4 Tips to Get in the App Store Top 200
Ranking on the US Top 200 charts is critical to the success of an iOS app – and anyone that tells you charts don’t matter probably isn’t in the charts. If you aren’t charting, my guess is that you are invisible to 90% of the app buying public. Apart from an iTunes feature, the charts are the ONLY way to get visibility for your app that translates to meaningful sales. Getting mentioned on review sites may give you a momentary blip, but in the end it is visiblity in the charts that is going to give you long term success. Sure, you can eke out a living with a non-charting high priced niche app, but if we are honest with ourselves no one is in the App Store to just make enough to scrape by – we are all here because we want to hit a home run! We want to be the developer that creates the next Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja or Angry Birds (had to get my mandatory idevblogaday Angry Birds reference in there!).
Here are a few tips to help you create the next big hit app:
- Make a great game with heaps of content
- Price it at US$0.99
- Release four versions
- Keep updating
Make a great game with heaps of content
Games let you reach the biggest market because anyone that owns an iDevice is a potential customer. Have a look at the US overall Top 10, 9 of those apps are games. So if you want to sell a lot of apps, make a game.
I don’t think we’ll see another single level/mode game do as well as Doodle Jump in the App Store. I know people argue that you should avoid creating levels – Steambids: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels – but unfortunately customers in the App Store love levels, and the more levels the better. People want value for money (or at least perceived value for money), and you need to make sure that you impress them with how much content your game has. If you have 30 levels, make sure players can see all the locked levels from the start. This is something Angry Birds and Cut the Rope do really well.
Price it at US$0.99
Ranking is determined based on volume of sales. You can play around as much as you like with pricing, but in the end you will sell the most copies at US$0.99. That is a fact. Now, if you find that for whatever reason your game doesn’t chart well (even at US$0.99), then by all means play around with price to find what price point maximizes your revenue. Dave Frampton of Chopper 2 fame has a good article on App Pricing.
Release Four Versions
In last week’s post about designing for multiple platforms we briefly mentioned for iOS we plan to release four versions of each app:
- iPhone Paid (with IAP)
- iPhone Lite (free with ads)
- iPad (or HD) Paid (with IAP)
- iPad (or HD) Lite (free with ads)
Why four versions you say? Seems like a lot of extra work. Plus won’t it anger customers that they have to purchase multiple versions? Why not just release a single free Universal version with an IAP to upgrade to the full version? The answer is simple: ranking.
If you want to increase your rank it is a mistake to have a single free version with IAP to upgrade to a full version. This will actually lower your chart ranking. Another problem with releasing a free game is that free games don’t stay in the charts as long as paid ones. e.g. The average number of days the Top 10 paid games have been in the charts is 299.6, the average for the Top 10 Free games is 39.1. Free games are downloaded at an amazing rate. When we made Crazy Snowboard free just before xmas we were doing 250,000 downloads a day (and that was at the #2 spot). At that rate it doesn’t take long to saturate the market.
In hindsight I wish we hadn’t made Crazy Snowboard a Universal game. If we had an iPhone version and an HD iPad version I predict that our combined sales of both apps would be higher, and our rankings on both the iPhone and iPad charts would be higher.
(Another thing to watch is that once you make an app Universal, you can’t limit updates to just iPhone or iPad. This is a good policy as you can’t predict which device a customer purchased the Universal version for.)
Keep Updating
Customers love a freebie. Updates are an excellent opportunity to re-engage with your customer and let them re-discover your app. And the more people playing your game, the more likely someone else will see them playing and generate a word-of-mouth sale. Our most successful app to date, Crazy Snowboard has had over 16 updates since it was released. Angry Birds 13 updates, Doodle Jump 37 updates, Fruit Ninja 10 updates. Updates may not have the same impact as in the early days when an update changed your release date, but they are still a good way to boost your ranking.
Hopefully some of these tips will help you find success, I know we will be applying these techniques to our next release.
(Note: Crazy Snowboard was out of the Top 200 Games chart for a while and managed to claw its way back in last week. It is currently #168 in the US Top 200 games chart, and since being back in the charts sales are up 30%)
I think being in the top 20 of a game subcategory is more important than making it into the top 200 games. It means your game is visible and purchasable in the first page on the device and that makes a difference.
Also, the dev of Tilt to Live posted about decoupling ranking from revenue a few weeks ago. Despite no longer charting consistently, their revenue has held steady. A similar post by the developers of Mega Jump also says they are able to pull in some steady money. Additionally, neither are “social games” which I suspect pulls in even more money.
Hi Wally,
Agreed! But if you can make it into the Top 200, it’s almost guaranteed that you’ll get a Top 25 sub-category. That’s another good reason to make games, because of the sub-categories you have an even better chance of appearing on a chart and increasing your visibility. You should also play around with which category you put your game in. Changing the game category of Crazy Snowboard Lite helped us grab the #1 Free game spot in Japan (read more…).
