This is my second post in the idevblogaday series and it’s going to be a short one because I’m at WWDC and I’m writing this post at the NGMOCO night of meat!

For those who caught my last post in the series you’ll know that our iPad game iBots Launch has been getting less than stellar sales. After a decent initial peak the number has fallen to roughly 10 sales a day.

So as an experiment I decided to make the game free for a weekend and see what difference it made. Well I can tell you it made quite a difference:

In just two days I had received around 30,000 downloads. Interestingly most of these were from China. I’m not sure exactly why, maybe there was a Chinese blog feature, maybe they just love robots!

It was a crazy two days, I got to watch the game cruise up through the charts again. I was especially fascinated this time because I had done zero marketing beyond making the game free. I did notice that there were a lot of twitter robots that announced that it had gone free but beyond that I can’t account for the rise in ranking.

Anyhoo obviously I haven’t been monetizing this game correctly!

So I’ve decided to try providing the game for free with iAds. The last few days have been spent adding ad support to various parts of the game and analytics to help me understand how people play it. As of today I’m ready to submit an update to the app store. 

Stay tuned to see if I can turn my financial situation around with the new strategy!

Ps. I have a few technical posts up my sleeve, one exciting piece to look forward to is a system that live updates the game while it’s running on the device. I have been using this system a lot in the development of our upcoming game.