Appy Entertainment Partners With Angels & Airwaves

While we’re still gearing up for the official announcement of our next game, Tune Runner, we do have a bit of news that’s just too big and too cool to keep under wraps. Appy Entertainment has partnered with alternative rock band Angels & Airwaves, who will provide an exclusive remix for the launch of Tune Runner later this month (pending Apple’s approval, of course!).

While a central feature of Tune Runner is that you can use any music you own to create game levels, we still wanted to ship the game with a custom track, both to give the game a little extra glamor, and to ensure that even players without music on their iPhone or iPod touch could play the game right away. We worked a couple personal relationships to find a partner and we came up big when Angels & Airwaves offered to create a custom remix of “Hallucinations,” the first single from their forthcoming album, LOVE. LOVE will be released for free on Valentines Day, and will be available both on the band’s website, and through a unique new Facebook app.

We’re super excited to have Angels & Airwaves be a part of Tune Runner. They’ve sold over two million albums, and they’ve been in the top ten of Billboard’s Top 200 charts. Their music is a perfect match for the game, and we’ve created a custom game background that will run any time you play a level based on an Angels & Airwaves track.

The band is on board, too. “We love the idea of people being able to experience our music in new ways,” said Tom DeLonge of Angels & Airwaves. “As a band, we believe that music is about more than just listening, and Tune Runner gives people a great new way to interact with the music. We’re excited to be a part of this game right from the beginning.”

We’ll have more about this collaboration — and MUCH more about Tune Runner — when Tune Runner launches later this month. Angels & Airwaves new album, LOVE, will be released on February 14.

Angels & Airwaves

All-Nighter At The Secret Worldwide Headquarters

Crunch time … Friday night turned into Saturday morning, and the crew didn’t call it quits until past 4:00 AM local.

The photos are fuzzy, but so were we.

The drunks downstairs kept our energy up, but eventually the night caught up even with the God of Thunder.

We’re back at it today … gonna ship this game if it kills us. And it might!

Wish us luck!!!

Everybody Loves Free Pizza!

A couple weeks ago we participated in FreeAppADay.com’s free app promotion, offering the full version of Zombie Pizza for free for a period of about twenty-four hours. Why did we do it? How did we do? Would we do it again? Read on!

Zombie Pizza experienced something a little north of 30,000 downloads during it’s free day. Doing the math, we didn’t do as well as some other apps that have appeared at FreeAppADay, which recently claimed two million downloads over a two-week period. That’s OK. Zombie Pizza is a refined … uh … taste. We get that. Presenting the game to a wider audience was one of the main reasons we made it free for a day.

Zombie Pizza’s day in the sun made for some fun number watching. This chart from AppFigures shows how in the span of a day, Zombie Pizza’s rank moved from outside the top 200 to category top 10s in the United States:

We did well internationally, too. This MajicRank snapshot isn’t quite our high water mark, but it’s close:

Of course, those gaudy ranks evaporated as soon as we flipped the game back from free to paid. But that was to be expected. For us, making Zombie Pizza free was all about exposure — for the game, for our company, and for our emerging brand. We knew going in that we couldn’t directly monetize a free version of Zombie Pizza. Once you own the full version of the game, there’s nothing more to buy. We didn’t make a dime on Zombie Pizza during it’s free window. But we’re still happy we did the promotion.

Wait. We gave away 30,000 copies of a $1.99 game … and we’re happy about it?

You bet.

In the two weeks since the promotion, sales of the paid version of Zombie Pizza have increased about 39%, when compared with the week prior to the promotion. We’re talking about a relatively small sample of days, here, so our numbers could be a bit wobbly, but the results are in our favor so we’re going to be militantly optimistic about the long-term impact on Zombie Pizza sales. Huzzah!

Over that same period, downloads of Zombie Pizza Lite — the free version of our app — have increased about 20%. The day after the promotion, Zombie Pizza Lite experienced its best single day of downloads since the app was introduced last October, so folks that were late to the free promotion appear to have jumped over on their own and tried out the Lite variety.

Our other hope was that the promotion would grow our overall audience, but those results will take longer to judge. How many of those 30,000 downloads represented new customers for Appy? Will those new players recommend Zombie Pizza to their friends? Will growing our customer base have any impact on sales of other games going forward, particularly for our soon-to-be-released new game, Tune Runner?

Give us a couple months and we’ll share our analysis … but looking at things today, bottom line, two weeks out from our free day, we judge the promotion a success. Thanks to FreeAppADay.com for affording Appy Entertainment some spotlight time!

(And if you’d like to buy a copy of Zombie Pizza — which is still a great deal, even at the full price of $1.99 — click the button below!)

Lights! Camera! Pants??!?

We’re finishing up Appy Entertainment’s semi-secret new project (and we’d say we hope to submit it by Friday, but we’ve made the mistake of putting a date on this thing before) … yet we’re confident enough in the project’s completion that we put together a video shoot yesterday to promote the game.

