Bumps drops 7 places in games, advice?

UtopianGames

Hi Guys,

Just woke up to see Bumps has dropped 7 places in games in 24 hours and is now out of the top 25.

I'm seriously thinking about raising the price to $1.99 (we originally planned to release for $99 see how things went then make it $2.99)

We have a lite version coming soon along with 1.1 with new levels and a mini game (both submitted yesterday).

Any advice would be welcome on how to gain back some spots.

Darren.

quantumsheep

utopiangames said:
we originally planned to release for $99...

That seems a little steep, even for a game of Bumps' quality

QS

victorkin11

I think when the update release, it will help!

quantumsheep

On a more serious note, we're all in uncharted territory here with you, and anything anyone tells you would be pure speculation gleaned from 'studying' the market.

In other words, they'd be guessing, as opposed to speaking from experience.

Like it or not, you're the authority on what happens when you get this high now

Good luck mate,

QS

synthesis

I recommend that you don't!!!
Let the Lite version do its thing. That may help exposure.

If you raise price...you are likely to fall even faster.

I counted about 6 or 7 new apps released in the last 2 days that have shot to the top 25. Your slide is a matter of it being too crowded. If your sales are still holding...you probably are fine.

I don't think Bumps is going to do 5-10k downloads a day to get a top 25 slot (OVERALL)...so you probably have peaked. I wouldn't raise the price...as I am pretty sure that won't help you climb higher.

I would get to work on a "Bumps 2" and make sure you have it ready to go in 15-30 days after the Lite release to capitalize on your current market share. Then once its ready to submit...update Bumps and Bumps Lite with an ad card on the splash pages announcing Bumps 2 and submit them all at once.

For Bumps 2, use the same skin and same game base...make a couple of new mini games (or change the skins on the current ones) and create a batch of new puzzles. This is the best way (IMO) to get that second dollar from the same title...without damaging your current rankings for Bumps.

Let the current stuff do its thing and get those other titles out ASAP!!!

UtopianGames

Yes we counted a few good ones too like monster dash and chillingo's zombie game.

Were not falling as fast as others most noticeable are gangster west coast and the incident.

5-10k for a top 25 is a little off, at #17 games we were doing 2.5k a day.

Darren.

synthesis

I meant 5-10K for Top 25 Overall.

I recall you peaked around 30. I have heard reports of 5-10K downloads for 10-20 positions and 10K+ downloads for a Top 10 position (overall)

BTW:
I have looked at a lot of apps and their lifetime sales charts...and nearly every time an app raised its price $1...the sales CRASHED hard. More times then not...they quickly dropped their price back down but NEVER regained their previous positions/exposure. The stable apps were the ones that didn't futz around with the price.

Look at some lifetime charts on app annie and you will see what I mean.

firemaplegames

For what it's worth, I changed the price of Danger Cats! from .99 cents to 1.99$ and my sales actually increased.
Sales have been steadily, but slowly, increasing since I released the game 9 months ago.

As a test, and mostly because of the success of Bumps, I decided to try it back down at .99 cents and see what would happen.
Money-wise, it's pretty much exactly the same as before, except now I have twice as many sales.

I think I will keep at at .99 for a little while longer, as I am going to work on Danger Cats! 2 as soon as my next game.
Hopefully some of these new customers will buy the sequel.

Sales for games typically dip a little during the week, here's hoping your sales will pick up again this weekend!

amigoni

Hi Darren,
I think synthesis advice is great. Start working on Bumps 2 or if you can do a variance in a different game category, even better. You want to capitalize on your brand (Bumps) so that people keep familiar with it.

Also I have to think that the drop is due to the crash at start. I can't even start the game anymore on my iphone. All other games salad games start so I must believe that is something due to the game going straight into the intro, hogging even more memory than the others.

Either way $2.5k per day is pretty amazing!

UtopianGames

Umm not starting anymore is a big worry.

We have 22 actors in the 6 screens with the size being 2880x320.

I will change it to single screen splash and swap images rather than scroll along.

Thanks for that!

Darren.

UtopianGames

Ok done the update...again.

Guess from now on its single screen at a time (i only stream lined it to give the user a better experience instead of waiting for scenes to load, that's why i put 6 together).

Lesson learned so from now on load load load.

Darren.

AfterBurnett

Or not show it at all... we're all capable of creating our own loading screens when we need em

Photics

utopiangames said:
Just woke up to see Bumps has dropped 7 places in games in 24 hours and is now out of the top 25.

