I’m not sure what the cause of this low rating was but people live busy lives and we are not entitled to their time! We will simply try to reach our audience again in the next few days. This means that on launch day from our 145K-strong newsletter readership, only 3,509 people clicked on the link. Sadly though, the result over the next 24 hours was underwhelming: an open rate of 13% and a click rate (on the image or link to the App Store) of 2.41% which is both well below the industry standard. We sent the newsletter out in time for the US mainland to see. Our thinking thus was simple: Make a good port that also offers something new and write a straightforward and nicely formatted email bringing people directly to the iOS store. This has worked really well for us in the past as the few times we do actually send a newsletter, we reach a open rate of nearly 40% (industry standard: 20.82%). We treat our newsletter with a lot of respect and only use it when we have big news, sometimes going nearly 600 days without sending something as we really don’t want to inconvenience people. What’s more is that the vast majority of these recipients bought Game Dev Tycoon in the past and are simulation game fans. We have a decent following on Facebook ( GreenheartGames 7K, Game Dev Tycoon 13K, TavernKeeper 1.6K) and Twitter ( Greenheart Games 8.4K, Tavern Keeper 2.1K) but our real star is our newsletter which has a staggering 145,714 recipients. Part of the reason we were confident to invest into a good Game Dev Tycoon port (Rarebyte, our development partner, spent over a year creating the port), was that we have a larger audience than the usual indie game studio. We suspected that Apple would not feature us on day one, so we set our goal to try to rally our audience behind the release on launch day to get the first important positive boost. Marketing (or how we failed to reach most of our audience) If Steam hadn't featured us at launch though, I don’t think we would have reached the critical mass that makes word-of-mouth effective… bringing me to the next point: marketing. Our initial release has a Metacritic rating of 68%, but after the changes we made for the Steam release, we got a 95% user approval rating from Steam players. Quality-wise this was an important decision. After the piracy story went viral in early 2012 and we had all the attention of the world (it felt like it anyway) we didn't actually do the smart business thing and rush the game on Steam but instead disappeared for over three months to polish the game based on feedback we’d received from our players. The reason Steam was such a strong release for us was primarily because Steam had us featured on the front page. Thanks players and press! You are amazing □ Sale Numbersġ,463 copies in 24 hours is pretty good for a first game on a platform but if you take into account our audience and if we compare this data to other platforms and to the amount of copies we have to sell to break even on the mobile version, it becomes more sobering. We couldn't have hoped for a better reception. It’s the perfect sort of game for mobile devices and there’s so much to do here all players owe it to themselves to check out this great port. The press also gave us great reviews, here is the 5-star review from Toucharcade: Seriously though, the only visible low rating was due to an issue where the game can crash on iPhone X – fair enough and sorry, we are investigating (if you have that issue, please try to logout of Game Center and then back in again or get in touch with us via email). On release day we got 86 ratings with a total rating of 4.8 stars, or as Game Dev Tycoon would say 10, 10, 10, 9 (thanks, All Games □). Players had a great time playing the game. Looking at our data however, and seeing that the actual users are in fact lower than the purchases, suggests that there is a piracy rate of 0%, which would be incredible. We did not repeat our piracy experiment because I don’t think we are legally allowed to publish an iOS game outside of the App Store, even if it were a joke version. (Release time 28th Nov, 6AM PST.) Data after 24 hours Piracy (For Android players: Release on Android is scheduled for January!) After one day Here’s the data from our release day (one day delayed because of how the data is collected). This is in part so that other developers have more data to make decisions on, and also gives us a chance to talk more about the release, instead of only re-sharing positive coverage. We decided before the release that we would try to share sales data with the public after checking that this is allowed with our contact at Apple.
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