My game Leaf Bound had just been approved yesterday. I’m seeing it slowly gain traction. We are on the 46th spot under adventures.
Hopefully it picks up. There is a handful of games that are under adventures category that is on the top 10.
The rankings are based on sales per day in the app’s category for a specific appstore (territory). Furthermore, it seems modified with a weighted average, so even if your sales drop drastically, you remain in the charts for a bit.
If you break into the top 100 paid apps list, then you tend to get enough exposure that your sales can sustain for a longer period. My game, Air Boss, broke into several top 100s, 50s and 25s for games and action/adventure, but never managed to get into the top paid apps, so sales spiked initially, then held for about 1.5 to 2 weeks, then dropped rapidly.
If you manage to get a feature, your sales tend to spike drastically, usually putting you in the top 100 paid apps from the cases I know of.
LeafBound certainly looks like it has what it takes to break into the top 100; I’m sure you will do well.
If you haven’t done so already, you might want to grab MajicRank; it is a great tool for monitoring sales.
Thanks for your response!
That is a very interesting app. I’m downloading it right now. 
Great info. Thanks.
I noticed a game on the front page (numerous games thus far, actually) that are featured in the TOP DOWNLOADS sections and when I click on it I see it has 1900 ratings of which 1200 is 1 star and every single review is “This is boring and stupid” “Deleted it in a minute” “Don’t waste your time” etc etc etc
I, therefore, was just as curious about this…
So how does a crap game manage to get enough download to reach the top 10 to keep getting more bad reviews fro the front page…
Actually, that brigs up another question I think I should post in a separate thread…
Was it a free game or lite version by any chance? It seems that they tend to get bad reviews simply because free stuff is downloaded by anybody… just because it’s free, rather than because the user might be interested in it. The rating system is kind of skewed towards people who dislike their apps…
It takes a good bit of effort to rate an app you like - you have to find it again in the store, scroll down and find the rating stuff. If you don’t like something, you delete it off your phone and instantly the rating thing pops up automatically. Naturally, most people deleting an app are doing it because they didn’t like it. I’ve gotta admit, 95% of the apps I’ve downloaded and kept… I haven’t gone back to rate them.
I imagine that the app you were looking at has been downloaded, liked and kept by thousands of users who have not gone back to rate and appreciate their app. The people who didn’t like it were given an easy automatic option to rate it down… but even with 1200 low ratings, the fact that it was a Top Download feature probably means that there are tens of thousands more who’d rate it 3-5 stars if they actually bothered to go back and rate it.
(edit: damn, just noticed that you moved the discussion of this question to another post. oh well, this is up now. Good luck to designtek with Leaf Bound!)
By the way, I posted a perl script on my blog that you can cron to periodically check your app’s ranking.
http://www.touchcentric.com/blog/archives/42
I’m using it with some AppleScript to fill out a spreadsheet.