New Star Soccer - week 1 sales
Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/New Star Soccer - week 1 sales
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| Hey guys, I thought you might like to hear the week 1 sales figures for NSS. I launched it on March 13th on the iOS and Android appstores, whilst simultaneously uploading the Flash version to Mochi and Kongregate. To be honest I have been surprised and overwhelmed with all the positive feedback I have received and well, sales aren't too bad either. These stats are from March 12th - March 19th. iOS http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/new-star-soccer/id498973162 Downloads (Free) 10,868 Sales (IAPs ranging from £0.69 to £5.99) 2,964 Android http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newstargames.newstarsoccer Sales (£1.99) 829 Flash http://www.kongregate.com/games/siread/new-star-soccer Kongregate Plays 223,379 Kongregate Ad Revenue $150.16 Mochi Plays 151,059 Mochi Ad Revenue $49.23 The Kongregate stats have blown me away. It has flown past quarter of a million plays now (remember the stats above are only for the first 7 days) and it's the 3rd highest rated sports game on the site. (I don't really consider flinging penguins as a sport, so technically it should be number 1!) I think that the Flash version is really helping to shift units across the other platforms. It has regular ads that link to the iOS and Android app stores, and there are also ads for the PC/Mac version of New Star Soccer 5 (written in BlitzMax). Sales of NSS5 have more than tripled! So all in all a fantastic first week. What I would dearly love now is to get featured on the front page of iTunes games section. That would send it over the top! Naturally I want to thank Mark for creating Monkey in the first place. It truly is a wonderful piece of work. |
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| Wow... thanks for sharing and good luck! |
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| Some great numbers, especially the Kongregate play count, which I think was a very smart move to release on a major flash gaming portal. |
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| I think that the Flash version is really helping to shift units across the other platforms. Interesting. Are these ads rolled into the Kongregate Ad Revenue or are they separate ads? |
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| Congrats! iOS £0.70 * 2,964 = £2074.8 Android £1.99 * 829 = £1649.71 Kongregate Ad Revenue = $150.16 (£94.90) Mochi Ad Revenue = $49.23 (£31.14) TOTAL = £3850.55 Not bad for 7 days sales :) I agree that your Kongregate play count has helped with the marketing for the mobile platforms! (Note to self: Do this in the future ;)) |
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| Nice job Simon! |
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| Congrats Simon! |
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| I just won $250 for being game of the week on Kongregate! :) @Adam Not quite sure what you mean - Kong put up an ad as the game loads, and the revenue is from that (plus the other ads on the page I guess). My own ads are links to the mobile versions and NSS5 that appear on the main menu and pop up after every 5 matches. @therevills Don't forget Apple and Android take 30%, and the iaps on iOS range up to £5.99 (which sells very well I should ad!) but your figure isn't far off. ;) |
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| Congrats on your success. Somewhat expected from me as I said in the project thread - it's a really nicely put together game. If you get a chance to make a post or mention how you used Monkey in creating it I'm sure it would be helpful in generating additions to the community. |
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| That is awesome! Very excited for you and I appreciate you sharing numbers. Any plans for a Windows Phone version? |
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| @Why0Why Possibly in the future. I will make sure the game is 100% stable first (still some Android issues) and I believe we need a solution to the on-screen keyboard as well. Then I need to pick up a Windows phone (currently collecting more test devices than I care to think!) @muddy_shoes Sure. I'm always bigging it up and there is a nice big logo on the games About page that links to this site. :) |
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| Good job! I'm 4th in the Arcade mode high scores! :D |
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| I was 1st for a few days, now ive slipped down to 5th with 42 goals. |
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| Ooo i must've moved then, i was 4th with 37. Just checked, still 4th on the all time high scores. |
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| congrats :D |
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| Well done ! /StuC |
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| Woo! Won $1500 for being game of the month on Kongregate. It's getting something like 100,000 plays a day at the moment. Almost up to 1.1 million on Kong! |
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| Congrats! i'm #1 in this week's high scores and #2 in the all time scores! !\o/ |
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| Wow, doing great! Well done! |