You’ll have to wait a week or more to fully understand what’s going on here, but we do have a couple teaser images.

Yep, that’s our CFO, Rick Olafsson (though you may know him as Doctor No). While it may look like we trekked all the way to Giza to get this shot, Rick would never allow such financial malfeasance, and so we had to content ourselves with shooting Rick (and dozens of other performers) in Director Michael Mayhew’s private Los Angeles studio:

And thus is our green screen legerdemain laid bare for all to see.

And speaking of bare, check out the gams on our CFO! Why shell out for a full suit when you’re only being shot from the waist-up?

The iPhone development biz is a cut-throat affair, boys and girls, where only the lean and mean survive. The next time someone mentions the bloated budget of a video game, spare a thought for our green screen and half-dressed CFO!

More info on our next game shortly …

So, About That iPad Thing …

There was some news yesterday about something-or-other that Apple released. A bromide? A tablet? A pad? Something.

Yeah, we were clustered around our computers hitting the refresh button, just like everyone else.

It is still early days but we are excited for the new iPad and anticipate our games will be right at home on Apple’s latest wonder device.

For more in-depth commentary, mouse over to Mobile Entertainment, where Appy Entertainment CEO Chris Ulm reacts to Apple’s announcement, along with lesser luminaries from unknown companies like Electronic Arts and Glu Mobile …

Zombie Pizza — Double IGF Award Finalist!

If to be nominated is to win, then Appy Entertainment is hip-deep in winnings right now. Joining Appy’s honors on the 2009 Best App Ever ballot (and there’s still time to vote on those awards … hit the buttons on our front page HERE), Zombie Pizza has landed two nominations in the prestigious Independent Games Festival Mobile Awards.

Zombie Pizza has been nominated for Achievement in Art, and Audio Achievement, and along with Tiger Style’s Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, is the only game to secure multiple nominations on this year’s ballot.

From this morning’s press release, we see that “the Independent Games Festival itself was established in 1998 to recognize the best independent game developers, much the way that the Sundance Film Festival honors the independent film community. The creation of IGF Mobile in 2007 was the direct response to the maturing of the mobile game industry and the desire to similarly recognize and reward those driving the advancement of the space.”

Appy Entertainment is especially pleased by this recognition as the award covers not only iPhone games, but all hand-held devices, including the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. Zombie Pizza was selected for the final ballot from 170 titles entered in the competition.

Winners in each category will be announced February 8th. In the meantime, if you want to see what all the hoopla is about, get yourself a slice of Zombie Pizza by clicking the button below!!

The iPod touch Advantage

Apple will announce earnings today, and later this week Moses will reveal his latest tablet (actually it’s Steve Jobs, but there’s scant difference at this point), so you’ll be awash in news from Cupertino. Overlooked in the rush, as always, will be the iPod touch, and its importance both to Apple’s bottom line and the growth of the app market, particularly for games.

We blogged about the importance of the iPod touch over a year ago, but because we’re crusty old men who like to repeat ourselves, and because PocketGamer.biz was good enough to provide us a platform, we have some more recent thoughts on the touch published over at that august website today:

Check it out HERE.

King of RPGs

This blog has previously confessed our love of all things geeky … we offered up a review of Mark Barrowcliffe’s excellent Elfish Gene, and we speculated on the existence of the Nerd Gene in our own offspring (who just last week went off to play D&D without us … it was like the nerd equivalent of watching your kids leave for college).

We haven’t had an excuse to let our geek flag fly for awhile, though, so we were delighted to be contacted by Jason Thompson, who offered up a gratis copy of his original English language manga, King of RPGs!

This is a time when our blog really needs an audio component. All together now … think of a heroic voice, with lots of reverb …

KING –

– OF –

– RPGs!!!!!

Writen by Jason Thompson, with art by Victor Hao, King of RPGs is the tale of a group of college freshmen lured from the mainstream path by the imaginative distraction of genre gaming. While role-playing games are front-and-center, this first volume also skewers collectible card games, and manages cameo appearances from Euro and wargame players, too. King of RPGs is an authentic and over-the-top romp through the varied subcultures of the nerd gaming scene, lovingly crafted by creators that recognize the inherent absurdity of the hobby, but at the same time clearly love and respect the people and the products they send up.

The characters will be familiar to anyone who has ever hosted a game night. We never really tumbled to massively multiplayer online roleplaying games, but we recognize and understand lead character Shesh, a recovering MMORPG addict who hulks out into a role-playing demon when confronted with stressful situations in tabletop games. Hitting more uncomfortably close to home is the obsessive gamemaster with an iTunes play list of snake men screams on his iPod, and who allows advantage points in character creation for taking partial encephalopathy as a weakness. We’ve also walked a mile in the shoes of the kid who got his start by cleaning the bathroom at his local game store, but we never turned into a wealthy, collectible game tycoon like that character, probably because we weren’t smart enough to accept salary in the form of cash, instead of store credit (ah, if we only knew then what we know now!).

