Sales of War Evolved have been pretty steady since it was released on November 25, 2009. On a weekday, we are usually ranked in the lower 100’s, while on the weekend we normally get into the top 100. The graph below from App Annie shows this trend.

In general, we were making $500 a week after Apple’s 30%, which we were really happy with. A few months ago, I got an email from the founder of the website Free App A Day (FAAD). His marketing pitch was simple: expose your app to hundreds of thousands of people for free, and then when it switches back to paid word of mouth will keep the app selling well. I was skeptical at first. I did not think that by giving something away for free, you could actually increase sales in the long run.

The Prep
In the months following, I did extensive research to determine if FAAD would actually help War Evolved. I took about two months worth of apps that were on FAAD to see if the campaign ended up increasing their sales. For some apps, FAAD was a complete waste of money – they were off the charts before, got to the top of the charts with FAAD, and then as soon as the promotion was over they dropped right back down off the charts. Alternatively – when an app was already high on the charts, after FAAD they continued to sell just as well as they did before.  The general trend that I found was that if your app was ranked between 70-150, then FAAD helped. This was perfect for War Evolved.

In mid-April I sent over the payment to have War Evolved be featured on FAAD on the first Friday in June. The cost to have your app listed on a weekday is $1200. In addition to featuring War Evolved, we decided to cross promote our newest app, Tune Finder. If you got War Evolved for free, an alert box would pop up advertising Tune Finder.

In the time between April and June, I was busy getting War Evolved prepped for the cross promotion. War Evolved 1.2.4 introduced the new code for the cross promotion. War Evolved uses Opsive.com for the back end of the scoring system, and I knew that my current hosting plan for opsive.com would not be able to handle the traffic. I upgraded opsive.com to use a virtual machine instead of a shared server account. Everything was set, we just needed to wait for June 4th to get here.

The Day Of
I flipped the switch to free around 6PM PST on June 3rd, so that everything would be propagated by the time June 4th arrived. During those 6 hours of being free on June 3rd, War Evolved got about 1,700 downloads – and it wasn’t even listed on FAAD yet!

On June 4th, War Evolved got 73,654 downloads. It shot up to the number one game in free strategy, and number 21 overall. June 5th was even better – 168,325 downloads and a ranking of number 4 overall.

FAAD said they would get a lot of downloads, and they definitely did. I was surprised how quickly War Evolved shot up the rankings.

Opsive.com
I was right to think that the shared hosting account for opsive.com wouldn’t be able to handle all of the traffic. The virtual machine account couldn’t even handle it. At about 8AM EST on June 5th Opsive.com was taken down  and I didn’t notice until I got up around 9:30AM. Opsive.com was hosted on the cheapest virtual machine hosting plan, so around 11AM we tried switching it to a more powerful virtual machine. That still couldn’t handle the traffic. I had to switch to a dedicated server account, a switch that was painful and caused War Evolved to crash a lot more than it should have. I exchanged 54 emails with my hosting provider that day. Some of them were just server status emails, but the majority weren’t. I would like to thank Acenet for doing such a great job, their support was top-notch and they helped me every step of the way. The new dedicated server completely switched over around 5PM, and it is still running great.

War Evolved’s Free Rank
The chart below shows the number of downloads we got while it was free. In total, we got over 670,000 downloads in 6 days!

Tune Finder’s Cross Promotion
Tune Finder is a new app that is hard to search for so it really hasn’t done too much. The cross promotion for Tune Finder dramatically changed that, at least for those six days during FAAD. The graph below shows the number of clicks Tune Finder was getting. All of these clicks were from people saying “OK” to the alert box shown at the start of this post.

Yes, that is 1,337 clicks in just one hour. At one point I saw it get up to 1,600 in one hour. All of these clicks had a dramatic effect on Tune Finder’s ranking: it shot up to number 14 on the music charts. Now that the promotion is over, it is off the charts again. However, we just made Tune Finder free so hopefully that will have a positive impact.

The Results
So was FAAD worth it? I can pretty much say yes. War Evolved is currently ranked #37 in strategy games, the highest I’ve ever seen it. The amount that we are making on a day to day basis is also dramatically larger. On Thursday we brought in $354 – that’s the most we’ve ever made in a single day. It should be exciting to see what the weekend brings in. The graph below shows a history of War Evolved’s income, after Apples 30% cut.

