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From 0 to 450k, an App Store Success Story - With Charts and Numbers
- mashmac2 16y agoI was just reading about this article in relation to how the submission system works here at HN... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808884 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1808884
- alain94040 16y agoIt's not just the title that was wrong: when I load the article, there is nothing compelling in the first 3 pages of text! It takes scrolling a lot before some useful data shows up here and there. No wonder it didn't get any upvotes the first time.
- sp4rki 16y agoYeah when I first read it I thought the same, but you do have to admit that the title made all the difference in regards to exposure. I even think i could have made a better job of the title had I actually though about it more, but since this was only a little experiment to prove the importance of titles in HN I guess it proved a point ;)
- mattparcher 16y agoNote that the 450k download number is of the free version of the game, Trainyard Express. There is also an impressive sales graph for the paid version at the end of the post, suggesting that the game has been rather lucrative since the beginning of October: http://struct.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/TheWholeShebang.png http://struct.ca/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/TheWholeShebang....
- mrbogle 16y agoThe little bump at oct 2 is $240, so it looks like each major horiz line is 2k/day. It seems the day he posted this, it made just north of 9k/day.
- dminor 16y agoLooks more like $1k per horizon line to me, but $4.5k/day is impressive nonetheless!
- cubicle67 16y agoNote also that 450k download number for the free version is now > 1 million! From its App Store description: Downloaded over a million times, woah! [Edit: make that 2 million now http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810010 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1810010]
- andre 16y agogreat breakdown, from start to finish
- andre 16y ago"always release on a Thursday" - never heard that one before
- brown9-2 16y agoAnyone care to speculate or enlighten the rest of us on where this pearl comes from?
- vaksel 16y agoi would imagine that applies more to the entertainment content. A game released on Thursday, will get played and told to the friends about Friday thru Sunday
- Groxx 16y agoEnlightenment not implied, but here's my retrospective theory: Sunday: few people looking to start something new, languish for a few days. Monday: it's *Monday*. Tuesday: Still beginning of the week, things are still being piled on Wednesday: nothing wrong with it Thursday: early adopters try, advantage of full Friday + an extra day of users before weekend Friday: people finish / wind down / have more free time to start things Saturday: In the swing of X, or looking to start X. With an assumption that you will always have early adopters any day of the week, at roughly level values (or increasing on Friday evening through Sunday). My final take from that: Thursday gives you part of a day with early birds to find game-breakers ASAP, and Friday and Saturday are useful days to have early to boost your numbers at the start. You're also sure to get all of Friday by starting on the day before. Wednesday gives little advantage over Thursday, but costs you another day before bug-fixing weekend / next week. And early week releases are, well, too close to Monday. Nobody likes that. All of which is wildly subjective, and is merely justification and not reason. But it makes some sense in this light (to me, at least).
- arn 16y agoApp store sales spike on weekends, so better to ride that trend.
- MattRix 16y ago
- sant0sk1 16y agoWell deserved success. It's an excellent game and I love seeing solo developers at the top of the charts!
- avgarrison 16y agoThis is certainly an inspiration for developers that want to take the time to make a quality game, instead of trying to "game" the app-store with submissions like iFart, etc.
- clemesha 16y agoI noticed the paid app was sold at varying times for $2.99, $1.99, and $0.99. Anyone have more information about the physiology/performance/trade-offs of those different prices? Do $0.99 apps sell way more than other priced apps?
- MattRix 16y agoTrainyard was at $1.99 at launch and for a while after that. I figured it was a low introductory price, but not so low that I'd get careless users who wouldn't put any effort into the game and would just give it 1 star reviews, which was a bigger problem back a few months ago before Apple took out "rate-on-delete". These days, I feel like there are less tangible disadvantages to the 99c price point, other than the fact that you make less per sale. There's still the issue that users are willing to put more effort into a product they pay more for, and will even go to further lengths to defend it, because they want to justify their purchase and their taste. On the App Store, it all comes down to perceived risk. If a user is unsure about an app, they probably won't spend much more than 99c because they don't want to overspend on a dud. Once a user sees an app in Apple's "featured list" or has used the lite version of that app, they'll be much more willing to splurge on a higher price, because they know what they're getting. For Trainyard, I felt that there was no longer a big difference between the $1.99 and $2.99 price points, because by the time a user arrived at the purchasing page, they already knew they wanted it. All that being said, there is a large contingent of users that seem to only buy apps at $0.99, but most of the time, your apps won't be visible to those users. The moment I reached the top 50, I knew I would have tons of that sort of user looking at Trainyard, so I did the price drop.
