14 DAY TRIAL // Backflip Studios, the video-game developer and publisher from Boulder, Colorado, reported some of the ups and downs on the app store, after one year. The headman, Julian Farrior, enforced the idea that free applications were a true gold mine in order to get a significant revenue. And, if one can predict the market changes, some interesting tactics can also be employed. A first example in this respect referred to the way ads were placed in the games, thus, in the pre-holiday period, the developers put a lot more third-party ads in the titles against house ads. House ads constrain users to pay for Backflip’s non-free apps. During the holiday, especially because of the buying frenzy, things changed, as they placed more house ads.
The results? In the pre-holiday period, they made over $400,000 in that month on ads, and just under $90,000 as a result of their house ads. In the holiday period, they made over $250,000 that month in sales of their other apps, and about $140,000 in ads. The study was conducted on Paper Toss, one of Backflip’s most popular application.
Lite versions enjoy a great amount of success among iPhone apps, Julian Farrior says, but there are two ways to approach this matter – some games will greatly support a free Lite version, while others will probably be cannibalized. For Ragdoll Blaster, the Lite version helped move about 2,000 units per day in the App Store, added to the 2,000 it already had for being featured by Apple.
But for the game called Harbor Havok 3D, things didn't turn out to be as good by teaming up the full version with a Lite one. Farrior relates, ”We thought we were pretty good at this game at this point, and launched Harbor Havok 3D, and it didn’t really do anything.”
The same sad story repeated with the Flight Control game, which was launched as a deeper title but on a saturated market. Farrior had pushed for press coverage way too soon, because the app was rejected multiple times, and this delayed the launch, making his press effort a waste. By releasing a Lite version on this game, the developers practically shot themselves in the leg. “With this version, it literally cut out sales in half,” Farrior admits. The game had four levels, which they considered to be four individual games. “When we gave away one of those, there’s just no reason to buy the game. All of that said, we’re going to repackage it as a free app.”