Reprinted from Majaka.net

EDIT : Part 2 is now live with actual IAP sales data: Freemium is no silver bullet

This is the first in a series of 2 posts where we analyze how Ski Champion performed on the Apple App Store. In this post, we take look at download numbers. The next post will focus on monetization. Be sure to follow me on Twitter (@NicolasG_B) to be kept posted.

Ski Champion can be downloaded for free here.

Gaël and myself started Majaka in January this year. One of the key learnings we wanted to take away from making Ski Champion was how many downloads could a small, independent developer expect with a free game that does * just okay * without being a hit.

Downloads were very frontloaded, aside from a recent peak

Downloads were very frontloaded, aside from a recent peak
 

Ski Champion shredded its way into the Apple App Store on March 25th. Two months in, and the game has now been downloaded 221,724 times (and counting).

We will now explain why the team at Majaka considers this figure a success, how we optimized Ski Champion’s presence on the App Store, and what lessons we learnt for future titles.

=> Sit back, grab a cup of mulled wine, and enjoy the ride !

First some data

We know our beloved games industry peers are always thirsty for juicy, accurate development stats-and they should. So here is what went into the making of Ski Champion:

200K+ downloads. What’s the verdict?

It’s not a *stellar* number, mind you. The most popular iOS games regularly hit several millions downloads. But not every free game on the App Store gets 200K downloads either. Funpark Friends had 68,000 installs in 5 weeks. Others go absolutely unnoticed despite being free.

Ski Champion ranked top 25 free apps in France, Italy and Slovakia, and  Top 10 free racing and sport games in 25 countries.

All in all, the figures certainly exceeded our expectations so we consider it a reasonable success.

Was it purely random?

It’s no secret that offering a free App will boost downloads tremendously in itself. However, as stated above, some free apps do get unnoticed so we like to think we must have been doing something right (remember, we are French and therefore cocky). Looking back, we attribute our download numbers to a combination of several factorsthat we will attempt to list below:

App Store optimized

App discovery is a key challenge for developers on the App Store. Many (most?) usersaren’t looking for anything in particular, and blissfully browse the charts & lists for apps to download. Here is how we increased the likelyhood that someone stumbling upon Ski Champion within a list of other apps would actually go ahead and download it :

That's actually how it happened !

A development anecdote
 

Hit iOS Games Icons

We looked at our icon among some of the best, most eye-catching ones
 

Funny trick : we suspect some players thought they actually *had* to give us a 5-stars review to get the reward. Hopefully they liked the game too !

Some players thought they * had * to rate Ski Champion with 5 stars to get the 20 free Ski Pass. Hopefully they liked the game too !!
 

Can you achieve Gold?

Challenge your friends

So, to summarize on Ski Champion’s App Store presence, we now understand that players make their download decisions based on a very small set of information. They take less than a second figuring out whether they even want to check out an app’s description and screenshots. Only after this 2 steps process do they decide to download the app.

4th Sport Game

Most players do not even go past this step. Make sure they do!
 

Pre-release teasing

Majaka is a new and self-funded company. While investing into marketing is something we would like to do more, and sooner rather than later, we decided to see how far free marketing techniques could take us for Ski Champion, our first title. Here are the actions we carried out:

Be sure to follow us too :)

We posted mostly status updates and pictures, and shared those on our own personal walls to encourage our friends to "like" the Majaka page.
 

At the end of the day, other than within our own network of friends and acquaintances, there’s no way our marketing efforts reached 200K people. However, by building up the tiniest hype among our entourage, we made sure many of them actually downloaded Ski Champion and, more crucially, gave it a 5-stars review. This in turn helped convert many iPhone players.

Find a niche

One of the main reasons why we made Ski Champion was because we simply could not find a proper downhill ski racing game on the AppStore. It sounded like an underserved niche market, that also tied in rather well with the Winter skiing season in Europe (although the sun already shone quite nicely over most of Europe by late March, when the game got released).

While skiing may not have such a broad appeal as the most sucessful casual apps out there, Ski Champion definitely enjoyed particular success in countries where the discipline is the most popular : France, Italy, USA, Sweden, Japan or Switzerland.

A price-point experiment

Finally, we recently got an extra, unexpected 50K downloads by doing the following :

Free to paid ... to free

This is clearly a downward curve and we expect download volumes to rapidly decline to their former levels. Nevertheless, an extra 50K players is nothing to sneeze at !
 

Now, the practice of temporarily turning a paid app into a free app to give downloads a short-lived boost is fairly well known. There are news aggregators all over the web keeping track of paid apps turning free, and feeding those deals to their readers. What we learnt is that it seems to work both ways. It will be interesting to see how the trick turns out a second time around (hint: we suspect it  *will* work, just not as well)

Could we have gotten even more downloads?

Why, of course. There are many means available to drive installs of iOS apps. However, given the time and ressources available to us, we intentionnally kept away from most avenues, such as:

Lessons learnt

For our next games, we will definitely pay attention to what seems to have worked with Ski Champion: start marketing early, optimize App Store presence, support Game Center, etc. We incentivized players to subscribe to our newsletter, with decent results : we now have a 4500 people fanbase compared to 1300 before launch. 4500 people that we can promote our next game to.

On the other hand, we are kicking ourselves in the lycra-clad leg for overlooking the following 2 things:

1. Notifications: Make the math: we collected the email addresses of less than 2% of our 200K+ players. We have no way of communicating directly with the vast majority of the rest. What a waste! We will have to find a better way next time, such as to implement server notifications allowing us to send short messages to players.

2. App Store Localization: It’s okay to edit exisiting App descriptions, but you cannot actually add a new language without an app update. We launched Ski Champion with only French and English descriptions, thinking we could always add other languages later  on through iTunes Connect. We were wrong. We managed to fit Italian before the 1.1 update and have German and Russian translations waiting for update 1.2 (thanks Ji & Denitza’s mom!)

In retrospect, there are many other things that could have strenghtened our position as a games publisher. In particular, we could have offered more reward opportunities to our players : share app with friends, become a Facebook fan, follow Majaka on Twitter, subscribe to Youtube channel. We elected those out to be faster to market, but would definitely like to try them in the future.

=> That’s it for today ! In our next post, we’ll look at how Ski Champion performed financially for Majaka, and why. Follow me on Twitter (@NicolasG_B) to be kept posted!

Meanwhille, anything else you would like to know ? Do you have more download data to share? Tell us in the comments section!