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| Just the motivation I need to get my game done.. Easter holidays just round the corner time to lock my self away for a few days. Just out of interest how much did you spend creating the game? |
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| Thats awesome news :). |
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| That's amazing, congratulations :) Edit: Seriously, that's really amazing. Over 4 grand in a week! You must be over the moon. ! :o |
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| Amazing! Congratulations :D Thanks for sharing your stats! Monkey sure has a lot of potential when creating awesome high quality games :) |
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| @Supertino It's difficult to put a time-frame on the development because most of the code was ported over from New Star Soccer 5 (BlitzMax). That game took about a year to create, and I spent about 4-5 months porting code, creating all new menu screens and building a new match engine. @raz Totally over the moon. 3 weeks in and it has gone from strength to strength. :) |
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| Your game seems to really fit Kongregate audience. You had over 200k plays in a week, while for example Fairway Solitaire (BFG blockbuster game) had "only" 713k play since Feb 15th 2012. Shit, I just checked it and you're close to 1.5m plays within 23 days :D Congrats!!! |
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| Si, would it be possible to submit your game to the Apps section? Would like to add it to the featured section on the front page. |
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| Yeah, I did attempt that the other day but for some reason it wouldn't upload. Just tried again, this time it was successful. :) |
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| Thanks Si. One problem though - when attempting to play, I get an error: Monkey runtime error: TypeError: Cannot read property 'f_frames' of null That's on both Safari and Chrome. |
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| Hmm, strange. I will be releasing version 1.1 soon, so I will upload again when it's ready. |
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| siread - how did week two go? :p |
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These are the downloads of the free app for weeks 1 to 4 on iOS: And these are the in-app-purchases:  These are the Android installs (sales):  |
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| Impressive |
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| Sales on the up... good stuff. |
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| Amazing, well done Si |
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| Hey Simon. Care to update again? I am curious to see how it is going. Has it been continued momentum or has it dropped off? |
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| Sales on iOS have improved week on week. Android sales are steady but nowhere near that of iOS. April was my most successful month ever, AND my wife and I had a little boy. :D |
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| Congratulations on both accounts especially about the baby |
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| This is still amazing, nice one (and congratulations on the baby!) :) |
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| Congrats! I have 2 girls and 2 boys, I am done on that front. I know it feels great to have the most successful month ever financially and then have a baby on top of that. Exciting times! |
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| Congrats for the little boy. That is indeed great news!!! |
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| An EDGE review! Ok, so reviews don't seem to have the same effect as they used to, but AN EDGE REVIEW! http://www.edge-online.com/reviews/new-star-soccer-review |
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| Wow. Congrats! |
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| wow, congratulations on your new family member! sorry about your sleep schedule, though. we just got ours back. :) |
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| Siread, did you ask them for a review, or did their came up with it on their own? |
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| I didn't ask but a chap called Simon Byron did a free press release for me (because he loves the game) and he is 'followed' by a lot of influential folk, so I believe that's what caught their eye. :) @Adam Sleep is a very precious thing at the moment! |
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| Your level of success shows that knowing your audience is the key to the success. While Avalon Legends did very well on casual portals, Flash version on Kongregate received so far just 480 plays (in 4 days). Congrats! |
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| The reviews are flowing now... Edge: http://www.edge-online.com/reviews/new-star-soccer-review Eurogamer: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-05-16-app-of-the-day-new-star-soccer Kotaku: http://kotaku.com/5910329/new-star-soccer-turns-you-into-a-mobile-superstar GameTrailers: http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/2012/05/16/app-of-the-day-new-star-soccer Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/mobile-app-reviews/9271875/New-Star-Soccer-app-review.html |
