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Nicholas Lovell
Home   >   Featured   >   Go free, spread the word

Go free, spread the word

By on August 1, 2011

Andrew J. Smith of Spilt Milk Studios is clearly a gifted marketer. Armed with little more than chutzpah, charisma and Twitter, he has turned a zero marketing budget into a creditable campaign for his critically-acclaimed indie iOS title Hard Lines.

Of course, it helped that the game was good.

What difference does going free make?

ipad shot 02

Andrew has been pretty open about the success of Hard Lines in a series of reports and developer diaries on GAMESbrief. Last week, for example, he revealed that the first six weeks of sales of Hard Lines was in the region of 9,000 copies.

And then he had a birthday.

So Andrew, showing his flair for turning the mundane into a PR story, decided to make Hard Lines free for a day to celebrate. And he publicised this fact to his 1,197 followers on Twitter.

The result was pretty impressive:

  • Downloads the day before: <50 units
  • Downloads for the day itself: 12,282 units

Of course, getting something for nothing is always attractive. It’s most useful to a developer which has IAP installed (like Infinity Blade, or Tiny Tower, or a large proportion of successful smartphone games), not one which just has a single price strategy.

Although I’m really looking forward to Andrew’s update on Friday this week to tell us what impact the promotion had on sales once the price went back to 69p.

About Nicholas Lovell

As well as founding Gamesbrief, Nicholas is a consultant to the games industry on online and corporate strategy and financial matters. He can be contacted at nicholas@gamesbrief.com Following a decade long financial career in the City of London, Nicholas founded Lodestar Partners, a corporate finance boutique that focused exclusively on the games industry. From 2006 to 2008, Nicholas was CEO of GameShadow, a games website and patching engine. He is a non-executive director of developer nDreams and provides consultancy services to a number of companies including Firefly and Huddle.
  • http://twitter.com/dbltnk Alexander Zacherl

    We did the same for our iPad game Astroslugs on thursday (used FAAD) and also had about 13.000 installs on the first day. 30.000 over three days, all-in-all.

  • http://twitter.com/SpiltMilkStudio Andrew John Smith

    Yeah our next update (in submission right now) brings our first IAP to the game, planning on really pushing hard for people to get new stuff that way. It’ll be interesting seeing how well we do.

    Best of luck with Astroslugs!