Today marks a great milestone: Warships has been downloaded over one million times! This in only 53 days! We never expected such a success, especially how bad the game was performing since mid-January.

Some figures

Before becoming free, Warships sold between 99¢ and $1.99. From december 09, 2009 to June 26, 2010 (Warships went free the next day), it sold 6,731 copies for a total of $4,586¹:

^{Figure 1: Daily revenues for Warships from December 09, 2009 to June 26, 2010.}

As you can see, aside from the launch sales peak, Warships made an average of $10 a day, with days as low as $4! We had no choice but to turn to an ad-based model to fund support and maintenance of the game. We decided not to create a separate free version since ads would only be seen within the menus, not during the game². Some users complained about it but once we explained the situation, they understood.

At first, we would only display an ad to our flagship app, TouchPad. Aside from the people actually buying the app from the ad, we use our LinkShare affiliate ID to generate more revenues. While not very significant, it generated anywhere from $5-$15 a day.

Then, we decided to give iAd a try:

^{Figure 2: Weekly iAd revenues for Warships from July 12 to August 14, 2010.}

So since we added iAd to Warships on July 13 to August 14th, the game made $2,218.65 in ad revenues. This represent a $70/day average. That’s a 700% increase, not counting the revenues from the TouchPad ad and our LinkShare affiliate ID!

While this looks good on paper, it’s still a pittance that only brings enough money to support the game. Moreover, iAd has been very slow to start and still has to prove to be a good source of revenue for developers.

In conclusion, we’re happy about our decision to make Warships free. It was a gamble that turned out well. You can download the game here.

Update: I forgot to include some iAd statistics about requests, impressions, etc. Warning: you won’t be impressed by what you’ll see!

^{Figure 3: Overall iAd stats from July 12 to August 14, 2010.}

¹ All amounts mentioned in this post are in CAD.


² Thanks for not reminding me of that nasty ad over board bug!

Here are the download figures. Notice the 70 000+ peak on July 5th:

Then, came the ad bug, which as crazy as it may sound, was a pain to fix¹. As you can see on the chart, downloads plunged dramatically. Now that the bug is gone for good, downloads are picking up but they are in no way as large as they once were.

This is where you can help. We’d really like to achieve the One Million Mark by July 31st. All you need to do is download the game and play it. If you enjoy the game, tell your friends on Twitter to download it and so on².

Warships is a nice game and you’ll probably enjoy the two players mode. We are planning to improve the game over time and fast-app switching will be part of the 1.4 update that should be submitted to Apple next week.

So thanks all and be sure to let us know what you think of the game!

Product page: http://edovia.com/warships/

iTunes Link: http://bit.ly/9b0DaQ

¹ A longer, more detail post will be available in August to explain what happened and to tell you about the whole “Warships now free” experience.

² The game is free and ad-based. It does generate revenues but we’re far from getting rich (see ¹). Most revenues are reinvested in the game.

Product Page

App Store Link

While I enjoy the extra money this provides me with, I’m more concerned about learning about how advertisement campaigns are performing so that’s why I’m redirecting visitors to my website before sending them to the App Store.

When you apply for an iTunes LinkShare affiliate ID, you’re likely to get rejected at first, especially if your website is outside the US. If that happens to you, just contact LinkShare to let them know that you intend to use your affiliate ID for the US iTunes Store only and you should get approved.

Now that you have your affiliate ID and have created your products links, it’s time to put them to good use. I suggest that you create a link on your website (ex: http://edovia.com/appstoreredirect…) to which you pass needed parameters. In my case, I pass the appId and the u1 parameter you’ve read about in Shane’s posts.

Try that link on both your iPhone and your Mac and see how it behaves in both cases:

http://edovia.com/appstoreredirect/appId=6&u1=blog

This allows me to log the redirection and know where it comes from. It also allows me to control how to present the redirection to the user. I treat the iPhone traffic differently since I don’t want the user to have to go through yet another webpage before hitting the App Store.

When a redirect occurs from say a desktop, I present the potential user with a “Thank You” page, that replaces the default redirect page you normally get when Safari jumps to iTunes.app:

The redirection occurs in a 1×1 iframe. I got this method from a Karelia’s blog post. I highly recommend subscribing to their feed about indie marketing. Really useful information!

Mobile Safari won’t handle the iframe tag so this method won’t work on an Apple mobile device. That’s why we have to check the user agent and make sure our redirection will open App Store.app directly.

So I’ve added some PHP detection code to my redirect page to handle this:

<?php
	// Log redirect into database
	...
	...

	$serverAnswer = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];

	// Fetched LinkShare link associated with product and u1 parameter
	$url = $product_item["appstore_link"].$dResponse["linkshare"]; 

	if (ereg("Mobile", $serverAnswer)) {
		// Simply redirect to the App Store through LinkShare.
		// This will gracefully launch App Store.app
		header('Location: '.$url);
	}
	else {
		// Present the redirect "Thank you" page that
		// contains that iframe I've told you about.
		$dResponse['views']['header'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/header_front.php');
		$dResponse['views']['content'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/appstoreredirect.php');
		$dResponse['views']['footer'] =
			array('url'=>'./app/pages/footer.php');
	}
	exit;
?>

That’s it! I’m sure I’ve probably missed a few conversions along the way and that my method could probably better but I don’t really care that much for conversions anyway, as long as I can see trends and confirm that advertisement campaigns are successful. I also like the idea that I can control the redirection and change it along the way if necessary.

While I was wondering how I could help, Justin Williams at Second Gear Software tweeted about bringing Mac/iPhone together to gather funds for Haiti: Indie+Relief.

More than 150 indie developers participated and while at this time no official numbers were given, it seems that the operation has been a success!

Update: Indie+Relief raises $143,872 for Haiti.

We offered to give away 100% of the total price for Warships and Currencies. That meant that we’d also give the 30% share that Apple keeps from every sale. However, sales we a little disappointing: both apps sold for a total of $144 so we boosted the amount to $400! We decided to give this sum to CECI, a local Montreal organization.

I feel that we’re very fortunate to live where we do and that more than often we take our comfort for granted. I also decided to give more because my brother, who is an helicopter pilot in the Canadian Army, will be sent to Haiti in the next couple of days to help. He’ll be there for 2 months. Giving a little more was the least I could do.

If you haven’t bought any of the apps yesterday, you can still donate to your organization of choice. Here’s a few:

CECI
American Red Cross
Doctors Without Borders