Sales of War Evolved have been pretty steady since it was released on November 25, 2009. On a weekday, we are usually ranked in the lower 100’s, while on the weekend we normally get into the top 100. The graph below from App Annie shows this trend.
In general, we were making $500 a week after Apple’s 30%, which we were really happy with. A few months ago, I got an email from the founder of the website Free App A Day (FAAD). His marketing pitch was simple: expose your app to hundreds of thousands of people for free, and then when it switches back to paid word of mouth will keep the app selling well. I was skeptical at first. I did not think that by giving something away for free, you could actually increase sales in the long run.
The Prep
In the months following, I did extensive research to determine if FAAD would actually help War Evolved. I took about two months worth of apps that were on FAAD to see if the campaign ended up increasing their sales. For some apps, FAAD was a complete waste of money – they were off the charts before, got to the top of the charts with FAAD, and then as soon as the promotion was over they dropped right back down off the charts. Alternatively – when an app was already high on the charts, after FAAD they continued to sell just as well as they did before. The general trend that I found was that if your app was ranked between 70-150, then FAAD helped. This was perfect for War Evolved.
In mid-April I sent over the payment to have War Evolved be featured on FAAD on the first Friday in June. The cost to have your app listed on a weekday is $1200. In addition to featuring War Evolved, we decided to cross promote our newest app, Tune Finder. If you got War Evolved for free, an alert box would pop up advertising Tune Finder.
In the time between April and June, I was busy getting War Evolved prepped for the cross promotion. War Evolved 1.2.4 introduced the new code for the cross promotion. War Evolved uses Opsive.com for the back end of the scoring system, and I knew that my current hosting plan for opsive.com would not be able to handle the traffic. I upgraded opsive.com to use a virtual machine instead of a shared server account. Everything was set, we just needed to wait for June 4th to get here.
The Day Of
I flipped the switch to free around 6PM PST on June 3rd, so that everything would be propagated by the time June 4th arrived. During those 6 hours of being free on June 3rd, War Evolved got about 1,700 downloads – and it wasn’t even listed on FAAD yet!
On June 4th, War Evolved got 73,654 downloads. It shot up to the number one game in free strategy, and number 21 overall. June 5th was even better – 168,325 downloads and a ranking of number 4 overall.
FAAD said they would get a lot of downloads, and they definitely did. I was surprised how quickly War Evolved shot up the rankings.
Opsive.com
I was right to think that the shared hosting account for opsive.com wouldn’t be able to handle all of the traffic. The virtual machine account couldn’t even handle it. At about 8AM EST on June 5th Opsive.com was taken down and I didn’t notice until I got up around 9:30AM. Opsive.com was hosted on the cheapest virtual machine hosting plan, so around 11AM we tried switching it to a more powerful virtual machine. That still couldn’t handle the traffic. I had to switch to a dedicated server account, a switch that was painful and caused War Evolved to crash a lot more than it should have. I exchanged 54 emails with my hosting provider that day. Some of them were just server status emails, but the majority weren’t. I would like to thank Acenet for doing such a great job, their support was top-notch and they helped me every step of the way. The new dedicated server completely switched over around 5PM, and it is still running great.
War Evolved’s Free Rank
The chart below shows the number of downloads we got while it was free. In total, we got over 670,000 downloads in 6 days!
Tune Finder’s Cross Promotion
Tune Finder is a new app that is hard to search for so it really hasn’t done too much. The cross promotion for Tune Finder dramatically changed that, at least for those six days during FAAD. The graph below shows the number of clicks Tune Finder was getting. All of these clicks were from people saying “OK” to the alert box shown at the start of this post.
Yes, that is 1,337 clicks in just one hour. At one point I saw it get up to 1,600 in one hour. All of these clicks had a dramatic effect on Tune Finder’s ranking: it shot up to number 14 on the music charts. Now that the promotion is over, it is off the charts again. However, we just made Tune Finder free so hopefully that will have a positive impact.
The Results
So was FAAD worth it? I can pretty much say yes. War Evolved is currently ranked #37 in strategy games, the highest I’ve ever seen it. The amount that we are making on a day to day basis is also dramatically larger. On Thursday we brought in $354 – that’s the most we’ve ever made in a single day. It should be exciting to see what the weekend brings in. The graph below shows a history of War Evolved’s income, after Apples 30% cut.
If you are a developer and are wondering if you should do FAAD (or something similar), I would advise you to do your research first. For War Evolved, it looks like it paid off. But that doesn’t mean it will for every game out there. In the end I am glad we did it, but it was definitely a risk from the beginning.
3 Responses to “Thoughts on Free App A Day”
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Hi Justin,
Quick question for you please … how did you know that the app was free and therefore okay to show the TuneFinder dialog – did you go off the date?
Cheers
Scott
Hey Scott,
Yes, it was completely off the time. When War Evolved starts up, it submits the id of the device to opsive.com. If the id was submitted between the start and end time of the promotion, the Tune Finder dialog would pop up.
If a person got War Evolved for free and then didn’t start it up until now they wouldn’t see the promotion, but I don’t think that is too many people.
If you want I can send you the script that I used.
Justin
Thanks Justin, I’ll take you up on the offer of the script please!
I’m trying something similar with Invaders World Tour on July 14th.
Cheers
Scott