If you are a developer and are wondering if you should do FAAD (or something similar), I would advise you to do your research first. For War Evolved, it looks like it paid off. But that doesn’t mean it will for every game out there. In the end I am glad we did it, but it was definitely a risk from the beginning.

In collaboration with www.FreeAppADay.com, War Evolved is now free! I switched the free switch last night, and since then there have been about 4,000 downloads. War Evolved is currently ranked number 11 in top free strategy games.

We are using this promotion to cross promote Tune Finder, it’ll be interesting to see what happens. As soon as this promotion is over and War Evolved goes back to paid, I’ll post a detailed update about how War Evolved did and whether or not it was really worth doing FreeAppADay.

Update: The move was a success, and Opsive.com is ready to take on the War Evolved promotion.

Opsive.com will be unavailable in the early morning on Tuesday, June 1st. We are switching to a more powerful server.

During this time, scores for War Evolved will be unavailable – no submitting global high scores, and no viewing them either. Facebook scores will also be unavailable. The actual game will still work.

Everything should be switched over a few hours after the switch is made, so most people shouldn’t notice any problems.

We have just launched the new and improved Opsive.com! It took way too long, but in the past five months we have started and finished Tune Finder in addition to gearing up for the next game. First, the obligatory old/new screen shot:

The top page pictured is the Opsive.com home page, and the bottom one is the War Evolved page. The content is pretty much the same throughout the site, it is just prettier. I would like to thank Sarah (@sarahhwatsonn) for all of the work she did on the design of the web page. We went through many revisions, and I feel that the current design is a nice clean way to display our content.

Causalities of the new site

When I was developing the new site, I put the new blog at /wordpress. When I changed things over to the new site, I stupidly deleted all of the contents under /blog and replaced it with what was at /wordpress. It was only later that I realized that all of the images were still stored under /blog. This means that I lost all of the images from the previous posts. Oh well, there weren’t too many. I’ll get a new graph posted shortly of how War Evolved is doing, and that will have a lot more data than what the previous posts had.

Tune Finder

I have been on a blogging hiatus, and did not get a chance to announce our newest app, Tune Finder. I will do that in a post next week.

War Evolved

Sales for War Evolved have been going surprisingly well, and we are glad people are enjoying it. War Evolved still appears in the top 100 strategy games on most weekends, and we think that is awesome especially considering it was released in November. We have one major promotion coming up for it in a couple of weeks, more details to follow. We will also post updated sales numbers.

The next game

Development has started for the next game, and I plan on being as open as I can with this project. I will post about the game, the challenges, and some behind-the-scenes details. We are still in the planning stage, so I don’t want to reveal anything yet, but it shouldn’t be too long. In related news, Opsive has brought on another member to its team, Donald Parsons (@donaldparsons). Don will be working on the Facebook side of things for this next game (yes, it is an iPhone game.. more details later). Sarah will still be doing the graphics. I’ll try to get both of them to post when they have enough interesting material.

It’s good to be back and I look forward to explaining how we make a game and the behind-the-scenes of Opsive!

Justin

If you’ve been following my Twitter page, you already know that version 1.2 of War Evolved has been submitted. In this post, I want to do a quick walk through of some of the changes.

When you download the update, the following will be listed as added/changed:

• Save game feature
• Air units on EVERY level
• Air turrets on EVERY level
• Cheat mode – enter your name as CHEATER
• Facebook Integration
• AI/Unit Tweaks
• Performance enhancements
• Minor bug fixes

This release was packed with improvements, and I was really surprised with everything that was in there as I was writing it out.

You will be able to continue any single or local two player game. For obvious reasons, networked games cannot be saved. For a bit of a warning, the restored game will not be exactly as it was exited at. Each unit contains a lot of data about its state, and we didn’t have enough time to test all of the various scenarios. So instead what we did was just save the variables that deal with the game, such as amount of money and what level each player is at. When you exit, the game will automatically refund you for the money that you spent on units that will not be restored.

The second major addition are air units! Each level now has at least one air unit, and it really does make things more fun. On the cavemen era we have a pterodactyl, Egyptian era has a phoenix, medieval has dragon, and cowboy has a rudimentary flying machine. I won’t ruin the surprise of what the air units look like in this blog, you’ll just have to play the game to find out

In addition to you being able to cheat, the AI can also cheat in single player. This should add some extra challenge for those who are really good at the game. To get to the cheat menu, enter your name as CHEATER on the main screen. Obviously, when in cheat mode, your score will not be recorded on the global scoreboard.

