Badlogic Games

I registered on the market around the 20th of december in 2009 and immediatly uploaded the first version of Newton. In the first day i had 800 downloads, with an active install base of 98%. This increased constantly, the downloads that is, over the course of the next month. The active install base dropped considerably. More on that later.

What i did during that month was the following:

• post on various forums (androidPit, anddev, androidforums, androidcommunity to name those were i got responses)
• kindly reply to all problems/request
• reupload new versions of Newton with fixes and feature updates on a weekly basis.

Considering my none existant budget that was really all i could do marketing wise. The game was generally well received. Upon inspection of the comments of other games on the market, especially those i consider successful i soon realized that you have to live with one star ratings and comments like “this sucks”. It’s ok with me, Newton is not everyones type of game. What i was surprised about was the direct communication players engaged in. I got many mails offering help, reporting problems or just telling me that the game rocks. I don’t know wheter this works out the same on the IPhone market, but the atmosphere in those conversations i had was always nice and friendly.

Another surprising fact is that the forums i posted in did in general reply as friendly as those people that wrote me e-mails. I always tried to get the point across that i’m aware that my post is kind of spam but that it’s the only way for me to promote the game as well as get feedback to make it better. Not a single complaint was posted! This method worked for Quantum as well back in early 2009.

After about 2 weeks i had my first review on This Android Life. The review itself was very honest and pointed out a lot of the short comings of Newton that i’m personally a little uneasy about (shiny graphics ole!). Shortly after that i received a mail from Tim, writer at Android Guys. I responded with a probably to lengthy mail feeding him all the information i can think of. Shortly after that i got my second review, again honest, pointing out the couple of flaws that are present while still being very positive on the game itself.

I guess good thinks are coming to you when you keep doing what you think you do best. At least that happened to me. And while I haven’t sold a single unit of Newton yet (probably due to there being no paid version ) i’m really happy with how things worked out so far. Here’s were i’m at at the moment:

Not that bad i guess. The only thing that bugs me about android development apart from crazy graphics driver bugs (screw you samsung and motorola) is how little information the market is giving me. It’s Google, they should know the value of statistics! I heard rumors that they plan to offer more info in the near future. In the meantime i started reverse engineering the market protocol which is kind of a pain in the ass, but i really want to get proper statistics. Sites like androlib.com  can do it, so maybe i can do it too. If i can work it out i might post the code here for other devs to get proper statistics on their projects.

This article is kind of the start of a monthly rubric i want to introduce for all the apps i have one the market. I think other developers can benefit from my statistics. To get a better insight i will use a mighty spread sheet to keep track of the daily growth and will post detailed statistics at the end of each month. I should have done that already back in december, but i was too busy doing other things (holidays and all).

Anyways, I’d be happy to read your thoughts on the android market, your experience, maybe even some info on your statistics.

Ciao