You can check out the strip at the King of RPGs page, and the book is available from Del Rey, where it is branded as a first volume, which hopefully means more are on the way. And while you’re at the author’s page, be sure to check out the mysterious Street Master.

The identity of the Street Master is a closely-guarded secret, but whoever he may be, he has won our respect with his brazen behavior of playing Dungeons & Dragons on city streets. We salute you, Street Master, with a hearty Appy huzzah!

Free Pizza!

What’s the only thing better than Zombie Pizza?

How about some FREE Zombie Pizza???

For Tuesday, January 19th only, and in association with FreeAppADay.com, the full version of Zombie Pizza (normally $1.99) is FREE!

That’s right. FREE! You can download the game and with the two bucks you save, you can treat yourself to a slice of honest-to-gosh pizza (but tell them to hold the eyeballs!).

This deal will go away by Wednesday, so get your Zombie Pizza while it’s hot and twitching!

Click HERE to visit the Zombie Pizza page at FreeAppADay.com!

Tale of the Sale

Last weekend Appy Entertainment ran a sale. Why did we do it, and how did we do? Read on!

Our decision to put on this sale came together in about five minutes … and that’s one of the things we love about this job, and this market. You can be really nimble and try things out. We didn’t come to work on Thursday morning knowing that we’d be running a sale, but by the time we turned out the lights that night, we’d dropped prices across the line, sent out communication to press, and contacted everyone on our mailing lists. The first chatter appeared on Twitter in the early hours of Friday and our half-price weekend was on.

Why a sale, and why now? Our primary motivation was to drive volume … there had been a huge influx of new users into the iPhone/iPod touch market over the holidays, and while we saw a nice little bump at Christmas, we still wanted to introduce ourselves to all those new players. We’re also planning to release a new game in the next couple weeks, and increasing our customer base before a product launch is never a bad idea.

We dropped everything in the line to .99 for the weekend (Weekly World News remained at .99). And how did we do?

The best way to appraise our results is see how much volume increased as a percentage of the previous, non-sale weekend’s totals.

• Appy Newz 277.7%
• FaceFighter 89.34%
• Weekly World News 200%
• Zombie Pizza 198.3%
• Overall paid 97.9%
• Overall free 11.9%

What do these numbers tell us?

The biggest gainers were Appy Newz and Weekly World Newz, but these apps enjoy lower volume than our games, and so are subject to greater fluctuation week-to-week even when we aren’t running a sale. Appy Newz also saw the biggest price drop in the sale (from $2.99 down to .99), which may have goosed its numbers a little bit. The increase in volume was enough to boost our gross on these products, which was nice.

Games are our bread-and-butter, so we were much more interested in the performance of FaceFighter and Zombie Pizza. For whatever reason, FaceFighter sales were slow to pick-up on Friday, which dragged down the whole weekend. If we’d sold FaceFighter at the same rate on Friday as we did on Saturday and Sunday, we would have come out well ahead. As-is, we lost a bit of gross, versus the previous weekend, but we did drive a lot of volume and hopefully brought some new players into the Appy fold. Zombie Pizza responded very well to the sale, earning us a little bit extra scratch. Seeing Zombie Pizza jump up as fast as it did might mean the market is telling us it should be priced at .99 permanently, but that’s a discussion for another day.

Two other trends are worth mentioning. First, while we almost doubled our paid volume with this sale, volume of our free apps also went up almost twelve percent. Even when apps are on sale for a buck, people still like to browse, and there’s no better way to do that than by downloading a free app. Second, we think we enjoyed a little bit of a “line effect,” where having several games on offer lifted sales, overall, as folks showed up for one game, and decided to download two or more. This is encouraging news for our brand and for our future plans as an app micropublisher.

Bottom line? We did OK. We drove volume, which was our primary objective, but the sale did not substantially impact our grosses when compared with the previous weekend. Across-the-board, our products jumped 20-30 slots in the ranks during the sale, then subsided to right about where they were when we returned to full price. Paid sales this week have shown a very slight increase over last week, while free downloads have dropped off a bit, but it will be several weeks before we can evaluate if these are meaningful trends. We do think the majority of our sales came from new customers, which is a very good thing, and there were collateral benefits to running the sale, as we were mentioned in several blogs and news sites over the weekend, which is good exposure for our brand.

Will we run additional sales in the future? While we do have a secret promotion hitting next week, for the most part, we intend to stick to our current scheme of introductory pricing for several weeks or months, followed by permanent increase to full price. We have no desire to be in the dollar app business. Sales are one of many tools we will use to build our audience, but they won’t occur more than a couple times a year.

That’s the way we see things … for now. Remember, we didn’t come up with the plan to run our sale until the day it happened, and our plans change as fast as the market. So our policy toward sale promotions might change, too. Besides, the ground can change under us at any second — our as-yet unannounced next game will ship fully-featured and for free, with an in-app paid upgrade, and that will be a whole new world for us.

We will know more in a couple months, which is about three years in dog years, and a decade or so in the app market. Wish us luck!