I’ve read those articles, and there are some good points, however I still think you are better off doing multiple versions – especially when your app is first released. You can always go back later and add an IAP to the free version to upgrade to the full one if you like.
Could you elaborate on this? Wouldn’t having a gross number of downloads distributed amongst three or four versions of your app result in a lower rank across all of them, rather than consolidating all potential downloads in one app?
Hi Stephen,
If you have a single free version with IAP then you are limiting yourself to only appear on one chart – the Free chart (and potentially, but unlikely, the top Grossing chart too – which is a harder nut to crack). The Free charts are very volatile, so chances are (even with a hit app) you will only be in the Top 10 for 39 days (on average) rather than 299 days if you were in the Paid charts.
Here’s a real world example. Our Crazy Snowboard game has a free Lite version and a paid Full version. Currently the Lite version is generating an average 10,000 downloads a day, which puts it at #164 in the US Free Games. The Paid version is generating 1,000 daily downloads and is #163 on the US Paid Games (note: it is not in the Top 200 Grossing chart). This means we are visible on two charts (and as Wally points out, also Top 25 in two game sub-category charts).
If instead we had a single free version of Crazy Snowboard with IAP we would only appear in one chart, the Top Free. Even if the conversion rate was higher than the 10% we are seeing now (because IAP is easier than downloading a separate app), say 15%, 1500 sales is not going to get you in the Grossing charts.
So there it is, one app = one chart, two apps = two charts.
We’re wrestling with this decision right now for our next game. Very interesting points here, but maybe this only holds true for puzzle games of the style of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope etc? They game the charts with several versions of their game and add levels now and again to get updates and work it all back and forth to ride the charts. They have the advantages of large teams and large budgets and the advantage of already being at the top.
The link discussing Tilt To Live Wally posted above is a very interesting and very different perspective. I’d much prefer a sustainable model as discussed there for the long term of my business.
Hi timeuser,
I think this approach would apply to any game with wide commercial appeal – not just puzzle games. I can only go by our experience with Crazy Snowboard which is a 3D sports game, not a puzzle game.
I wouldn’t call what Angry Birds and Cut the Rope do ‘gaming the charts’. What they do is just smart. They have great games, and do constant free updates with more content. People love that.
And just because you are a small developer doesn’t mean you can’t make frequent updates with additional levels and content. Tilt to Live has had 8 updates, Mega Jump has had 13 so far, and as I mentioned above Crazy Snowboard has had 16 – and we are only two guys.
As far as sustainability, your best chance of making it as an Indy is to generate a consistent income – and I can tell you staying in the charts is the best way to do it. It’s not like you are selling out or scamming the system (like these guys), you are just working smart.
Hi Ezone,
Your post on switching categories is pretty interesting. Really surprised to find that such a big effect from a simple category change. I hesitate to switch categories because the other ones are just less trafficked thus a lot less potential customers. The RPG category for example, only takes about 10 copies / day to break into the top 200 US whereas the Arcade/Action category is looking at 100-150/day for the top 200.
But I suspect that if switching categories means a top 25 rank in a different category, it could make a big difference. Anything lower than 25, I’m not so sure. Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll have to give it a try at some point.
True. I didn’t mean to imply that Angry Birds, Cut the Rope etc. were doing anything wrong by “gaming” the charts, just they were working them from every angle they could to their advantage. You’re right of course that it’s smart of them to do that and they are great games. The combination of a great game, luck and smart marketing is surely the recipe but as always the devil is in the details. Those games are definitely outliers in that they’ve stayed on the charts so long and that may skew the statistics a bit. Planning for a hit like that seems it could be too many eggs in a basket.
I see two opposing models of marketing success in the App Store recently, the model you discuss and the freemium model used by ngmoco, Mega Jump etc. I’m trying to decide which is the model to pursue for us or if there is some common thread. ngmoco have done some things that seem to relate to your point of having mutliple versions in the charts, they released several nearly identical versions of the same apps so they could chart multiple times.
Perhaps the conclusions drawn in the Decoupling Ranking From Revenue article are misplaced. In their case they had the large pool of users to monetize with In App Purchase. Who’s to say they wouldn’t have done better with a model like you discuss? However, longer term once an app slides farther down the charts it seems it would be easier to monetize players with In App Purchase as mentioned there.
You might be interested in our experience with the Freemium model: Free or Paid – Why Not Both!
Thanks. That was some more to think on. You have several interesting articles here.
Very good points. Thank you. Check out our blog on the genesis, production and marketing of our iPhone app from two ordinary people. http://sodunked.blogspot.com