Day 5 of the Launch Boy saga!

We had a good run, but it’s become clear now that Launch Boy is returning to Earth. We peaked at #81 on kid’s games on Monday, and we’re gliding (falling?) back into obscurity as we fell off the “New Games” list in iTunes. What surprised me in particular was how fast the lifecycle was — your window of opportunity to climb the charts is literally a couple days. Even for a totally awesome revolutionary game (not to imply that we were), I would imagine that word-of-mouth viral spread would need more time than that to kick in. Pre-release buzz is the way to go, so you get your surge all at once. Unfortunately, we don’t have an audience (yet!) to buzz to, so hopefully that’s something we’ll cultivate in time.

To calibrate ourselves, we compared our ranking chart a few other games released at the same time. Most had a similar trajectory, with a peak in the >50 rank in a genre and a swift fall a few days later. Unless the launch marketing campaign generates the range of 10K+ downloads per day (at LEAST), your game will be pushed off the charts.

I’m going to start scouring the app rankings to see of any app was able to pull off a “second act” after the initial launch. For us, it seems like a stretch to think we can hit that 3000+ download/day rate (that we were getting from the iTunes new games listing) with the limited marketing resources we have at the moment. In the meantime, time to regroup and strategize for our next title!

We’re at day 3 of Launch Boy!

As of our launch last Saturday to our Monday report, we’re up to 3700 downloads, putting us on the iTunes charts! According to appfigures (an awesome app sales tracking service), as of writing we’re #82 on the Kids Games chart, and #136 in the Action Games chart!

In retrospect, we maybe should have categorized Launch Boy as “Family” or “Arcade” — in our rush to release we failed to think through how to best fit into the subgenres of games. But is it better to be ranked lower on a higher-profile chart (like “Action”) or higher in a lower-profile chart? Unfortunately the iTunes data doesn’t tell us where the traffic is coming from, so unfortunately we can’t answer this question.

Our attempts at viral spread through Facebook/Twitter still look to be dead in the water. As of Sunday, only 7 posts were made through Facebook (with similar numbers for Twitter). I’m surprised how little our “post scores/achievements” feature is being used, although I shouldn’t be. It’s been said that people are getting weary of wall spam from games, and so far it’s proven quite true.

While our numbers are probably beans compared to the big players out there, nothing can compare to the huge personal satisfaction we get from seeing people all around the world play our game! Go go Launch Boy!

Follow @exitplanstudios

In case you couldn’t tell from the site, Exit Plan Studios is a new venture for us, and we’re in the process of learning the iOS app developer scene. There’s lots of hearsay about how brutal it is (see this revenue survey report), but, being the masochists we are, we wanted to find out first hand.

So here is our first release, LAUNCH BOY. It’s a simple casual distance game with cute character design, free for download (check it out here!) and three $1 in-app purchases. In all it was about a month of (very) part-time development.

It went live on 11/12, and to our surprise the downloads began almost immediately. It was completely undiscoverable on the iTunes store, so we’re guessing the 3rd party iTunes app aggregators already picked us up.

We also added hooks to Facebook and Twitter, to give us an outside chance of virality. So far, very few users have posted (5 tweets, 2 Facebook status updates), which dashes our hopes for the sustainable growth from those channels.

The final report? iTunes Connect put us at 300 downloads yesterday, 10 in-app purchases (including 3 of my own). It’s a pretty low conversion from free to paid users at the moment, but that’s not surprising. The surprising part (at least to me) is that we were able to reach as many users as we did with literally no marketing. This morning we’ve reached 600 folks posting stores to Game Center, which is encouraging!

Of course, without marketing, I expect the growth to disappear literally overnight, as the game falls off the “New” charts and into an early grave. As the green developers we are, we’re now exploring ways to try to break through the marketing limitations for a small studio. Any veterans out have suggestions or experiences to share? We’d love to hear from you!

More updates to come!

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