| DHG games is happy to release
publicly sales figures of it's two last AppStore projects: Motocross
Challenge and Cowtopia. The following is a short article written by one
of DHG's founders David Doucet After almost one year since the release of our first game on the AppStore, the DHG Games crew is now ready to share our sales numbers with other developers. If you want a very short answer about how things went for us, here it is: we made ~13,000$ and got more than 500,000 downloads out of 2 games we developped in 9 months. If you want a longer answer, here it is... Motocross Challenge Revenues
A) ~300$ sales peak following a positive review on TourchArcade.com. The price was 0.99$. B) ~500$ sales peak when Motocross Challenge was featured as "New And Noteworthy" on the AppStore. This was following an update that featured online multiplayer. The price was 2.99$. C) From that day until now, Motocross Challenge has continued to sale between 10$ and 40$ a day, average around 15$ for week days and 25$ for weekend days. Downloads Stats
A) 15000 downloads peak for the free/lite demo while the paid version was featured in the "New And Noteworthy". The demo breaked in the top 100 free games charts of many countries, most importantly in the US. B) DHG Games did a special free weekend to try to generate sales of both Motocross Challenge and Cowtopia. We had some kind of success for Motocross Challenge with ~40,000 downloads per day. It didn't really result in more sales since all got back to normal as soon as the free games weekend was over. C) The main purpose of the free weekend was to try explain ing why we had so poor sales for Cowtopia compared to Motocross Challenge. Was it the lack of exposure, the lack of interest about the game premise, or the game quality? By putting both Motocross Challenge and Cowtopia free at the same time, it allowed us to know if the customers would be aware that the game exists. The ~40000 downloads we got from Motocross Challenge prooved us that yes, we got exposure covered. So, even free, Cowtopia was not very attractive to iPhone owners. If quality was the main problem, people would probably at least have tried the game for free. We did our homework with playtesting and we got good reviews from players and the few reviewers who tried the game, so we're pretty confident the game is good and can compete with the best in the action-puzzle category. It could have been the quality of our screenshots, but I sincerly believe the cartoony graphics are a strenght of our game and those screenshots looks pretty good to me. Is is that the game feels too childish? Is it unclear what the gameplay is all about? I believe these are the 2 main reasons that explains our poor sales. Another one would be that at the very same time Cowtopia got its main exposure by being featured in "New And Noteworthy", another game was beating sales records. All the "word of mouth" publicity available for that week was consumed by Cut The Rope.D) We get on average a bit over 1000 downloads per day, only for Motocross Challenge since there's no free version of Cowtopia. Total Revenues
A) Most of Motocross Challenge sales in the big peak were at 2.99$ B) Cowtopia highest daily peak never reached 50$ :-( Developers' Comments As you may have guessed, these are not solid enough numbers to make a living out of this. Fortunately, it wasn't a big surprise for us. When I left my job to start working on my own iPhone games in early 2010, there were already many articles about how saturated the market was. I also had friends who failed at generating a fair revenue out of it. I was willing to take that risk since I wanted change in my career anyway. I evaluated this was some kind of buying a lotery ticket with better odds and more merit if you win. The end result is that I didn't get rich, but I had a great time doing it and I like my new job. Although our sales figure are not impressive, I'm still convinced that with the same games but with wiser business moves, it could have turned out very differently. For examples, with 500,000 downloads, there's probably a good potential for publicity revenues. On the marketing side, I spent good efforts on Motocross Challenge to contact reviewers and I also purchased a bit of publicity, but I'm sure that somebody else with the right skills set would have done a much better job than I did. Do you have questions or comments? Join us on our Facebook page and we'll be happy to hear what you have to say and answer any questions you may have! |
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