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| Great momentum! |
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| Just wanted to say thanks very much for sharing your stats. Did getting to no.5 in UK (?) on iOS grossing chart boost your sales a lot? |
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| I've been playing like there was no tomorrow mostly all day. I'll blame you, Simon, if I hit the deadlines on my contract jobs... Awesome game. |
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 I think you can see where the success started to really kick in. After 'The Sun' reviewed the game it shot up the charts (sales tripled over night). Then a week later I did an update with a 1-shot 'Would you like to review this game?' prompt after about an hours play. Suddenly 5 star reviews starting pouring in (so far 7700 for this version!) and it climbed all the way to #1 top-grossing app in the UK. It has been in the top 5 for about 2 weeks now. While I am super happy at the success of the game I am slightly annoyed that it hasn't been replicated anywhere else in the world (except Ireland). Apparently the UK market accounts for about 8% of revenue on iOS where as the USA is a whopping 42%! (http://www.appannie.com/blog/#.T-R3TrVYuSo) Of course, New Star Soccer is making more money than I ever expected but I can only imagine how much a world-wide hit makes. Now if only Apple would feature the game (or even put it in their special 'Football' section!!!). |
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| You're gonna have to come up with New Star Football (said through gritted teeth), New Star Baseball and New Star Basketball for the American market (maybe New Star Hockey for Canada too!). Actually thinking about it, if you managed to get the same feel going I can't see any reason why they wouldn't be as much of a hit as New Star Soccer is in the UK :) |
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| wow, that´s amazing.. Congratulation for this. =) |
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| Just bought it for my Android phone, good work! Out of curiosity, why don't you use InApp purchases for Android like you do for iPhone? Do you have a special iPad version or is it just a universal app? Thanks and congratulations for your success! |
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| Maybe the fact it is not getting the same results on the US market is because on this Market people do not play soccer? |
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| Awesome success. Thanks for sharing those new results. Yeah probably you need to make New Star Baseball or Football or something. In Canada New Star Hockey :-) |
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| New Star Basketball would do it for me :). Or how about jump on the fastest rising sports now, New Star MMA :)! |
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| I was telling Simon that soccer is not too big in the US and I thought basketball would do well. But MMA sounds really awesome! |
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| I didn't go for IAPs on Android because as far as I know there wasn't a nice and easy IAP mod at the time, and I really wanted to get the game out by that point. I also figured it would be a nice experiment to compare free+iap versus paid apps. In retrospect I should have gone down the same route on Android as I did on iOS, particularly considering that piracy is rampant on Android. iOS revenue is 10x that of Android! I'm considering doing a different sport to cater for the US market but I actually have another idea for a new style of footie game, as that is where my passion lies. Just wish I had more time! |
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| Simon, now that you've made your millions, you can always buy time (by hiring other people to do the work for you). :-) |
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| Yeah, I've been thinking about that. I think if I cleaned up my Monkey code I might hire someone to build a different sport based on the existing code. I've a lot going on at the moment but will start thinking about it in the next month or two. If anyone is interested be sure to drop me a line. We could probably come up with some sort of rev-share agreement. :) By the way, i'm still a LONG way from £millions. :P |
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| Here here! :) |
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| Well done Simon. As I mentioned in another new star soccer thread, I'm addicted to this damned game. I had no idea it was written in Monkey until it crashed and I got a Monkey Runtime Error dialog :) It's only happened once though. Very nice Aaron |
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| Hey, nice one! Would you care to share (I understand if not!) how you marketed this? You have kind of blown my mind with how well you've done. Great work! :-) |
