

Taptitude - a Windows Phone Success Story - loarabia
http://fourbrosstudio.com/taptitude/post/2012/04/17/Taptitude-a-Windows-Phone-Success-Story.aspx

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untog
There's probably a decent amount of money to be made on Windows Phone apps. A
smaller market, but far less competition- and lord knows the current batch of
apps aren't up to much.

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kranner
One problem for indie game developers on WP7 is that Microsoft pushes Xbox
Live titles in front of everything else in the 'games' tab of the Marketplace
app (the equivalent of the iOS 'App Store' app). I'm no expert but it appears
that getting XBL status isn't trivial or guaranteed.

The situation is made worse, in my opinion, because of the Metro design
aesthetic; after all that whitespace there is room for only 3 app icons in the
'games' tab on my Lumia 710. If you drill down via games->genres, there is
room for 5.5 app icons. And the first two tabs in games->genres are 'Xbox
live' (all XBL titles) and 'top' (again, all XBL titles).

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brandf
[Taptitude Developer Here] Yes, I agree with what you're saying. We too feel
like XBL titles get pushed far too heavily, which turns away indies.

That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like
ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing
budgets.

Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be
missing an opporunity on windows phone.

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kranner
Thanks for the disclosure! It looks like you guys have put in a lot of effort
too with the 60+ minigames. What I'm wondering is whether the same effort on
iOS might not have fetched greater returns given the same marketing budget.

Anyway, congratulations!

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sfurtwangler
[Taptitude Dev Here] I'll second what Brandf said. Despite the Xbox Live games
being front and center, we think being one of the highest rated free games
helped Taptitude get noticed. If we released the same game (same effort put
into both programming and marketing) on iOS, I don't think it would have
gotten as much attention.

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xmmx
>We've asked our users why they don't update to Mango, considering it's free,
and most of the responses were because they didn't have a computer to update
their phone with. Unfortunately this can't be done over the air.

Wow, this is very interesting. I was always under the impression that the
smartphone crowd always synced their phone to their computer first. Maybe the
way apple does it has ruined my perspective.

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polyfractal
Until I started listening to Podcasts regularly (before Mango you could only
download podcasts with Zune through your computer) I would routinely just
charge my phone with the wall adapter.

I sync with my computer every night now, but isn't a big stretch to imagine
lots of people doing what I used to do.

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freehunter
I only plug my phone into my computer when it needs an update that can't be
done OTA. With Zune Pass and Skydrive, my music gets to the phone wirelessly
and my videos and pictures get to my computer wirelessly. I think the phone
has only been plugged into my computer twice, once to do a backup before I
installed the SD card and once for Mango.

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ja27
This is the app story that all my Windows Phone friends talk about as "a
success story". It's really "the success story", as it's the top downloaded
free game (except for XBox Live Extras).

I wonder what the revenue numbers for the top free iPhone and Android games
are? Tapitude looks like it's doing about $3,000 a week / $400-500 a day. (Am
I reading their chart right?) Didn't we hear plenty of stories about how Draw
Something was doing $100,000 a day (now that's probably combining ad revenue
and in-app purchases from the free version plus the sales of the paid
version).

I'm not saying that there isn't money to be made on Windows Phone, but if the
top free game is only doing $400 / day, it's orders of magnitude less than on
iOS. Is it worth it to have your app in the "smaller pond" of a less-crowded
app store? Maybe.

I suspect their huge spike over the past 2-3 weeks is due to the Lumia 900 -
everyone trying out some new apps on their new phone. Time will tell if this
is the phone that really sells the public on Windows Phone, but it's clearly
their best success yet (top selling phone on Amazon).

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brandf
[Taptitude Developer Here]

Hi ja27, thanks for your questions. We are currently doing $1,400/day and our
data indicates we're still growing. As a part time hobby project, we consider
this a success.

Yes, the top iOS games make much more, but that's not the point. Our game
would never succeed on iOS because the market is too crowded. We feel there
are great opportunities on windows phone that small indies may be overlooking.

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rollypolly
Is it just me, or is a 1$ eCPM average unusually high?

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qeorge
Its not really. We're still figuring things out, nowhere near their traffic,
but similar eCPM. (Android/AdMob)

<http://imgur.com/9pT9V>

Comparatively we get $5-10 eCPMs from AdSense on websites.

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nixarn
How did you get such a high eCPM? Care to share any more info on the matter?
:)

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qeorge
For AdSense? (assuming, I'm surprised how high it is too)

Honestly AdSense eCPM is through the roof since they started doing
retargeting. Its now much more about your demographics than your content.

For example, back in the day, a forum for a Warcraft Guild would have
triggered "Buy Gold Now" ads which paid pennies per click. Now ads are
targeted to the user and know the user's search history, so the ads can be
much more relevant. Given that Warcraft players are often rich techies,
suddenly the ads being shown have a much higher CPC.

In short: sites that 3 years ago would have paid pennies per click are paying
dollars per click on AdSense. Its kind of insane. If you wrote them off before
I'd consider taking another look.

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jiakeliu
As a Windows Phone user and developer, I've noticed frequent updates help
promote app usage tremendously, which is confirmed by the analysis. With so
many apps installed on my phone, I tend to forget about 70% of them until
there's an update notification and then I'd want to check out what's new. So
this is a perfect model as long as there's no shortage of content ideas. This
is reminiscent of one of the most successful PC games today, League of
Legends, which has had new content released every two weeks since launch
couple years ago.

Devs, have you considered microtransaction for Taptitude? You did mention
"coins to purchase game updates." Maybe some users prefer to pay for those
updates instead? Congratulations on the success!

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dpark
Frequent updates _with fresh content_ promote app usage. Frequent updates for
tiny bug fixes promote app removal, at least for me.

