The idea behind Rocket Santa was to rapidly develop a fun Christmas game, partly to gauge interest in holiday themed games and partly because I was keen to create a second game before the end of 2009. The game had its fair share of teething issues and feedback i’ve received for Rocket Santa has varied wildly. A few people have stated that its too easy and lacks depth, others have said that it’s really enjoyable and has a good pickup-and-play factor.
Rocket Santa has been in the App store for nearly 1 month now so I thought it would be nice to share the sales figures with you. Rocket Santa is listed in the UK and US stores only and i’ve converted all values to dollars to make it easier to digest.
Rocket Santa units sold
Rocket Santa dollars made
Lets take a look at some promotional efforts and their impact on the graphs.
The Great App Bake Off 2009
Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer runs an annual App baking contest. I decided to enter this year and submitted my developer entry on 19th December (I also acted as a sponsor for the competition, offering promotional codes for Star Fusion and Rocket Santa as prizes). Gavin’s App Bake Off has been picked up by many of the larger iPhone sites so this may have had a positive impact on my sales figures – its hard to tell. Either way its a great idea and you still have time to enter with an App cake of your own.
Notcot
On 16th December Rocket Santa appeared on the front page of notcot.org. This resulted in a spike of 8 sales that day which accounts for the surge in the week commencing 14th December. More importantly though, it was great to see Rocket Santa on the site since I religiously visit Notcot every day for inspiration.
Mundue Holiday promotion
Matt Martel of Mundue.net very generously offered a golden opportunity to around 25 iPhone developers. He ran rotating advertisements in his excellent game reMovem at zero cost to the developers. Adverts for Rocket Santa began running on 23rd December and resulted in 1,238 clicks over the holiday period. Unfortunately I have seen no uplift in purchases through this. Perhaps my app store page is not compelling enough, perhaps people don’t want a Christmas themed app, perhaps Rocket Santa does not look like that great a game :-) who knows. Even so, i’m very appreciative of Matts efforts and hope that we can work on similar promotional efforts in the future.
So 1 month after launch Rocket Santa sold 27 units and, after Apple’s 30% cut, made a total of $18.90. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions from that.
I feel like my first two games have been great learning experiences but also very simple in terms of gameplay. I’ve already started working on my third game which promises to be more complex and i’m hoping to draw on my experiences from Star Fusion and Rocket Santa to make it as good as it can be.