I'm seriously thinking about raising the price to $1.99 (we originally planned to release for $99 see how things went then make it $2.99)

We have a lite version coming soon along with 1.1 with new levels and a mini game (both submitted yesterday).

Any advice would be welcome on how to gain back some spots.

As mentioned above, raising the price would likely cause your app to drop faster.

Lately, I've been wondering how successful this market can be. Even if you release a great app, it's highly unlikely that it will stay in the top spots. There are 250,000+ apps out there, all fighting for the top spot. Games naturally get stale over time. New games replace them. The question is... can you do it again... and again... AND AGAIN?!

Even if you make $10,000 with one app, can it be done again? It can take months to create an app that's special. That means you'd need to create the equivalent of Bumps every 2-3 months to make an average salary.

I don't know if I have any good advice.

You could create an iPad version and get some quick money from that side of the iTunes App store, but then what?! How is this sustainable? I don't think it is. You just have to keep making games... more and more games. Eventually you run out of ideas or reach burnout. The novelty of making games wears off. Meanwhile, the market is getting more and more competitive. The players are filling up their iOS devices with games. I think the demand for apps might be going down. But if not, the supply is certainly going up.

Meanwhile, GameSalad is stagnant. They can't even keep spammers off their forums or communicate properly with their community. I'm approaching the one-year mark with iPhone development and I'm wondering if I should get off this ride.

...but there are still glimmers of hope. It seems that iAds is slowly growing. Game Center could add awesome new features that would make our games more competitive. The iPad is selling like crazy. It seems that a smaller iPad is on the way and I hear rumors of the iPhone going to other phone companies. That adds a lot of new customers.

When I see this thread, I don't see much joy or happiness at hitting the top. That's concerning to me. Even if you win, do you ultimately lose?! Tshirtbooth is another GameSalad success story. $25,000+ for making games is amazing... but that's over the course of a year. As a side-line, that's amazing. But as a full-time gig, that's not enough.

Chaser

Utopian
You say 22 actors on opening scene why not just make those 5 scenes into 5 single images then your touch actors to move camera

Chaser

In a side note I raised the price of 1 of my apps and same amount of sales so I doubled my money

StusApps

Photics said:

Even if you make $10,000 with one app, can it be done again? It can take months to create an app that's special. That means you'd need to create the equivalent of Bumps every 2-3 months to make an average salary.

Bumps will make a lot (A LOT) more than $10000. It might have made about that already but it is not going to suddenly stop selling altogether. If it drops 100 places it will still be running at respectable daily money. It's only been out about 2 weeks.

When you get a few reasonable apps in the store they will generally keep ticking over. As tshirtbooth said, he hasn't released anything for 3 months. Good games kinda stay earning at a level, what that level is depends on the game and continuing appeal.

My early apps are now almost stable every day pulling in about $100 a day total (I know it's only a month since release, but they are no longer featured anywhere). While this isn't perhaps a main income it is quite nice to tick over at $3000 a month. If I could get to a settled $200 a day after the new apps sales come down I would be really really happy.

Photics

StusApps said:
When you get a few reasonable apps in the store they will generally keep ticking over.

I think that's true. I think Firemaplegames mentioned something that supports this idea. Isn't he making like $100 a day with older apps? 365 x $100 = $36,500 a year.

It still seems more like a cool sideline rather than a main gig.

Also, I think Chaser's suggestion of camera panning is an excellent idea. Why should you have to degrade the quality of the app? Quick cuts are not as soft as the panning effect in the game already.

Chunkypixels

Darren, I dont think you have anything to worry about.... its still very early days in the games appstore life. I think the game will continue to sell well for some time yet, and will have natural dips and rises in popularity. I think you'll see a rise with the update, and with future updates you could easily keep the game selling.

So I wouldnt panic.

I read an article this morning, where the guys at Rovio gave the timeline of success for Angry Birds. It took the game almost 6 months from its initial release before it hit the top spot in the US. During that time, through regular updates and the addition of new content, they steadily increased the games popularity until they had the hit that we all know today.

I know thats a special case.... but it does show that even the most popular games sometimes take time to build momentum.

I think Bumps is in a good position, and could still make future runs up the charts.

charlieaf92

My biggest worry are all of the reviews saying that the game crashes - these are poison. I would get more reviews posted ASAP to help push those down - and if there is an issue with crashing on certain devices, fix it ASAP and acknowledge it in the description and let people know it was fixed.

If to keep the game from crashing, users should close multitasking apps first - add that to the description.

