3 Magic Shots featured Unknown Orbit for free

The last blog I posted, I outlined how Unknown Orbit had dropped to around a sale a day, and that my next step would be to try setting UO to be free for a day or two.

Soon after, I was contacted by a new free app company called 3 Magic Shots, who claim to “… find top rated apps and get the developers under our spell to have them make it free for you.” I hadn’t really looked into any other free app a day services after hearing how expensive they were, and these guys sent me a professional, hand crafted email with a very professional looking website and app to go with it. So I said, sure why not! They had only launched a few weeks ago, and I was able to use the service for free, whereas it sounds likely to one day become a paid service.

I ended up giving them a bunch of marketing, text and image resources, some review quotes, that sort of thing, and then a week or so later I set UO to be free. On that day, 3 Magic Shots featured my game on their website, app and twitter. I got a push notification saying that it was available, and UO did look really nice within 3MS’s app interface on my phone. The game was also featured on a few other free app sites, and it ended up getting downloaded 26,000 times that day, tailing off to a few hundred 4-5 days later.

Overall the free version was downloaded over 45,000 times, and when it returned to a 99c app, sales were up to 10-15 a day, where they still are now. It will remain to be seen if I can stay at that level or not, but it would be nicer pocket money than $365 a year! I’d like to say a big thanks to 3 Magic Shots for providing a hassle free and very professional promotion service, their staff are great and my game was featured in the best light possible. A 10x sales increase is quite good (though of course, my sales were miniscule to begin with!), and perhaps with an app that was a bit stickier or more fun, I’d have seen even better results. I highly suggest you contact them if you’re considering some kind of free period for your game.

Surprisingly, while I was fully expecting to get a deluge of poor reviews from free users, reviews stayed at mostly 5 stars in the USA and Australia. Not many people appear to like it in the UK, however!

In terms of how UO has gone in general, on the one hand I feel like I did really well to get a highly rated and reviewed game out there, in front of all the big sites, yet it has been a fairly standard app store flop. On the other hand, I do understand that the game has its shortcomings, and I certainly don’t have any kind of feeling that I deserved to do better from it. I think if I did have this feeling, I would perhaps be doing more updates and trying to promote it further. I did my best with the skills and time I had, and decided to release when the game was ‘good enough’, while not spending too long on such a simple game.

In the mean time I’ve been prototyping a couple of games with the composer of Unknown Orbit and Class 3 Outbreak/Zombie Outbreak Simulator, Rhys Lindsay. This has mostly taken the form of board game mockups which have been really enjoyable. Despite apparently being a game designer, I had never done this before and it was really illuminating. It gives me much greater confidence to begin creating a computer prototype, knowing that I’ve almost played through the finished game a few times. If all goes well I hope to begin sharing details on that next game soon.

Thanks for reading.
Regards,
Jay