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Android users will pay to play

By on December 13, 2011

Paul Johnson is the co-founder and managing Director at Rubicon Development.

After a previous post regarding sales of our Great Little War Game for iOS, the team asked me if I’d make a follow up post, now that the game has been out on the Android platform for a similar length of time. I’m always happy to oblige so here we go…

We released on Android using the simple “just buy it” model, that seems to be going out of fashion these days, with some trepidation. There is a lot of hate on the internet about piracy and miserly customers etc., but I’m glad to see that my faith in human nature has been fully rewarded and as usual the haters have it wrong. Very wrong.

Sales from the first three months have matched the iOS equivalent period very well indeed. In fact the entire release period has felt like a pleasant case of deja vu for us. Just like iOS we had a moderately successful batch of initial sales. And then just like iOS we got picked up for a major feature on Google Market and sales went silly for a bit. Post-feature, sales have settled down quite nicely too, again as they did for iOS.

We were averaging about $800 per day before the feature. During the feature, sales ranged from $3,000 to $6,000 per day, which was great. Sadly though these features only really last a week, so the total sum was less than during the iOS one, but I’m not complaining. Since then sales have been doing between $700-$900 per day.

One random element that did us proud was the recent “10 Billion” promotion that Google ran. We were one of the chosen ones there and got featured on the very first day. Although all the games on this promotion were sold for 10 cents, the actual sales volume went silly. And I mean proper silly – at one point we became unable to track what was happening as we peaked above 400 sales per minute. Yep, per minute. Now if only we could do those numbers at the proper price!

To sum up, we’re on track to have taken around $125,000 by the end of this first sales quarter and that’s not too shabby a return in my book. That’s certainly way above what the haters would have you believe. If you have an iOS game that’s pretty decent and you’re wondering about porting to Android, just do it.

In other news, our latest game has just gone live on iTunes this week – Yachty Deluxe. (An Android version won’t be too far off). This game represents our first outing into the “free with advertising” sales model and I’ll glady report back on that in.. er.. 3 months? 🙂

About Paul Johnson