Ranking is driven by number of downloads. Top grossing rank is on the basis of $ earned. As far as I have seen, if you get into top 200 list of paid games, you will be getting 500+ downloads a day. I had some of my games get 100+ downloads per day with ranks around 900 in all games. So if you plan to price your app at $0.99. you know where you need to be. Price it at $2.99 and you can be fine with a much lower rank. Freemium is a bit complex. I have only tried lite version(free) to full version(paid) model and I have seen conversion rate of 1.5%-2%. So if you want 100 paid downloads, you may need 5000-6000 lite version downloads per day. The best level I have got to is around 150 in free games with downloads closer to 18-19000 (this was only for a day) As other users suggested , try to get 4-5 apps earning $20-25 (Its not easy as it looks to do this on a consistent basis). Hope these numbers provide some pointers for you and everyone else
Recently paid for 1 years worth iOS individual developers license. I've been working more on art resources for the game then programming. I've had problems with cocos2d learning difficulty & thought about buying corona SDK because of it's documentation. Would like the app to make a profit.
@ playtinum Thanks for sharing those details, it's great to have a frame of reference on these things for newbies like me getting ready to release my first game on the App Store @Lakeview Corona is a great place to get your feet wet. It's simple to program for, includes most of the features you'd need for most any 2d game, and offers plenty of monetization options for you to leverage.
I fooled with it for awhile and thought it would be best to start out with. Thought about making a simple whack of mole game for 99 cents or free for the first week. You think that would be a good idea?
At least in my experience, getting a specific number of downloads per day isn't something which really happens, it's always been peaks and troughs for me, very spiky sales graphs. Username, by the way, Silent Hill reference?
