Chaotic Box Blog

Back when I announced my iPhone app Flux I mentioned it was more of a marketing experiment than anything else. The question back then was: "Can a free app increase sales of a paid app?" The answer in short is "sorta, yes", the real answer is more complicated...

First lets have a look at the best case scenario. You release a free app, and a week later it shows up on the "New" list. This is exactly what happened with Flux (yay!) unfortunately it only happened in Canada (yay?) Being featured in one country alone is odd enough, but it also never appeared in the "New & Noteworthy" section in iTunes - only in the "New" section on the device App Store. The device is where you want to be of course, but this was odd - I don't think anyone knows how Apple chooses what apps to feature and when, but I can safely say now that I got absolutely no clue how this crap works - my theory is someone goofed. Anyway, since the first day of being half-featured it shot into the top 10 free entertainment apps and stayed there, also occasionally popped in and out of the top 25 free apps overall. This works out to around 3,000 downloads a day at its peak, down to around 1,500 day a week later (remember, this is the Canada store only).

My only paid app at the moment is Pinch 'n Pop! so one way to judge how this experiment is working is to look at Pinch 'n Pop!'s ranking in the Canada store:



Unfortunately I don't have ranking data prior to June 6th, but you can still see an obvious (if fragile) upward trend the day after Flux was featured. This is of course the effect I had hoped for, but seeing as this is the Canada store and those are the Kids/Family subcategories, this only translates to an average of around 5 downloads a day. Still, much better than than the 0.2 downloads a day I was averaging in Canada previously.

Here is a more sobering graph:



This shows the estimated world-wide profit (in CAD$) for Pinch 'n Pop! since May 1st. You can easily see how an update can affect sales (and how quickly an app gets buried again), but sales following the release of Flux are pretty flat - similar to the background-noise sales I normally see between updates. It's fair to say those sales would've been even worse if not for the small bump in Canada, but a pittance plus a pittance is still a pittance

I've seen no appreciable trends in other countries. Flux has been downloaded nearly 10,000 times in the USA and was scrapping the bottom of the top 100 free entertainment apps list early on, but once it finally fell off that list downloads dropped to well under 100 a day. Sadly it seems difficult to get any kind of exposure on the USA store these days - even with a free app, and even with similarly-useless apps sitting in the top paid lists.

Some more details and hindsight

Although I generally despise SEO (search-engine-optimization) tactics I did play around with the name displayed in the App Store a bit, changing it from "Flux" to "Flux (Liquid Fire)" and back again a few times. I found that "Flux (Liquid Fire)" definitely got more attention than just "Flux", so I guess a little SEO never hurts. The increased downloads may have more to do with EBO (eye-ball-optimization) than SEO however. For the most part, people buy/download whatever's stuffed in front of their faces, so the more eyes you can draw to your app while it's visible the better.

Flux 1.0 contained a link to the www.chaoticbox.com website and a generic "More from Chaotic Box" link that leads directly to Pinch 'n Pop!'s App Store page. For Flux 1.1 (which was just approved today) I've updated the Pinch 'n Pop! link to a graphical banner and also added that banner to a new options screen, so users might see the banner more than once per launch. With EBO in mind I've also updated the Flux icon for the 1.1 update to better reflect the "Liquid Fire" subtitle. The original icon was admittedly rushed and fugly.

I'll post an update once some more data is available but for now I can conclude that unrelated-but-free apps can certainly help the sales of paid apps, but only if the free apps get a ton of exposure themselves - and that's definitely not a guarantee.

Pretty graphs courtesy of the excellent folks at appFigures.com.

Please check out the official Flux web page for info, screens, and a quick video demo. It's basically just another virtual toy, but from my perspective it's more of a tech demo and marketing experiment rolled into an iPhone app...

The project was originally created to facilitate the testing and optimization of a fluid effect that's a big part of my long in-development (and as yet unannounced) space-shooter game. So it's a tech-demo, but I've also been curious to see how or if free apps can help boost sales of paid apps - or paid app, in my case at least. This seemed as good an opportunity as any to try that strategy.

And yes, this is the app that suffered an unscheduled name change at the last second due to ill planning. I think it worked out in the end however, as the old name didn't lend itself to such witty marketing slogans as "What the Flux?" or the ever so delightful "Go Flux Yourself!"

Over the past week or so I've been working on a free toy/tech-demo app for the iPhone. I'll post the app details a little later, but for now I will tell a tale of wasted hours...

Submission time. I fire up the 2.x SDK, build, zip, get the 512x512 icon and screenshots ready to go then log into iTunes Connect. I fill out the first page of details, hit "continue" and am greeted with the following bright-red message:

"The Application Name that you provided has already been used. Please provide a unique Application Name."

Darn. I had of course performed an App Store search for the intended name a few days prior, and also a few Google searches to weed out any pre-announced apps, but as it turns out that isn't enough. Now I faced the prospect of coming up with a new name, fixing all references to the old name, and redoing all the branding and logo artwork - including the app icon, which consisted of a single stylized letter ripped from the logo!

Lesson learned. When starting a new project I almost always use a "codename" of some sort, anticipating that things will change in time. More often than not however, the codename simply sticks and becomes the real name. After this experience however, my advice is to log into iTunes Connect and start the app submission process early and often, just to ensure the name is available (even the codename). I would also recommend holding off on the branding/logo art until a release is within sight, and checking with iTunes Connect prior to committing to the art to ensure the name is still available after weeks or months of development.

I suspect this problem will get worse as 40,000 apps balloons to 100,000 (and more), and I also suspect we may see some sort of name squatting by less ethical devs by submitting empty shells with release dates far into the future. Larger companies will no doubt trademark their app names and use legal means to shoo away any squatters, but us little guys should always keep a few alternates handy - anyone who's registered a domain name knows the drill.

Welcome to the new Chaotic Box Blog!

The Chaotic Box website has been a tad err, chaotic of late, so a bit of a refresh was in order. I've simplified things and moved the blog back onto the main site, rather than keeping it buried in some obscure (and out of date) developer sub-site. I'm starting with a clean slate however, as most of the old blog posts are now irrelevant.

This new blog will focus primarily on iPhone/iPod touch game development, marketing, and related ramblings. I've also joined the Twitter and YouTube bandwagons (links in the sidebar) so expect some noise on those channels as well.