Rocket Santa has been in the App store for nearly 1 month now so I thought it would be nice to share the sales figures with you. Rocket Santa is listed in the UK and US stores only and i’ve converted all values to dollars to make it easier to digest.

Rocket Santa units sold

Rocket Santa dollars made

Lets take a look at some promotional efforts and their impact on the graphs.

The Great App Bake Off 2009

Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer runs an annual App baking contest. I decided to enter this year and submitted my developer entry on 19th December (I also acted as a sponsor for the competition, offering promotional codes for Star Fusion and Rocket Santa as prizes). Gavin’s App Bake Off has been picked up by many of the larger iPhone sites so this may have had a positive impact on my sales figures – its hard to tell. Either way its a great idea and you still have time to enter with an App cake of your own.

Notcot

On 16th December Rocket Santa appeared on the front page of notcot.org. This resulted in a spike of 8 sales that day which accounts for the surge in the week commencing 14th December. More importantly though, it was great to see Rocket Santa on the site since I religiously visit Notcot every day for inspiration.

Mundue Holiday promotion

Matt Martel of Mundue.net very generously offered a golden opportunity to around 25 iPhone developers. He ran rotating advertisements in his excellent game reMovem at zero cost to the developers. Adverts for Rocket Santa began running on 23rd December and resulted in 1,238 clicks over the holiday period. Unfortunately I have seen no uplift in purchases through this. Perhaps my app store page is not compelling enough, perhaps people don’t want a Christmas themed app, perhaps Rocket Santa does not look like that great a game :-) who knows. Even so, i’m very appreciative of Matts efforts and hope that we can work on similar promotional efforts in the future.

So 1 month after launch Rocket Santa sold 27 units and, after Apple’s 30% cut, made a total of $18.90. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.

I feel like my first two games have been great learning experiences but also very simple in terms of gameplay. I’ve already started working on my third game which promises to be more complex and i’m hoping to draw on my experiences from Star Fusion and Rocket Santa to make it as good as it can be.

So, a total of seven people have bought Star Fusion and ten people have used a promo code to download the game for free. Clearly I have some work to do in order to increase the number of sales. I have to say that even though these sales are fairly dire, the thought of 17 people playing Star Fusion is an incredible feeling.

Promotion

I’ve only really scratched the surface when it comes to promotion but I have put in some effort. Here’s a list of the activities so far…

1. 26th July: Two promotional codes published on twitter to celebrate the launch of Star Fusion
2. 27th July: Review request sent to 148Apps along with a promotional code
3. 27th July: Promotional Post created on iPhone Dev SDK forums along with 4 promotional codes
4. 27th July: Review request sent to Touch Arcade along with a  promotional code
5. 27th July: Two more promotional codes published on twitter
6. 27th July: Review request sent to TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) but didn’t include a promotional code this time
7. 30th July: Added Star Fusion to game list on cocos2d for iphone website along with 4 promotional codes
8. 30th July: Review request sent to AppVee along with a promotional code
9. 30th July: Review request sent to Touch Reviews along with a promotional code

So what worked? Well, I published 16 promotional codes and from the download statistics above only 10 have been used. I’ve published 8 codes to forums, 4 to twitter, and 4 to individuals (review sites). The only constructive comment i’ve had back has been via the iPhone Dev SDK forum. It’s a little early to tell but I think at this stage it’s fair to say that posting to forums gives the best response. None of the review sites have got back to me yet.

Reception & Feedback

I’ve had a few positive user reviews on the iPhone App Store . One of the comments was particularly useful since it offered some constructive criticism. Obviously i’ve shown the game to as many people as possible so i’ve had feedback there too. General consensus seems to be that the game is enjoyable but lacks replay value. I’ve also had some negative comments regarding the graphics and science behind the story.

Next Steps

I’ve listened to what people are saying and i’m currently working on a Free update for the game (I’ll write a separate post about this soon). My aim is to add some more depth as well as refining some of the existing gameplay elements. I’ll also be adding some more polish to the graphics. It’s certainly been an enjoyable experience so far and i’m feeling positive about the steps I can take to increase sales. Money is only one aspect of creating games though and I think the biggest draw for me is the idea that one day i’d see someone I don’t know playing one of my games. How great would that be!

Thanks for reading this post. Here are some promotional codes to download Star Fusion for free from iTunes. Enjoy!

49KMPWAHJ64X

7646MLNRE3EJ

A6RKH7YEEL73

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