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| I didn't do any marketing really. The Flash version did really well, particularly on Kongregate, and that helped to sell the mobile versions initially. Eventually reviewers started to pick up on the game, and then the newspapers followed which really pushed it up to the top of the iPhone chart. Once you are there you need to keep updating the game in order to keep it fresh, keep people talking about it and keep it in the top 25. That kind of visibility on the app stores is absolutely key. Apple never helped me at all in getting it there, whilst other games get featured on release and see huge numbers straight away. It took weeks of being in the top 10 for them to even feature it in What's Hot. (It really is a case of 'who you know' in terms of getting featured on Apple, and I still don't know any one!) I think what it proved to me is that if you have a really good product then you can rise to the top. Otherwise you need a huge amount of polish and good contacts to get featured. Even then you will see titles fade away as soon as their ranking slips. Oh, and go free-to-play in some way. Not in a cynical way - NSS uses the age old trial mode/unlock system (with some in-app-purchases for good measure). Just don't be afraid of going free - it's vital to get the download numbers and I believe everything will be f2p on mobile eventually so get in before it's too late! |
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| How are you implementing the trial-unlock? A registration code, or a standard API? |
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| It's just an in-app-purchase which when bought stores a flag in the master save file. Android isn't free to play which was a huge mistake in hindsight as piracy is rampant on that platform. There just wasn't a good solution in Monkey at the time (and I think that is still the case?). |
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| As far as I know there is an InApp module for Android?! |
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| Good info Siread! Thanks very much. Our games got featured (Spring Bonus on the app store) but we saw nowhere near what you've seen, so it really does seem like it can be a bit of pot luck, but this is exactly the sort of game you can imagine people finding and loving. It would seem sports+free+IAP=money? We are free to play, but where do you put the IAP? That part is different for every game. Jake (GreyAlien here) is currently away for a while but we're both trying to decide the best way to get the best from our releases. I'm trying to get a few ideas together for when he gets back. Your post above is quite surprising :-) @Siread - IAP is totally doable on Android. We decided against it as it simply wasn't getting any attention that would make updating it worth the hassle. Perhaps I need to look at that again- But it's very doable! Unfortunately though, Android Piracy is just too easy. It needs looking at, as it is actually so easy as to be a deterrent for me on that platform, despite it being the platform I wanted to primarily target. |
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| Thanks for the information Simon, it's always interesting to here how other people are doing and their approaches to marketting. My app TrapIt has made less than nothing, never been featured and has faded away into obscurity, but I think I might see if I can turn it into a F2P version and see if it gets any more traction that way. Cheers Aaron |
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| I agree that free to play games might be the future at least to get enough downloads. But there are quite a lot of players who don't like that... Anyway, could you share your InApp sales percentwise? I assume that you carrier mode is the best sold one. How do players accept those "stars" packages? (Btw, what am I supposed to do with these stars?) I'm very interested how many players actually buy the carrier mode? Again, percentwise is enough. In my case of my Battleship game I have about 2% of people who buy the full version vs playing the lite one. I have more than 100.000 downloads of the lite and about 2.000 sales of the full... Thanks! |
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| *Gets New Star Soccer* *Forgets to do 8 hours of work today* Very nice. :) Although, I did discover a very minor bug on (at least) the iOS version. When you're marked as a substitute due to low energy (as opposed to "unimpressed"); and then a random event (as opposed to a drink) like a teammate giving you a drink, or letting you use his hottub, etc, boosts your energy levels back up; the game still shows you as being a substitute with low energy as a reason. However progressing to the match demonstrates you no longer are (ie, a normal game due to normal energy levels). +BlackD EDIT: OK, at least iOS and Flash. ;) Probably all of them, but like I said - very minor. It's a display only bug and doesn't affect the game. Example in action, after receiving an energy drink from a teammate:  |
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| Thanks for that! :) |
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| Hi, another thing: 1.- Background sound sometimes disappears 2.- Some problems with image rendering getting corrupted after hours of pure addiction 3.- Text sometimes is too large to fit on screen on Spanish and it's impossible to read on the Star Man newspaper and the like. Also, the Enery Too Low message on the Skills menu is also too wide to be shown properly on Spanish. Other than that, I love the game. |
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| Double post |
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