Sorry for my bad english!
1st of all - great community! Thnx for all the help!
In a older thread someone posted to me that switching the app from a sales price to free does kill the ranking.
But i see top selling games like Jetpack Joyride now for free? If it really kills the ranking whats the advantage of giving the game for free?. Cause if they switch back from free to payed all the ranking is gone again. i don’t get the point of giving top selling apps for free.
greetings
It is promotion of course.
I guess you can also have two versions of the app on the store - one paid - and then release one free.
(or the other way round).
Jetpack Joyride does not have a paid and a free version! there is only one version on the app store. my question is about the kill of the rankings. if you put it to free - ok it goes up to the list if a mass of users are downloading it. but if you switch to payed the ranking falls back to zero? that is what confuses me. of course its about promotion. but with which end result in the ranking history?
In a nutshell:
The inApp Purchases for Jetpack Joyride where included from the beginning. i know that. but the game itself was always available for a purchase price of 99 cents. why did the studio switched to free? and this is not the only game that went to the free section.
Because it wasn’t charting well in paid. AFAIK free titles “for a limited time” might not reset their chart ranking, but pause it. That’s only theory though, and a more affirmative answer is needed.
why so discourteous? still the question bothers me what happens to the ranking by switching it to free and then back to paid. GameLoft does this always with some games.
My personal experience is that my apps lost some rank but that is all. If you don’t use in app purchase switching to free is useless - you will mostly reach those who want free apps anyway.
Maybe they just want to advertise their brand this way.
I am pretty certain they do it to raise their ranking, get the game on the top lists again and people start downloading, word of mouth etc. If it is underperforming as a paid app they go free and sometimes insert ads, count on iap etc.
they switch to free to implement in app purchases and charge you for everything you do in the game , so a previously $1 dollar game becomes at the end a $10 or $15 dollar game, so free its just trick to make you donload it and tease you to pay every time you play , like with lets golf that they charge you for plays not for the game itself , so if you intend to play it a lot , you have to pay a lot… in my opinion those are just blood sucking strategies.
Sorry for being discourteous. I am a grumpy hippo. Regarding the strategies, well I can’t say I won’t try similar but more fair strategies on appstore. Mine will tend to be properly optional though - I believe that the player should still be able to complete the game (if the game is paid to begin with).
I don’t think it is evil having in app purchases for paid titles or free titles. Nobody is forcing anyone to play that game.
When they do that they probably get millions of users around 3% of which will buy the IAP (well its probably around 2%). Now if jetpack joyride probably has an average IAP of $6 at 2% of a million at an average of 6 IAP you are laughing, jetpack is actually missing out by not having higher IAP to catch the whales. 20,000*6=120,000 You can read the freeium blog
http://www.appannie.com/jetpack-joyride/
http://blog.flurry.com/?Tag=Freemium
Also it seems that jetpack joyride is made by halfbrick studio (I rank there quality alot higher than gameloft).
If you really want to know you should follow this guy: Nicholas Lovell.
This is where to start: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8BejCxzuc4
watch all parts to get a real understanding, and check out wwww.gamesbrief.com
That should answer you questions…
Thanks for those links @IPete2 … just what I needed to read/watch/contemplate this morning!:razz:
my pleasure - I hope you enjoy…