The dust has settled since our mad week at the top of the charts giving our iPhone game FaceFighter away for free, so we thought we’d do a little analysis to see exactly how things panned out.

This post will be a bit longer and crunchier than is usual here at Appy Place, so for those of you with hummingbird attention spans, here’s the main take-away: by giving away a million free copies of FaceFighter, we’ve seen paid sales of FaceFighter surge up over 200% after ending the promotion; downloads of FaceFighter Lite are also up over 300% in that same time.

Now, the details.

The Rocket

FaceFighter has been Appy Entertainment’s most successful app to date. It had already seen over a million downloads in its paid and full versions before our free promotion, and was a worthy and well-regarded app with quality content and critical recognition. Prior to the promotion, FaceFighter was outside its category Top 150 in the United States, but it was a steady earner for us, with daily sales fluctuating by a couple hundred copies depending on day of the week and the mysterious currents of the App Store. Despite prior success in offering Zombie Pizza for free, we approached a free promotion for FaceFighter with some trepidation. This game is our bread-and-butter, and we didn’t want to destroy it by giving it away. But at the same time we were determined to do everything we could to support the launch of our newest game, Tune Runner.

So we had this little rocket called FaceFighter. It wasn’t a new title, but it had moderate visibility and good reviews so we figured setting it to free would make some noise. We primed the app with a pop-up message encouraging players to download Tune Runner, and then trundled FaceFighter out toward …

… The Launching Pad

The launch pad for FaceFighter was Free App A Day.com. The FAAD site has attracted significant daily traffic by promoting a new paid app for free every day of the week. Just setting FaceFighter to free on our own would not have dented the charts. We needed a lot of eyeballs on the app all at once to generate a download spike and vault FaceFighter up into the top ranks of free, where it would come to the attention of the wider, App Store-browsing public. Only then would FaceFighter generate the kind of downloads that would translate to a good launch for Tune Runner.

Despite an App Store glitch that delayed the start of our free day for several hours, we still had a good launch on Thursday the 18th of February, with about 83,000 free units vaulting us up the ranks.

All the following charts are from AppFigures, and all ranks are from the U.S. App Store (which largely reflects our international performance in any case).

FaceFighter ranks, before and after …

The chart above shows FaceFighter’s U.S. ranks before, during, and after our free week. On the left, you can see a little of our history bumping along outside the Top 150. Then comes a black-out period while the App Store adjusted from our change from paid to free, followed by a rapid rise to the top. Finally, you see another black out period as we switched back from free to paid, followed by another nosebleed-inducing rise as our paid ranks jumped up to the middle of the Top 100, substantially improving FaceFighter’s position versus where we were before the promotion.

Our Week In Orbit

Before drilling down on the post-free bounce for FaceFighter, it’s worth talking about our “free week” for a moment. Let’s look just at the unit numbers for FaceFighter during its free period.

FaceFighter’s free ride

We had originally planned to be free for just one day with FaceFighter, but when our free day was delayed by a glitch, we decided to extend that period by twelve hours or so. We kept close tabs on our numbers, and re-evaluated on a daily basis. Keeping FaceFighter free for a weekend (when we experience our best paid sales) was a bit of a gut check, but the promotion was doing such a good job of pulling Tune Runner up the ranks that we decided it was worth it to stay free.

We were still a little stunned by each day’s download numbers. The Free App A Day site got us off to a good start, but the mad success of the free period really owed to a bit of a perfect storm:

1. We built our numbers with a ratings spike just before the weekend.
2. We got a little tailwind from press coverage by Touch Arcade and other sources on Friday.
3. We were able to reap the benefits of being on top of the ranks during peak Friday – Sunday download hours.

If we’d gone out free early in the week, we’d likely have lost momentum before the weekend. Thursday proved an ideal day for us, bringing us to the market’s attention at just the right time. By the end of our free period, we’d given away around a million copies of FaceFighter.

Re-Entry

Good God, what had we done?

FaceFighter had boosted Tune Runner up into it’s own Top Ten, which was all well and good, but what impact would this have on FaceFighter’s own sales?

Well, as you can see from our first chart, sales are up for the paid version of FaceFighter. Way up. Up 207% versus the seven days prior to the promotion. We made back any FaceFighter income we’d lost over our free period in about three days. Since then, it’s all been gravy.

Why on earth would sales go UP immediately after increasing our price from free to $1.99?

We think it’s because the App Store is a referral business.

We saw sales of Zombie Pizza go up 39% after being free for a day. Those numbers have largely held firm. It might make sense to see numbers improve right after a sale, as folks late to the promotion decide to buy the game anyway … but when sales hold on week after week, we can only conclude that some portion of the new sales come from our “free” people recommending the game to their friends, leading to paid sales, post-promotion. This effect is especially acute for FaceFighter, which directly employs the faces of family and friends inside the game. We designed the app to be viral in the sense that you’d beat up a friend and show them the picture, encouraging them to buy the app themselves to get even and share in the fun … and that effect was already serving to keep us stable outside the Top 150. With an injection of a million free downloads, we hit critical mass and referrals of FaceFighter appear to be carrying it along at an elevated rate.

Free Is The New .99

Much has been written about price deflation in the App Store. Appy’s take on consumer expectations is that $1.99 is a premium price for an app, .99 is average price, and everything should have a free option for entry-level buyers. If Apple wanted to do away with free apps and set a more profitable price floor for us, then we’d “reluctantly” go along, but for now, the market has spoken — they want free apps. And markets are never wrong!

So Appy Entertainment (and everyone else in this crazy business) has to find a way to make money off of free. And that’s a whole different topic. But before we close, let’s take a look at ranks for our other FaceFighter game … FaceFighter Lite.

the future is free!

From this diagram, you can see that FaceFighter Lite was right around the edge of the Top 100, and that it experienced a sharp rise when the full version of FaceFighter went back to paid status. To be precise, in the week since the change-over, FaceFighter Lite downloads are up 357% versus the same week prior to our promotion. Like the numbers for it’s paid cousin, FaceFighter Lite ranks have held pretty strong for the last week. With a gentle rate of decline, our fingers are crossed that we’ll stay up in the ranks for several weeks.

Right now, our profit on FaceFighter Lite is modest. We get a little bit of revenue from ads, but mostly we depend on players moving up to the paid version of FaceFighter to justify keeping FaceFighter Lite in the market. We’re still scheming about how to better monetize FaceFighter Lite. Revisiting FaceFighter Lite is on our backlog after re-fitting FaceFighter for additional, premium downloadable content (new faces, weapons, and finishing moves are on their way). We’re also bringing FaceFighter to the iPad, with a new feature just for that platform.

The Bottom Line

But that’s another column. For now, the bottom line on our mad free week with FaceFighter:

1. Appy’s “portfolio strategy” is paying off as our line of apps grows — it is possible to use one app to bootstrap another.
2. The FaceFighter promotion helped launch Tune Runner into the top ten.
3. Post-promotion sales for FaceFighter have more than made up for the income we lost by being free.
4. Increased visibility has netted us new customers, and grown our mailing list and Twitter followers, too.

Thanks to everyone for reading this far. We welcome comments and questions in reply to this post.

And for those of you visiting our blog or learning about FaceFighter for the first time, here’s a video to tell you all about the game. Feel free to hit the button at the bottom of this post to buy your own copy of FaceFighter, especially if you think this article game you two bucks worth of information! Thanks!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLSlnMGEWK4]

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 6:25 pm and is filed under PR & Marketing. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete innapropriate comments.