Other changes include Facebook integration, AI/unit tweaks, some performance enhancements, and bug fixes. All in all, this was a really solid release and I hope it adds a lot of play time to War Evolved.

What’s next for Opsive?

Glad you asked. We are first planning on redoing some of Opsive.com. I know the layout is terrible and you can hardly read this blog, so that is number one priority. We are also in the design stage for our next game, which will be on the iPhone and hopefully one or two other platforms. In addition, we are about to start a small non-game app that personally I’ve been wanting for awhile. This app should not take long at all to complete, and I’ll have more news when the time comes. Finally, we also have a block of time set off to do more War Evolved updates. For anything that you’d like to see in the next game, reply to this post or send an email to support@opsive.com and we’ll try our hardest to get it in.

Until next time,
Justin

In the last blog post I promised to post some sales numbers, and here it is. But first, the graph below is from TopAppCharts.com and shows the ranking of War Evolved for the past 30 days.

Note: we lost the image with the new web page

As you can see, there has been a positive trend. This is really good news for us, as we have yet to spend a dime on advertising (we keep wanting to crank out new features for War Evolved!) Sarah and I are really happy with these results, and are glad people are enjoying the game.

In terms of sales, War Evolved has also been doing well. The past three days have been really fun, as all app developers know. Christmas day we had our largest number of sales in 1 day – 184 copies of War Evolved were sold.

Note: we lost the image with the new web page

Click on the image for a full view. This graph is similar to the one posted earlier. The red line represents the number of scores submitted and the green line represents sales. In appreciation for all of these downloads, we have been in development of War Evolved 1.2 for the past week or two. Development has been going really well, and tomorrow I should be able to hand it off to our main testers. I will then be gone on vacation until the 5th, so I hope to submit it sometime that week. I will make a new post with all of the features closer on to submission.

Until then, keep enjoying War Evolved and somebody please take aberfloyd’s first place spot on the leaderboard

A quick update to War Evolved has been submitted and waits for Apple’s approval. Version 1.1.1 is very minor, only tweaking three things:

1. The AI reacts to air units better
2. Increased the Calvary’s strength
3. Decreased the air turret’s strength

Particularly on expert, the AI did not preform well after you reached stages with air units. Also we noticed that Calvary units are not used as much as we would like, so we bumped their strength up a bit.

In other news, we have come up with a feature list for version 1.2:

• Air units on every level – no need to get to WWII before you can build a plane!
• A cheat more – want more money? What about the ability to skip levels? It’ll be here, plus we’ll see if we can come up with some interesting settings
• Integration of Facebook Connect.
• Minor bug fixes – I have a small list of bugs I would like to fix, none that effect gameplay

We have already started dev on version 1.2, and hope to have it submitted early in the new year! I’ll keep you updated.

War Evolved has been off to a pretty good start. As I type this, there have been 985 submitted to our database. On average we see about 50 scores submitted a day, with a high of 99 (just occurred today). The next score was submitted 31 seconds too late, otherwise we would have hit 100. I’m going to work on getting some statistics on WarEvolved.com so you can see in real-time what is happening. The chart below shows a line graph of the history of the number of scores submitted.

Note: we lost the image with the new web page

In other news, War Evolved 1.1 has been released and people seem to be enjoying it. The major features of 1.1 include an overall smarter AI and a new expert mode (which only a few people have attempted… by far the most played difficulty is easy). We are already hard at work on War Evolved 1.2. Planned features include a cheat mode, integrating Facebook Connect, a new level, and some minor bug fixes. I don’t know if all of that will get in there or not, but I’ll let you know

That’s all for now, I’ll try to get some numbers with the sales of War Evolved in the next post. I’m going to try to start posting at least once a week.

War Evolved has been on the app store for about 48 hours now. Things have gone better than I expected, and there should be some exciting things coming up. I first wanted to say that I hope everybody is enjoying War Evolved, and if you have any suggestions please email Justin@Opsive.com.

The next thing I wanted to discuss was the focus of this blog. I plan on being as open about War Evolved as I can. This includes sales numbers and what worked and didn’t work. This first post is short just to get it out, expect more soon.

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=338343971