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!