It’s been a busy September, so I apologize for not posting much. There’s been more work at the day job, including a business trip to California, and I’ve been working on the Halloween/October update for Villagers Vs. Vampire. We’re looking to be done with the update before October 1st, which is basically this weekend, and I think we’re on track. We’re adding a new difficulty mode, a level select screen, and have reworked a bunch of interface elements. We hope you fine people will like the changes!
Speaking of the game, let’s have a look at some graphs and stuff! In the previous post, I mentioned the article we wrote for Games Brief, so if you haven’t read it yet, please check it out here: Platforms Move in Mysterious Ways. It goes into our downloads and sales, and the unexpected sources that our sales are coming from.
Continuing that line of thought, I have some new, updated data regarding our sales.
Here are our sales as of today, Sep. 29th. Fairly steady, but you can see that we have over twice the number of sales from Amazon (which is Android based) as we do from iTunes (which is iPhone/iPad). This isn’t what normally happens in the mobile game market. Developers typically experience the opposite effect.
The number of downloads for our free version is much higher on Amazon than iTunes. You can see where iTunes really shot up in downloads at the beginning, right at release, but then leveled out. Amazon started to pick up a few weeks in, and has maintained a higher rate of downloads since then.
The rate of downloads per day is shown in the below graph.
This tells the download story directly. When the game was released on iTunes, the rate of downloads was high (well, relatively speaking), peaking at about 230 / day. It then drops off quickly, and has maintained a low level of single-to-double-digit downloads per day. The Google Play Android downloads have always maintained a low rate.
Amazon, on the other hand, starts out slow but then picks up after about a week (the free version was released there during the 4th of July week). There was the unexplained spike on July 29th, but then the downloads increase again around the beginning of September. We’re guessing it’s because Halloween is coming up, and our game is in the Halloween category. We could be wrong though. We’re hoping that October will increase interest in the game, due to it’s theme and art style, and we’re looking to advertise again when we release the Halloween update.
However, advertising hasn’t done much for us so far, that we can tell. We ran ads heavily at release, and in a lower capacity throughout July. See the bump in downloads we received from all the ads during that time? Yeah, neither can we.
So, all in all, we’ve had over 6000 people download and play our game (and a few hundred more play our web version here on the site). Considering it’s the first game we’ve ever written, I see that as a success. We get some sales here and there, and the ads in the free version are bringing in a bit of revenue as well. Of course, we won’t be quitting our day jobs just yet, but as one philosopher said, “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”
On the cusp of my favorite month of the year, in my favorite season of the year, I feel that we have a lot of accomplishments to celebrate. We started our own game company, we followed through with creating and actually releasing a full game to the public, we did it while holding down full-time jobs, we released on multiple hardware platforms at the same time, we have thousands of players, and our game has averaged 4.5 stars in the reviews we’ve received (and if you’ve played V Vs. V and haven’t reviewed us on iTunes, Amazon, or Google Play, please do so! We want to hear all of your feedback and opinions). This is just the start, and every game we write will be better than the last.
So we’ll get the V Vs. V Halloween update done and out soon, hopefully by early-mid October, then we’ll turn our attention to new game projects and see what we can craft for you. “So much time, so little to do…wait a minute….strike that, reverse it….thank you.”
