Appy Outlook: July
It’s been awhile since we did an update, and we had a terrific sales day yesterday, so now seems a good time to bring the Appy Army up to speed on the latest doings here at the Secret Worldwide Headquarters of Appy Entertainment!
We’ve gotten a tremendous lift since being selected as a Staff Favorite in Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and Austria. We picked up even more tailwind in the middle of this week, when our FaceFighter 1.1 update (featuring Enemy Mime!) was approved by Apple, meaning FaceFighter enjoyed a couple days on the “New” page on iTunes.
The results were high water marks for FaceFighter in several territories (all ranks represent the high point between 6/30 and 7/10):
United Kingdom: #7 Arcade, #8 Action, #16 All Games, #29 All Paid Apps
Germany: #8 Arcade, #9 Action, #17 All Games, #26 All Paid Apps
Australia: #10 Arcade, #11 Action, #22 All Games, #33 All Paid Apps
France: #21 Arcade, #29 Action, #61 All Games
Japan: #18 Arcade, #26 Action, #60 All Games
United States: #50 Arcade, #65 Action
And, plucking out one of the smaller markets … we’re the #2 Arcade game in El Salvador! Huzzah!
We can expect those U.K., German, and Australian numbers to hold through the weekend, as we are still a Featured App in those territories, but our performance elsewhere will likely decline, as we have moved off the iTunes “New” page in our game categories in those stores. Our Staff Favorite status will likely lapse early next week, meaning a decline in Germany/U.K./Australia as well, but we hope for a more gradual decline given that we’ve managed to vault into the top ten in those countries, meaning we’ll continue to enjoy some exposure in the top paid apps sidebars. Ideally, we won’t decline more than ten or twenty ranks before our next FaceFighter releases come out to give us further “New” exposure.
Two new FaceFighter releases were submitted to Apple last night. FaceFighter 1.2 includes another new character (and this one is a secret character attached to a licensed property that we’ll discuss in a minute), and also brings in a boat-load of new weapons and Immortal Judgment finishing moves, including things like rubber chickens, lightning bolts, and even a stampeding herd of wildebeests. The other release in the approval queue right now is FaceFighter Lite, which will be a free “try it before you buy it” version of FaceFighter. The release of FaceFighter Lite will also likely mark the end of our “Introductory Pricing” of .99, with the full version of FaceFighter settling in at the regular price of $1.99. (So if you want to jump on the sale price, click HERE to get FaceFighter now!).
Looking further down the road for FaceFighter, there will be continuing free content updates, but the next big release will be head-to-head multiplayer, which will be the tentpole of our FaceFighter 2.0 release. Multi-player is up and running here in the building, but we’ve still some significant testing and debugging to go before we can unleash it on the world. But we’re talking weeks, rather than months, before we submit this one to Apple, so hopefully it won’t be too long before you can try to beat the crap out of someone who is trying to do the very same thing to you.
The numbers above do tell us a couple things about FaceFighter. One, that this is a product the market wants more than Appy Newz (about which more in a moment), and two, Apple is still the kingmaker when it comes to driving sales of apps from micropublishers like Appy Entertainment. We aggressively advertised Appy Newz in places like Facebook and several iPhone review sites, and for a time even engaged a publicity firm to help push the app, but aside from some modest success when Appy Newz was a Staff Favorite in a few European stores, sales of the app did not meet our high expectations. With FaceFighter, on the other hand, advertising has been almost nil, but it has gone on to outsell Appy Newz by a substantial degree, and is hopefully poised for long-term success in the market, whereas its older sibling has settled into the lower half of the Top 100 in the Photography category. Endorsement by Apple remains the single most important elements in promoting an app.
From this we take a couple lessons, the most important of which is that games are where the action is, and that’s where Appy Entertainment will be devoting the majority of our attention going forward. But not before we hit the Entertainment category one more time with our …
UNANNOUNCED LICENSED APP
While our soon-to-be-released licensed app isn’t likely to make Mr. Jobs’ next stage presentation (although you never know …), we are really excited about this new project. It will be a .99 Entertainment app based around Appy Newz’s “Shake It To Make It” functionality, developed in partnership with the publishers of an internationally-known property. The app has been in approval at Apple for about two weeks now, and we’d hoped to be able to announce it by now, but, well, stating your plans is a way to hear God laugh. So, we wait … and hold out high hopes that this app will surprise and entertain and break through. The property also features an iconic character that will be an opponent in FaceFighter 1.2. Watch this space …!
