection scheme can somewhat be customized (more checks, etc.) and my guess is that any customization will throw off the "drive-by crackers" that will crack anything that is crackable with some default script.. but they won't put any effort into cracking a single game. At least not one that isn't hugely popular 8)

Let's just hope that it stays like that...

So, iOS remains the main platform, but future ports to Android seem to be more meaningful now.

We've also been considering moving to in-app purchases for Android. Putting on the market the game for free, but with most of the features and/or content to be unlocked with the in-app purchase system.

However it's possible that that won't make a big difference in actual sales.

The big business of in-app purchases seems to be around addiction and gambling schemes.. not simply making something free form the start and asking to pay a one-time fee later.

We're considering those things.. but it's not a sure bet. The big hope is still to have a better market and ideally being able to be featured on the Android Market's front page at least for future titles.. ..speaking of gambling ! eh !

First month of Fractal Combat's sales

I've been thinking about posting an update on the situation with my independent game business, but it's hard to sit down and decide what to write.
For example, I wrote a long post a week ago and then scrapped it.. 8)

Fractal Combat so far is doing OK, only OK. Mostly because after the first 2-3 weeks of sale, I've all but stopped marketing it and focused on producing the first update.
This was due mostly to the lukewarm reviews from the likes of TouchArcade, 148Apps and PocketGamer, which got me worried that other review sites may start to copycat those reviews.. which are not entirely negative, but are also not very positive (accusing a cheap mobile game of being too repetitive? Yeah, sorry! 148Apps giving it 3/5 on graphics? Yeah, right!).

Admittedly, some of the potential weaknesses were known.. but I just didn't have the time. The game was complete and I needed to sell it as quickly as possible to stay in business (it's not just me, but I'm the one that depends fully on this 8).
There are no bugs or missing features.. but of course on iOS it's a given that there are going to be updates to improve on the original release and I counted on that (users do, so should I).

A few days after the release, Apple featured it in a decent spot, and that lasted about 2 weeks, which is good, but not good enough.
The game initially sold for $1.99 and is now $0.99. I regret not having lowered the price as soon as it was featured, because I'm guessing that sales volume (or lack thereof)  is what makes a game worth keeping in the featured list or not.

Nevertheless the game is still doing quite well in Italy !
That's due to a few factors.. one of them is the specialized sites' reviews. Frankly, reviews are subjective by definition. I have some communication channels with some Italian sites and journalists, and that helped me a great deal to get some fair coverage.
Having any kind of dialogue makes it possible to address potential complaints and to ensure that some things will be fixed or explain why the game is in a certain way.. the reasoning behind it. Not having a communication channel means that your game is one out of many in the App Store, and you're in the hands of some unknown reviewer that my love it or may hate it.

The moral is that PR matters a lot, especially in the context of independent mobile games facing competition from big budget games down selling for $0.99 a month later.
Having coverage in any country is great.. but having coverage in the much larger US market would be even nicer 8)

Now, a few words about piracy: I've been looking at the Game Center's leaderboards entries to estimate a "piracy ratio". GC is tightly integrated in iOS and Fractal Combat posts leaderboards entries automatically, so anyone that has GC activated (most players?) and that plays the game, will show up in the leaderboards.
I can then compare that number of users with the number of copies sold to guess how many copies out there weren't paid for.
Based on that, on the first few days, it was a staggering 9:1 in favor of pirated games, but that was mostly due to some extra exposure in the piracy circle (would you believe that it was an Italian "script adult" getting the cracked version up on the most popular iOS pirate site ?)
After a month, the ratio now is more like 2:1, meaning that for every 2 users on the leaderboard, one copy of the game was sold.

Now for some sales figures.. here is a chart of the first month. The initial larger sale is in coincidence with being featured in the New&Noteworthy games section (games only, not overall) on App Stores world-wide.
Unlike for Final Freeway, there is no spike for the TouchArcade review this time. Probably because the review wasn't quite an endorsement. We got 3.5 (out of 5).. but it sounded more like a 2.5.

And, that's the story so far, but it's not the end of it 8)

In the meantime, Final Freeway on iOS keeps on selling (one year later !) enough to keep me afloat, and the Android version is slowly taking advantage of its placement in the new racing category in the Android Market. Currently selling about 1-copy per hour, and placed 14th in the racing category. But it's too early to draw conclusions on that.

And now, back to work!