APPocalypse: What an Awesome review gets you

Among the first in what I bet will be a bunch of posts about the sad state of selling Apps in the App Store.  Pete's excellent one here as well.

Our game bloc'd that came out the end of March got an awesome review, better than anything I could have written myself.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/25/blocd-is-a-highly-addictive-riff-on-tetris-that-you-should-down/

Tuaw.com is one of the best known Apple blog websites, so we thought "Great!  Other sites will see it, maybe even somebody at Apple will see it and like the game."

Not so much. The blog article itself got ripped off linked to, but no other sites did a review.

But how did that really convert into sales?  Here's actual numbers from AppViz.

It had dropped from some higher peaks in the first day after it was released.  The blog post got a nice spike in downloads, but it only lasted a few days.

Counting the days of the post and a week after, we made $27.17 in that time.  Which while a pathetically sad number, does compare favorably to the TOTAL of $37.12 that the app has made as of today.  The green lines are the free download numbers.  The little blue bits on top are the In-App purchases that make some money.

Part of the Plan B was to do some other rule variations with the same gameplay.  We did that and released it as a separate game.  Bloc3d.  It's strictly a paid $1 game.  I'll post some stats for that one after it has been out for a bit longer...


Update:  Pete's Skype comments were worth adding:

Read your blog post in the middle of the night, more sad truths.  That one really shows the non-discoverability.  When you're promoted you get downloads.  When the promotion stops, the downloads stop immediately.  No long tail anymore, just switch off.