Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week • Hacker News Board

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#11

Post by Timothee » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 4:20 PM UTC

mleonhard wrote: post #10

> This was tweeted out and shared to a couple hundred thousand fans following on twitter and Facebook ... Looks like they already had a lot of customers.

Unfortunately, that's always a tough part when trying to learn from taptaptap's successes. It's much harder to be motivated to work on a tease before launch, a tweetblast, etc. when you don't have an audience yet...

However, as always, it didn't happen overnight and their audience is not the only reason to their success: one thing to learn is that everything they do is highly polished and well designed. They simply do great work. Working on that brings results (personal satisfaction if anything) without an audience.

As evidence of that the success of Tiny Wings in the App Store.

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#12

Post by Timothee » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 4:23 PM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #8

The App Store is very momentum driven. If you can get your app into the Top 25 Paid with a high star rating, via social media, emails, etc., you are golden. There are lots of users like me that will download almost anything that is highly rated, popular, and $1. Paid downloads work for the same reason, although usually the star ratings drop quickly once the natural downloads exceed the paid-for ones, so they drop out…

(I also wonder how many downloads are driven [redacted])

Way to spoil what many (including taptaptap in this post) want to keep under wrap. :)

But I would be very surprised if many downloads were for that. For one thing, it's not discussed much and the other thing is that it's a tiny part of the game. (to which I actually didn't pay more attention than that actually)

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#13

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 4:41 PM UTC

Timothee wrote: post #12

smackfu wrote: post #8

The App Store is very momentum driven. If you can get your app into the Top 25 Paid with a high star rating, via social media, emails, etc., you are golden. There are lots of users like me that will download almost anything that is highly rated, popular, and $1. Paid downloads work for the same reason, although usually the star ratings drop quickly once the natural downloads exceed the paid-for ones, so they drop out…

(I also wonder how many downloads are driven [redacted]) Way to spoil what many (including taptaptap in this post) want to keep under wrap. :) But I would be very surprised if many downloads were for that. For one thing, it's not discussed much and the other thing is that it's a tiny part of the game. (to which I actually didn't pay more attention than that actually)

[deleted]

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#14

Post by skream » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 4:54 PM UTC

Congrats to the TapTapTap team for another massive success in the app store.

@Phillryu... do you guys have a plan on how you're going to stay in the top charts? From the blog post, it seems as though you expect to gradually fall off the charts, but you must be continually working to support the current community and keeping interest high?

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#15

Post by kenjackson » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 5:04 PM UTC

This is great. Although I'm reminded of Halo Reach doing $200M in 1 day. Clearly not the same scale of product, but just reminds me of how much money console games make. And does make me wonder if the .99 price point will make it hard to make a lot of money with mobile games, even with hits. With that said, there's not many Halo Reach's that have ever been made.

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#16

Post by fletchowns » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 5:33 PM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #15

This is great. Although I'm reminded of Halo Reach doing $200M in 1 day. Clearly not the same scale of product, but just reminds me of how much money console games make. And does make me wonder if the .99 price point will make it hard to make a lot of money with mobile games, even with hits. With that said, there's not many Halo Reach's that have ever been made.

While that is quiet an impressive figure, you've got to keep in mind that it wasn't just Halo Reach. The Halo franchise was 10 years in the making when Reach was released.

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#17

Post by jamie_ca » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 9:51 PM UTC

Is there more to the app than a sudoku rehash, a Rush Hour rehash, Sokoban, and a sliding tile game?

I mean, those are all reasonably nice puzzles and should be easily worth a $1 download just as is, but that seems like a crazy amount of activity for slight variations to common puzzles wrapped up in some pretty gloss.

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#18

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 10:20 PM UTC

jamie_ca wrote: post #17

Is there more to the app than a sudoku rehash, a Rush Hour rehash, Sokoban, and a sliding tile game? I mean, those are all reasonably nice puzzles and should be easily worth a $1 download just as is, but that seems like a crazy amount of activity for slight variations to common puzzles wrapped up in some pretty gloss.

[deleted]

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#19

Post by timdorr » Wed, Jun 01, 2011, 10:42 PM UTC

jamie_ca wrote: post #17

Is there more to the app than a sudoku rehash, a Rush Hour rehash, Sokoban, and a sliding tile game? I mean, those are all reasonably nice puzzles and should be easily worth a $1 download just as is, but that seems like a crazy amount of activity for slight variations to common puzzles wrapped up in some pretty gloss.

There's also the prize of a free game at the end that I won't ever play and don't even particularly like. But that gives it a perceived value of the retail cost of that game.

Re: Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week

#20

Post by cageface » Thu, Jun 02, 2011, 12:38 AM UTC

kenjackson wrote: post #15

This is great. Although I'm reminded of Halo Reach doing $200M in 1 day. Clearly not the same scale of product, but just reminds me of how much money console games make. And does make me wonder if the .99 price point will make it hard to make a lot of money with mobile games, even with hits. With that said, there's not many Halo Reach's that have ever been made.

The .99 price point makes developing anything but mega-hits a waste of time. I routinely see comments complaining that a $1.99 app is "too expensive" even if a desktop app of similar functionality would easily sell for 10x that price.