indie-game-showcase
Latest
Sales results of App Store's first Indie Game Showcase revealed
Trying to stand out in the App Store is no easy feat, considering the number of games competing for attention and the inevitable flood of clones inspired by any successful venture. Smaller studios that lack the advertising budget of companies like EA or Ubisoft have an especially challenging time getting noticed, but last month Apple introduced the Indie Game Showcase, a promotion meant to lend more visibility to its highlighted titles. Gamasutra spoke with developers featured in the promotion to see how their titles benefited from the promotion. While Simon Flesser of Simogo, developer of Device 6, didn't share exact data, he noted that being featured has certainly been positive for the puzzling adventure novel. The studio's tweet from March 27, which falls within the running dates of the Indie Game Showcase, stated that Device 6 cleared 200,000 lifetime sales on the App Store. Other developers saw general boosts in downloads at the beginning of the promotion - Gauge, Game Atelier's free-to-try game of balancing meters as close to their threshold's edge as possible without going over, earned an average of 600 downloads a day. However, only three users in that daily average paid to unlock the rest of Gauge, resulting in an average of 7.3 euros earned per day. On a more general level, most developers saw an initial boost in downloads, but those sales spikes decayed quickly and rarely rippled to other efforts created by the studios. Chaotic Box's Frank Condello stated that the Showcase had "zero effect" on Chaotic's non-promoted titles and a "negligible" one on the free version of Critter Panic, its title in the Showcase. Critter Panic's promo status was also paired with a price drop in the month of March, but Condello said he hadn't seen any sales in the few days after the game was set back to $1.99. [Image: Simogo]
The TUAW Daily Update Podcast for March 21, 2014
NOTE: An issue with the Libsyn player not working on iOS devices has been resolved by moving to an MP3 format from the previous M4A format. We apologize for the inconvenience the past few days. It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get some the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the player at the top of the page. The Daily Update has been moved to a new podcast host in the past few days. Current listeners should delete the old podcast subscription and subscribe to the new feed in the iTunes Store here.