Just my 2 cents from a PR damage control perspective.

butterbean

I agree with what others are saying, and to stick to the .99 cent price point. Sure you might get more money the first few days, but usually when devs do that, they drop out of the top spots pretty fast. Do what Synthesis says, and stick with your price point, keep updating the game, and get ready to release part 2 in the next 30 days, or as soon as you can

UtopianGames

Chaser said:
Utopian
You say 22 actors on opening scene why not just make those 5 scenes into 5 single images then your touch actors to move camera

Yep that's what we did do, have one big scene with 5 480x320 actors and scrolled camera along but some have said that might be the reason for the crash so now we start with a single room then onto the camera scroll scene.

Darren.

millerbrother1

Photics, If I did the math right game development can be VERY lucrative. On this thread Utopian mentions getting 2500 downloads/day.

Darren said: "5-10k for a top 25 is a little off, at #17 games we were doing 2.5k a day."

2500 downloads/day x $0.99 = $2475/day - Apple's 30% = $1732.50. Do this for 30 days and you've made over $50k in one month.

That's not to say this is how many units they sold every day for an entire month, but you get the idea. It is very possible (with a successful game) to make a reasonable income. Add secondary sales to this (iPad, new versions, etc.) and you can really make a go of it.

expired_012

its #50 overall now dropped down a lot. Its not your fault tho, its all of the new big titles that just arrived in the store and got featured, and are now taking over the top 50

firemaplegames

It was my understanding that Apple used an algorithm to help new releases climb up the charts faster. Something like 14 x day 1 sales, 13 x day 2 sales. 12 x day 3 sales, etc..

Which will inflate the initial sales for the first two weeks or so. Just to try and give all apps some exposure on the devices.

I'm not at all positive that this is true though, just what I read somewhere.

Anyway, I have no doubt that when everything settles down, Bumps will climb back up.

---

In regards to the crashing, you have to be very careful with the image RAM, especially on older devices.

I'm pretty sure that the first iPhone, the 2G, only allows 20MB of image RAM before it crashes - this is regardless of the the other RAM usage.

Having a long Scene with all the actors laid out should be fine. However, each 480x320 image is 400K - regardless of file size. Laying out 5 in a row will instantly jump the RAM up to 2MB - which SHOULD still be ok.

But then again, older devices have way limited RAM, and if they are multitasking, maybe it will cause crashes.

Maybe for the time being, like you said, make them separate Scenes just to play it safe.

chosenonestudios

Why cant you do one actor and when you touch it, it changes images? That should be much more efficient and you wouldn't need it to load. Also you could interpolate and make it fade out and it would still look pretty damn good.

firemaplegames

@chosenone: that still uses the same amount of RAM. Whether the images are already there, or they fade in or get swapped in, it doesn't matter. Adding an image to your Scene in any way will increase the image memory usage.

amigoni

@utopiangames about the crashing. Another way you can do it is to have the intro play once you push the play button. Instead of when you first start the app. There is something going on when you start a gamesalad app that hogs down the iphone and we obviously don't know what it is. If you want me to test it out before you release it let me know. I would be happy to help since the one I got now won't work . You can email me at amigoni@gmail.com

chosenonestudios

firemaplegames said:
@chosenone: that still uses the same amount of RAM. Whether the images are already there, or they fade in or get swapped in, it doesn't matter. Adding an image to your Scene in any way will increase the image memory usage.

I think that way would use less ram though then using the camera.

chosenonestudios

Also you could just make the intro play the first time you play it, relatively easy to do and I think it would help because most of the time I just wanted to skip to the action or have an option to turn it off.

amigoni

chosenonestudios said:
Also you could just make the intro play the first time you play it, relatively easy to do and I think it would help because most of the time I just wanted to skip to the action or have an option to turn it off.

+1

UtopianGames

We have gone for a Bumps splash single screen then after 2 seconds it's back to old game with splash and intro so i hope it helps.

We have been dropping a lot and sales really do suffer per slot lost.

Currently #33 games and #57 top paid so we think sales will be around the 600-800 mark when we get the daily report 2morro.

10 places higher and there over 2K so dropping even 1 place can have a big effect in sales.

Still learning and having fun so it's all good, shame about the 1stars and people not being able to play.

Maybe we pushed GS too far and broke it, maybe we would be better off making snack time games until GS can handle bigger games.

Thinking about buying an iPad and doing Bumps on that but I'm not sure GS will be up to it tbh and would h8 to see a lot of 1 star "Wont load" "Crashes" "Freezes" posts so might hold of on that for now and do some game in a day type games.

Darren.