well, while I certainly don't wish you any bad luck - 1 day spike means nothing on AppStore... any chance that you can write in say a week from now if you saw any long-term improvement ?
OK... I'm putting a skin in this game today. The timing works because I have a major update pending. So Prairie Chute will be free until version 1.5 drops . Ill share my results on this thread.
I've tried this experiment. I put Mini Makruk (Thai Chess) up for free for a few days. I have three other "mini" chess games, so I figured the cross promotion would be good. Had over 1000 downloads in the first two days... but pretty much zero improvement in any other game's sales, despite my plugging of them in the app's description. Sales for Makruk did not improve once it went back to $0.99. Furthermore, I saw the classic iPhone spike that most folks observe. The free downloads dropped dramatically after the first 3 days.
GumDrops was free for about 2 months in total. While it was #1 in Japan it was getting about 3,000 downloads a day, and then gradually dropping off. The total # of downloads from my itunes report archive is 56,536. While the game was free I would periodically put the price back up to 99 cents for a couple of days, then drop it to free again, which would give the free downloads a boost. I think most of the people downloading it when it was free found out from automated places that track the itunes store and report on apps becoming free. So after a few days your newly free app drops off the first page of those lists, and downloads dry up. Of course if you get in the top 10 for a country that can help sustain you for a while as well, the same as with paid downloads. According to pinch media, it is currently getting about 600 unique players a day (playing for an average of about 30 minutes each). Unique players maxed out at 1,400 after the last update, and has been declining slowly since then.
We're just training customers to wait for that 99cents to free drop when we do this. A lite version hasn't increased sales for me, but it could be a) it was released under four days of apps b) screenshots are horrible c) still some naming confusions But, it definitely gives potential customers a chance to taste the game without me having to mark down the full version to free. I think working on at least 3-4 series of good, solid content updates is a better strategy for you and your customers over all. We'll see where that leads me
I said I'd report back after trying this with Pinch 'n Pop! so here it is... It was free last Saturday and Sunday - got over 20,000 downloads world wide, and it hit #57 on the Top Free Games in the USA. Sales prior to the the free weekend were down to less than 10 a day. Sales this week starting the Monday after the free weekend were: 23, 11, 4, 8, 8. So it settled back to nowhere pretty quick. I typically see more than twice those numbers for any given update release. In the end I maybe made (literally) a few bucks more with this stunt than I would have otherwise but at these numbers it really doesn't matter. The user rating also dropped almost everywhere so that can only be a bad thing. Free days/weekends might work better for games that people actually like The only things I can say for certain are that if you're going to make an app free, do it for more than 1 day. By the time it gets ranked the first day is over, so if your goal is visibility on the store you'll likely achieve little in 1 day.
50000 less customers If you make your app for free and 50000 people download the game they no longer are potential customers, since they have already downloaded your game! Several hundred of them might have bought your game in the near future. So a free week might hurt potential future sales. An odd way of looking at the bigger picture, but if someone downloads a free game you would think they have a predisposition to that style or category of game.
I think these reports are showing that releasing for free doesn't do much for sales (if anything.) I still think the only situations doing this could have value is if you've decided to release your app for free with advertising-based revenue, or if you're due to launch a bigger, better sequel of the original onto the app store and want to drum up fans who you hope will upgrade to the paid sequel (the latter model seems to be working for Tap Tap Revenge.)
Thanks for the numbers, I really appreciate it! I think Im just going to keep my app priced at $0.99. So far for the 1 update that I have submitted, it has doubled my sales since its been released. Sales have never been as low as they were without the update. The update added OpenFeint, so maybe cross-promotion in OF is the reason? Im not sure...
I've come to accept that the games I have aren't going to earn any money. It is good to charge for them sometimes because you get a big boost of downloads when they go free again. You get a lot of advertising when the price drops to free from all the automated price drop lists.
But wouldn't this completely destroy your future sales? I mean Gumdrops and billionaire are both incredibly awesome titles, I figure you just gotta advertise and be strong instead of giving in and making it free.
He isn't trying to sell or make money off his apps. He drops the price to free to keep getting more downloads.
Thanks for very good posting here. As a dev, I've been thinking about this option of free-ing for my app, iPharaoh. I've been also thinking about the false/imcomplete judgement of lite/free version on regular version. (I've been thinking more of how to make Free version fun to make people buy regular version and thanks to ImNoSuperMan about idea of having ads with full feature, etc.) It is just too hard for indie dev like us to get the attention of people out there
