I was wondering if any of you have experience shipping larger games that require wifi download because of its size. I realize a comparison to smaller apps is difficult, but did you experience notably fewer sales because of this fact? I’ve heard some unverified chit chat about this, but nothing tangible in terms of numbers really.
What’s your take and experience on this? Is it worth structuring your game for large bulks of free, perhaps automatically downloaded, DLC just to keep the size limit and allow 3G installs?
My game was 17MB back when the limit was 10MB. After the limit was raised to 20MB, sales were unchanged. That happened after the game had reached its peak, but I doubt the outcome would have been much different had the limit been 20MB originally. It got to #31 in games, as the result of being featured by Apple. So, being featured by Apple is far more important than the 20MB limit. I would recommend doing whatever it takes to get featured, which generally means making good content (plus some luck) and not worrying about the size.
My last game was 60mb and hit #1 on the iPad charts, #3 on iPhone. I also had the same experience as Eric with Zombieville, which is 15mb - no effect on sales when the download limit was raised from 10 to 20mb. I feel pretty confident that binary size is almost meaningless.
From things I’ve seen related to past work I can agree. For games the impact is small to inexistant.
Its productivity apps, tools, toy apps and “time wasters” that are primarily impacted, and even there commonly only apps that you only “buy on impulse” but which you would unlikely buy if you thought a second time about it which WiFi often has due to the “seen on the go - bought at home” pattern.
If it’s 100 mb and below, it would have not much of an impact. People these days are either on 3g or even 4g network and wifi, shouldn’t be a problem. I have seen apps that are very big and sucessful too. Like Rage HD. Super big to download and the game is nice.
Well there’s a hell of a lot of wifi spots and computers. Lets consider for a moment the situation where your phone has cellular data only with no access to any form of computer or wifi.
Um lets see. On the bus? In a car on a journey. Perhaps on holiday. If you’re on holiday chances are you already preloaded the phone with plenty to do. I can’t see the data limit being an issue. My ipad game is around 300 meg at the moment.
In UK, being on the train or in transit usually means no wifi, but to be honest, since all providers here recently moved monthly mobile data options to 500mb as a standard, most people don’t want to waste their bandwidth downloading new apps anyway, and I for one do all my app downloading in the evenings.
Also, thinking about large app downloads that have been successful, Rage and Infinity Blade spring to mind. Content wins always.