Invaders World Tour - Now On App Store

#21 Hey Scott, 84,000 downloads is very good. How does that translate into sales of the full version?

#22 About 12 since the promotion ended - no more than usual really.

#23 Hmm, I don't understand why the free downloads don't translate to a lot more paid downloads. I'm beginning to wonder if a free version might not be such a good idea. I think one of the problems is that young people these days have a very small attention span, and I'm wondering if they play the free version and are satisfied with that alone. If that is the case, it might be a better idea to limit the free version to something that is useless as a game, and serves only as a marketing tool. For example, I was thinking of producing a free version that gives access to all of the levels, or perhaps just a few, but the limiting aspect would be time. Let's say, 15 or 30 seconds and then it goes back to the main menu screen, something like that. It would show them what the game is like, but would only be a tease and totally useless as an actual game. If they like it, they'd have to d/l the full version to play the actual game.

What do you think?

#24 I had another similar idea. The free version would have a total time limit (5 minutes or something like that), so that after the user has played the game a few times and the timer expires the game becomes locked out. Not sure how that would work in terms of the user downloading the game again though.

#25 Mark, I'm not sure what to offer in terms of advice really. None of our free games have converted sales - but that might be because people don't think they are worth the upgrade price - both are in-app purchase as well.

The next new game from us will not have a lite but what we will do is have some of the other games free with promotion.

It's worth you signing up with appannie if you haven't - it is free www.appannie.com/care/. Then you can type in the names of similar games and see how they are doing - you can compare their lite downloads vs paid downloads. As a rule of thumb; anything ranked in the US in the top 100 is probably doing okay. Anything in the top 40 on a daily basis is doing well etc.

#26 Mark,

I remember reading somewhere that Apple will not accept timed demos. I read this awhile ago so I don't remember the details or even if it was true, but you may want to look into that.

My current plans for the next game is to not have a lite version and instead go completely with in app purchases. Scott's results don't sound too encouraging, and I'll have to figure out the right way to do it, but so far that's what I'm thinking.

Scott, do you get a decent number of downloads for your games that have in app purchases? More than the lite version of iWT?

#27 @ Mark - Justin is correct in his statement. Apple will not approve any app that is either time-gated or shows greyed-out features (illustrating something that would be in a full version). You can have less functionality in a "Lite" version but any buttons/actions/what-have-you that are present, must be touchable/usable.

You can neither time-gate individual levels nor the app itself. You can, however, not integrate things such as level saving, high score tables/leader boards, etc. and advertise those in a splash screen (or other) in-line advertisement for your full version.

You could also integrate ads in your free version to (hopefully) generate some revenue. However, don't simply place an upgrade to a full version that simply removes ads--this is a big turnoff for our consumers and will result in bad feedback. This will translate into your app getting buried into the other some 200,000 never-to-be-seen again apps that have fell victim to the crushing waves of the App Store.

Good luck!

#28 Justin, figures for the lite version of IWT (USA):

last 7 days : 560
last 30 days: 2930
IWT in-app purchase : 3

We can conclude that the conversion rate is very poor!

#29 Thanks for the responses guys. I don't understand why Apple are so picky. It's starting to get a bit rediculous, don't you agree? If an app is free we should be able to do whatever we want with it. Apple are still getting our $99 developer fees, even if we don't sell anything, so they are in a no-lose situation.