I am trying the following next week-end (if Apple has finished his review process): I'll make CrazyCrab free during 3 days and in the meantime I'll activate the Chartboost ad campaign. As soon as the free time period is over, I'm stopping the ad campaign. I'm doing this to test the waters.
The thing to consider however, is that even though my paid sales of Clash Force are very low (around 700 sales), I went free with it three times, and actually have around 30,000 downloads. That's 30,000 people who could be seeing the chartboost ad, and potentially getting me revenue of some sort. The 5 or 6 paid downloads per week aren't making me any money.
When you look at the sales numbers of a paid game that goes free, versus a game that is free out of the gate, the difference is astounding. Going free for a few days on a paid app gets you thousands more sales than going free from the start.
The unfortunate reality of the app store, is that the very things that earn devs money, are also the things that tend to alienate players. IAP, ads, price-drops, etc.
Tony, a few questions:
1. How many downloads of Pocket Ninjas do you have now?
2. I just updated it and noticed it's a bit laggy on startup. This seems to be due to the fact that it's trying to do many things at once. It's having to load chartboost, having to load the game, and having to display the gamecenter sign in. Would simply having a blank frame before the title screen, and have chartboost load there speed things up? And what would be the logical way to proceed from that screen? Have it set to go to the next screen on a timer, or require a tap from the user? I'm guessing there's no way to have it proceed until you close the chartboost ad without adding some sort of code in. Unless chartboost actually freezes the app until you close the banner?
1. 700k (Its been running at about an 800-1k download a day rate for the past month or so) Not sure tho, of those 700k people not really sure how many people have it still installed on their device.
2. I think you are right that there is to many things causing the initial lag, right now Im not sure how to correct that. I think starting in a blank frame is a good idea and may work, but again, haven't dug into it so not sure how to proceed out of it.
this is 100% spot onOriginally Posted by colej_uk
What ColeJ said is right, it's what I was trying to express when I mentioned that Pocket Ninjas is a high quality game that has done very well, it's not like installing ChartBoost means we all suddenly will be doing as well, but the gulf between Pocket Ninjas' iAd earnings and the ChartBoost earnings are testament to its better rates.
Been trying to convince you to do this for a while :P CrazyCrab is an awesome game but it's a difficult one to risk spending your money on (I know it sounds ridiculous for $1 but such is the way of the app store) because it doesn't appeal to a specific niche, it's just a great casual game. I believe it could do really well if people were downloading it for free, and you now have the added bonus of it going from paid to free, which always gets an influx thanks to the Twitter bots, and don't forget to post it in the price drops/freebies section of touch arcade. Cow Boom made about 30-40 sales in the first week, such a basic and dumb game, but when it went free it got about 3000 in 2 days, the ads made me maybe a dollar or two a day for a while. Not long after that it had to be removed because I got contacted by Best Buy who have some silly subsite called 'CowBoom', so I took it down until I could rename it. Nobody complained that I put iAds in it because so few people bought it that it didn't matter, and even if they did, it'd be a tiny fraction compared to the number of people who grabbed it for free.
CrazyCrab is beautifully addictive, if you put a chartboost ad at the start and an iAd on the map screen which appears between levels (the one where the crab walks to the next level), I think you'd find it'd make you quite a bit, because it's one of those games where once you start you can't stop.
does chartboost discriminate about the audience for the game? No iAds for children's games, for example... does ChartBoost even consider that?
not sure. One thing I like is you can select which games you want advertised or block those that you don't. I set this up a couple days by blocking games that had a low eCPM over the last couple weeks and had a pretty nice jump yesterday (my eCPM hit $17).
You can also filter out apps you don't want to advertise by age rating.
I'm thinking of implementing this into a game I'm making at the moment, but would there be a way to remove the ads once a user has made an in-app purchase to do so?
Granted, I haven't even used chartboost, but based on the discussion, you would need to do a little more coding to figure out where to place the chartboost code. You'd have to get it to show on a certain frame, and if the player has made the iap, it would save that to ini, and skip the frame that has the ad.
The only way to do this is that Clickteam integrate the SDK into the exporter, that would not be anything bad. BTW, in Android is the only way in which we use it, since the exporter generates an .APK file.
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