

Heisting the App Store: 500,000 Paid Downloads in 1 Week - Encosia
http://taptaptap.com/blog/heisting-the-app-store-500000-paid-downloads-in-1-week/

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larrik
From the title, I really really thought this was going to be about paying for
downloads to force your way in to the top charts. I'm very glad to see that
this is actually a great success story instead.

Congrats, guys!

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phillryu
Thanks! Have to say the idea of paid downloads has always been gross to us,
definitely hurts the ecosystem and tips things over in favor to companies like
EA who have cash to burn. We work pretty hard to pick up new fans, then
produce apps that they'll actually find cool and pick up on their own :)

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jamie_ca
Is there more to the app than a sudoku rehash, a Rush Hour rehash, Sokoban,
and a sliding tile game?

I mean, those are all reasonably nice puzzles and should be easily worth a $1
download just as is, but that seems like a crazy amount of activity for slight
variations to common puzzles wrapped up in some pretty gloss.

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flyosity
As an iPhone developer (well, mainly designer, but I also write Cocoa) I can
tell you that thinking it's "some pretty gloss" is a big mistake. It's not
"gloss" it's incredible over-execution and it's what separates a regular app
from a blockbuster app. This is especially true in games. The audio design,
impeccable visual design and extreme planning of every single user interaction
is what takes an app to the top.

By dismissing immaculate execution and over a year's worth of work from some
of the top game & visual designers in the iPhone industry as "some pretty
gloss" you're completely missing why it (and almost every other Tap Tap Tap
app) has went #1.

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jamie_ca
Yeah, I understand that the visuals are what gets the masses to jump on it -
especially since that's basically all you have to base your opinion on in the
app store.

That they went almost 2/3 of the development time before plugging the games in
is also an indication that they know exactly where they need to focus to make
it such a hit.

I think a few years of desktop linux experience combined with a love of ugly-
but-fun 8- and 16-bit console games has just left me in the habit of looking
beyond the shiny to identify the crunchy gameplay lurking underneath.

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jrnkntl
Hats off to tap*3 for creating a moneymachine once again. Too bad there is no
word about the amount of time it took them to develop the app.

Edit: in their previous blog post they say it was "Nearly two years in the
making…", but that still doesn't mean actual development time.

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phillryu
We were actively developing the app for over a year and a half, in part due to
a reboot midway. (The safe, prize and much of the game didn't exist until
midway through!)

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smackfu
The App Store is very momentum driven. If you can get your app into the Top 25
Paid with a high star rating, via social media, emails, etc., you are golden.
There are lots of users like me that will download almost anything that is
highly rated, popular, and $1.

Paid downloads work for the same reason, although usually the star ratings
drop quickly once the natural downloads exceed the paid-for ones, so they drop
out of the list fast. You still do need a quality app at the end of the day.

(I also wonder how many downloads are driven by some of the unusual uses of
the iPhone hardware that I think people would talk about to friends.)

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Timothee
_(I also wonder how many downloads are driven [redacted])_

Way to spoil what many (including taptaptap in this post) want to keep under
wrap. :)

But I would be very surprised if many downloads were for that. For one thing,
it's not discussed much and the other thing is that it's a tiny part of the
game. (to which I actually didn't pay more attention than that actually)

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mleonhard
> This was tweeted out and shared to a couple hundred thousand fans following
> on twitter and Facebook ...

Looks like they already had a lot of customers.

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Timothee
Unfortunately, that's always a tough part when trying to learn from
taptaptap's successes. It's much harder to be motivated to work on a tease
before launch, a tweetblast, etc. when you don't have an audience yet...

However, as always, it didn't happen overnight and their audience is not the
only reason to their success: one thing to learn is that everything they do is
_highly_ polished and well designed. They simply do great work. Working on
that brings results (personal satisfaction if anything) without an audience.

As evidence of that the success of Tiny Wings in the App Store.

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kenjackson
This is great. Although I'm reminded of Halo Reach doing $200M in 1 day.
Clearly not the same scale of product, but just reminds me of how much money
console games make. And does make me wonder if the .99 price point will make
it hard to make a lot of money with mobile games, even with hits. With that
said, there's not many Halo Reach's that have ever been made.

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cageface
The .99 price point makes developing anything but mega-hits a waste of time. I
routinely see comments complaining that a $1.99 app is "too expensive" even if
a desktop app of similar functionality would easily sell for 10x that price.

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smackfu
Sometimes you get apps where they expect you to buy:

iPhone app = $2 iPad app = $10 (5x) OS X app = $25

It gets out of hand.

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ra
That was an amazing launch, no doubt about it.

All the theatre of an Apple product launch. Well done.

