The power of FREE in the App Store

Today, the App Store is saturated with games from large publishers with large budgets for what they call “user acquisition.” It’s getting harder and harder for indie developers to compete in this kind of market. So how does a humble hobbyist get their beloved app noticed? The answer, apparently, is to give it away for free for a couple of days.

Last weekend, I dropped the price of my iOS board game, Five-O, from $1.99 to free. I planned to run the sale for one day only, to promote the latest update, which added universal app support. As you’ll see, the sale was a big success, and the decision to let it run for a second day was a no-brainer.

Just flipping the switch to make your app free gets you instant press from websites and apps that automatically track price drops. AppShopper is my personal favorite. Posting on Reddit might seem like shameless self-promotion, but they love to hear about paid apps that have gone free, especially apps from indie developers, so long as you keep it in the proper subreddits. Touch Arcade also has a forum to post announcements of this kind. There are probably more places you could publicize a sale, but I stopped there, and spent the rest of my day playing Five-O online and periodically checking its rank in the App Store.

By the end of the day, Five-O was still climbing the charts. It was close to ranking in the top 10 iPad board games in the US. That was pretty cool, but I wanted to see how high it could go. The risk of leaving it free for another day was small. Losing a day of sales is no big deal. Obscurity, I have learned, is the real enemy in the App Store.

The next day, things really got interesting. I got an email notifying me that Five-O was on the “Apps Gone Free” list, a popular column featuring hand picked apps which have dropped from paid to free. Another email let me know that a German blogger had written about Five-O, which helped boost its rank in Germany. It was also doing surprisingly well in France, China, and Canada. Here are the rankings I am most proud of.

#1 iPhone Board Game in France
#2 iPhone Board Game in China
#1 iPad Board Game in Canada
#1 iPad Board Game in Germany
#1 iPad Family Game in Germany
#5 iPad Game in Germany
#7 iPad App in Germany

And in the US

#2 iPad Board Game
#7 iPhone Board Game
#9 iPad Family Game
#10 iPhone Family Game
#35 iPad Game
#94 iPhone Game
#100 iPad App

In 48 hours, Five-O was downloaded over 43,000 times! Almost 50,000 games were completed during those two days. It went from 250 DAU (daily active users) before the sale, to 3,800 on May 5th, and 22,000 on May 6th. Now came the time to see if I could turn this success into revenue. At midnight on May 6th, Five-O went back to it’s pre-sale price of $1.99.

Switching a free app back to paid in the App Store immediately obliterates its ranking. So it was with Five-O. But, much to my delight, it started to climb back up again. Five-O was soon hovering around #50 in the paid board games category on both iPhone and iPad. On May 10, another popular German website featured Five-O in an article, leading to a #124 top grossing game rank in Germany and my highest daily revenue to date. Worldwide, revenue for the week was up 1600% from the week prior.

Dropping Five-O from paid to free was an excellent decision. It cost me nothing and increased my game’s exposure immensely, leading to Five-O being featured on several websites that would have otherwise not known about it. And, the thousands of new fans will hopefully spread the game through word of mouth. To any of my fellow developers out there, if you’re a in a similar situation, with an app that’s getting good reviews but not a lot of exposure, I’d definitely recommend trying this strategy.