- dpcan 16y agoI went the opposite route in the Android Market. When the lite version of my game hit the top 20 in its category, I made a few nice updates, and I felt the full version earned its higher price (~$4). After making the change, the number of sales barely went down, but revenue went up. But now you have me thinking. Are MORE people in the the $0.99-only crowd seeing my app, and are there enough of those people to make DROPPING the price more financially beneficial??? I suppose I could run a "sale", but once you start getting comfortable with a nice daily income, taking risks becomes harder and harder.
- brc 16y agoTrainyard express is showing #1 top free and Trainyard (full) is showing #2 for me. Trainyard is also featured #1. I'm not much into games but curiosity got the better of me and Trainyard Express is downloading.
- Nemisis7654 16y agoThis is awesome. The story, I mean; unfortunately, I do not have an iOS device, which means I cannot play the game (I would if I could!). It gives me hope knowing that there are great success stories out there like this still. I know the chances are slim, but it's still really cool to hear these sorts of stories. Congrats on the success of your game!
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- bignoggins 16y agoI know Matt doesn't want to get into revenue specifics but based on what I've heard and read from other developers top 3 on the app store is > 20K/day in sales. If trainyard manages to maintain a top 10 position for the rest of the year, I think Matt could probably net > 500K after Apple's cut, especially considering the holiday season.
- stevenwei 16y agoThe most interesting thing to me is that the app sat in relative obscurity for 4 months before being featured by Apple, at which point sales exploded. And judging by the App Store, being 'featured' only meant that the app icon was added to the New & Noteworthy section....not the giant banner you get for being App of the Week (currently Nike GPS) or Game of the Week (currently Cut the Rope)...unless I missed it earlier in the month?
- dpcan 16y agoI'd consider that "featured" because you touch the little "featured" spotlight icon in the bottom of the App Store to get to these apps. I probably buy a game from these sections every week, or 2 weeks, but I almost never scour the store for hidden gems myself. I think this section of the App Store is a HUGE draw for developers because it allows them to use their imagination when creating a new game and they still have an inkling of hope that they'll get noticed or featured. In the Android Market however - if you create something awesome but original, you're pretty much doomed to obscurity unless you find some other marketing avenue to drive traffic to your game. Or maybe by some miracle Google will feature you, but they have pretty limited space available for featured apps, and nobody seems to know how those are chosen.
- stevenwei 16y agoThat's a good point, actually. The way the App Store looks and feels on the iPhone itself is a lot different than the version on the iPad or in iTunes. You get a lot more visibility being featured on the iPhone compared to the other two.
- fondue 16y agoYour story is very inspirational and makes me want to get back to work on my simple game! Are you looking to bring this to the Android market, and if you do, would you consider the 'free but with ads' style that is being offered by Angry Birds producer Rovio?
- MattRix 16y agoYeah, absolutely. I've heard way too many stories about return policies and all that on Android, so I think I'd try to do the same thing they did. It really depends on the market at that point in time though.
- d3bugging 16y agoGreat story. BTW, your dreamhost account was able to handle 100K submissions? not bad!
- MattRix 16y ago400k now. Yeah pretty crazy, I've almost used 40 gb of disk space, and if the traffic keeps up, it'll be a TB of submissions. That being said, it's also a bit unreliable and users often have connections fail when submitting, but it's really pretty solid. I've now switched to Dreamhost PS, so it's a little more expensive, just to make sure it's a bit more reliable.
- pclark 16y agoAny examples of iPhone game developers who made a decent game but didn't make six figure downloads?
- jcl 16y agoIt depends on your definition of "decent", but I wouldn't be surprised if there are many. This very article would be an example, if the author had not decided to release a free version and the Italian press hadn't picked it up. Prior to that, the exact same game languished in obscurity.
- MattRix 16y agoExactly, but all it takes is the right mention from the right influential person, and it can snowball. None of this would have worked if I hadn't made a good game though.
- p_h 16y agoI wonder if Matt is one of Toronto's "App Kings": http://www.torontolife.com/magazine/2010/11/ http://www.torontolife.com/magazine/2010/11/
- iampims 16y agoI just bought Trainyard to thank you for having written such an interesting blog post.
- maguay 16y agoI got Trainyard as soon as I got my iPod Touch recently just because of this post on HN. Actually, it was the first (and only, so far) game I've downloaded, just because of hearing about it here. Awesome game, and definitely something I think most hackers would like as it makes you think through the solutions. Great way to kill a few minutes between projects =D BTW, just like PopCap does with their games, I think this one could live on a Ton of platforms ... including PCs/Macs. That'd get in the people without an iOS device...