The current version of Appy Newz (1.3) is compliant with Apple’s 3.0 OS upgrade, and loaded up with more content than most folks can use. We’re proud of the app — it’s a quality piece of work, and the people who like it love it, which is the kind of brand attachment we were aiming for in our first product. We’d like to do additional Appy Newz updates if sales warrant … and given the rumors swirling around a possible camera for iPod Touch, the Photography category could hot up in a hurry, so stay tuned!
FUTURE PROJECTS
Which brings us to the future.
We have an original game in alpha right now. It’s an arcade/puzzle game with a great theme that shows off Farzad’s amazing artwork in ways that our photo-oriented apps could not. The Ulm is leading development on this one, and we’ve been getting daily builds and playing the levels like mental patients. Fingers are crossed for an August release, but see our comment above about release dates and God’s laughter.
One more generation out from there, we have five internal concepts under active consideration. We’re marshaling documents and visualizations this week, and next week will select the single idea that will enter development (out of a process that began with about one hundred concepts). Each idea is worthy, and even those that don’t enter development will receive concept treatment for later evaluation, so we will eventually have some more iPhone-specific Farzad concept art to share here at Appy Place. All of the ideas are games, all are rich in theme, and each is unlike anything Appy Entertainment has done before.
And so the future for Appy Entertainment remains just as bright, frightening, positive, perilous, planned-out, and unknown as ever before, but we do know a bit more about our market, and we know a lot more about making these kooky games, so it is with confidence we can say the best is still to come. Onwards!
Tags: startup, Apple, iPod, iPhone, App Store, Appy, Appy Entertainment, Ulm, App, Farzad, Appy Army, Secret Worldwide Headquarters, Appy Newz, iTunes, Appy Newz Lite, FaceFighter, micropublisher
You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.
July 10, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Good to see that you’re getting traction in multiple countries. Though you said that advertising didn’t yield any results, were posts in iPhone websites of benefit to you? What about Twitter RT’s? There’s so many ways to promote these days it’s hard to figure out what will be the most successful.
Keep up the great work. Look forward to hearing about the secret project!
July 10, 2009 at 2:07 pm
The answer about advertising is … we just don’t know. We advertised Appy Newz extensively on PocketGamer UK (and they’re great guys who took very good care of us). Did that lead to the selection of Appy Newz as a Staff Favorite in the U.K.? Maybe. Then again, we didn’t advertise FaceFighter over there at all, but we were again picked up as a U.K. Staff Favorite, and we’ve sold more copies of FaceFighter in the U.K. than we have in the U.S.
We’ve detected no measurable increase in sales that we can correspond to specific website reviews of any of our products. That isn’t to say that reviews are unimportant, but I think the importance of reviews on the smaller iPhone sites is felt in an aggregate effect rather than specific spikes.
Twitter … no one knows anything about the reach of Twitter (not even Twitter!). We had a massive spike of visitors here to Appy Place when Greg Grunberg sent out a single tweet about the Yowza! interview that we did with him, but I don’t know how many of those visitors turned into customers for Greg. We continue to have a presence on Twitter because it is fun and easy and we have customers there, but I think overall it has been of greater use in staying in touch with other developers and reviewers than it has been in reaching customers.
This might be a place where the old bromide about “50% of advertising being wasted — but you don’t know which 50%” can apply. It’s even more likely that the advertising efforts we can afford at this stage are so small that they just won’t move the needle in any meaningful way. Because we can’t place analytics on our product pages at iTunes (which are created and maintained exclusively by Apple), it is difficult for us to judge where traffic comes from before landing on our page.
What we can measure is the impact of Apple’s endorsement in the form of an iTunes page placement, and that impact is so considerable as to dwarf our other marketing and advertising efforts.
There are far more unknowns than knowns at this point.
July 12, 2009 at 9:45 am
Thanks for the frank update. It’s really interesting to get some perspective about how Apps perform in the market. I look forward to your next game.
July 17, 2009 at 9:52 am
[...] I didn’t collect many links this week, but if you missed it you should read Year Two from furbo.org. Appy’s latest update on their progress and future plans is a good read too: Appy Outlook July. [...]