Gravity Hook HD Free Weekend Update
I wanted to post real quick about how our free weekend went, but first:
We can't tell until tomorrow (and really until next week or something) if making the game free for a weekend was actually good for revenue or not. Some basic stats about the weekend:
- Top iPad Ranking: #42 Free App
- Top iPhone Ranking: #111 Free App
- Total Downloads Before: ~17,000
- Thursday Night Downloads: 436
- Friday Downloads: 42,051
- Saturday Downloads: 48,263
- Sunday Downloads: 57,659
- Total Free Downloads: 148,409
One goal of this experiment is to test the viability of making apps free on your own, instead of working with a promotor like Free App A Day. Nothing against promoters, necessarily, but they often ask for a large chunk of the post-promotion revenue, and extra paperwork is extra paperwork, regardless of the situation. During the same time frame that we had Gravity Hook HD up for free, about half of the top 10 free apps on each device were Free App A Day promotions, so using something like Free App A Day seems to yield much greater exposure than we were able to generate on our own. However, the fact that we were able to increase the game's install base by an order of magnitude in a weekend on our own is encouraging.
One interesting thing is that most of the press and twitter coverage of the free weekend was on Friday May 27th, but the downloads steadily increased over the course of the weekend like they normally would. I suppose this would be due to general improved visibility, especially on the iPad free apps list, but it's hard to say. Also, I should note that we did not promote the free weekend as much as we should have, I think. I more or less settled on doing a blog post and light twitter campaign, but it ended up getting picked up by the major iOS outlets anyways. Sending a newsletter to our existing users probably would have been a good idea, but it's kind of a hassle...
In a week or two we should have an idea if this positively impacted sales of Gravity Hook, but one nice side effect is that since we run our own user database backend (alongside Game Center), we were able to collect some email addresses that we can use to advertise our next game update or launch. I'm still working on getting the exact number, but we probably got somewhere between 15,000 and 75,000 new customer contacts. So regardless of the impact on Gravity Hook's long tail, that's one nice concrete benefit of doing a free weekend. One weird, unexpected downside is that the program we use to visualize our sales data, AppViz, doesn't really differentiate between free apps and non-free apps. So while the Revenue charts weren't really affected, the Sales charts are all crazy messed up now. For example, it says we've sold 165,000 copies of the game, when obviously the number of actual sales is more like 17,000.
Finally, I can't remember if we shared this before, and maybe it's clear anyways, but Gravity Hook HD is (was?) our worst-selling title. We were only selling a few copies a day, so we felt like we weren't necessarily taking a huge risk by doing somethign like this. We probably only "lost" 15 or 20 sales (less than $50 of revenue for the company) and in exchange got one of our games onto 150,000 new devices. So we'll see what happens to the revenue, but I think otherwise this was a pretty big success!
UPDATE: There were substantial (20%+) bumps in the sales of Wurdle and Steambirds HD during the free weekend, even though they were not mentioned or on sale or anything, though Canabalt and Steambirds were unaffected. Hard to tell if that's a causal link though!
