A two year look at the sales of chart-topping iOS title, A Dark Room

Two years after the game made its App Store debut, A Dark Room developer Amir Rajan has pulled back the curtain on the game's sales figures. 

Posting the numbers on reddit, Rajan has contrasted the game's sales over a two year period.

The figures reveal that during the first 12 months 773,933 users paid for the game, while 1.05 million players opted to download it for free. 1.02 million of those free downloads occurred when Rajan made the game free for a week during August 2014. 

Offering some insight into those numbers, Rajan says that A Dark Room went viral in both the UK and the US, becoming the #1 premium free-to-play app in the US for 18 days straight without being featured or promoted by Apple in any way. 

In an earlier reddit post, the developer explained that when he made A Dark Room free it climbed to #3 in the Overall Charts, beating games such as Candy Crush, Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, and Clash of Clans to the top spots. 

However, despite being downloaded over 1 million times in the space of a month, A Dark Room's 45 day paid download average failed to receive a boost. 

Over the next 12 months sales started to wane, and from November 2014 to October 2015 A Dark Room saw 202,440 paid downloads. Again, Rajan experimented with making the game free for a limited time, which netted him an additional 196,959 free downloads. 

Overall, A Dark Room brought in $697,270 in gross revenue over the two years. After tax had been deducted, and the earnings had been divided amongst the team, Rajan himself was left with net profits of $191,810. 

"It's incredibly difficult to have a smash hit. But I think it's very doable to have many games that make a small amount of money per month," said Rajan, speaking about the successes and failings of A Dark Room.

'If you had 10 games, each making $50 a month, that isn't too bad. And there is always a chance that one of those will perform better than the others.

"I think the most important thing is to stay true to whatever your style is, and try to build a personal connection with the player - that's the one advantage indie devs have over AAA companies."

You can take a look at the month-by-month sales figures of A Dark Room and Rajan's other titles right here.