Seeking to Understand

Hexy has been on sale for two full days. The timing hasn’t been the best - with the holiday shopping season now here, tons of apps in the app store are doing special promotions or holiday themed releases, etc. It’s very hard to get noticed. Even so, the first day of sales was pretty good - we sold 19 units. Yesterday, even though it was Thanksgiving here in the US, we sold 8.

Hexy doesn’t have a hype machine behind it, isn’t built by some “big name” in the industry, I only have 71 followers on Twitter to pimp it to, and no one reads my blog… (Greg is in the same boat.) So from where I’m sitting, selling 27 in 2 days doesn’t seem half bad - especially considering that Hexy is actually pretty hard to find in the store unless you’re looking for it. We’re not on any Top or New lists, and we’re several pages away from the front when ordered by release date in the board game sub-category. (Which I don’t really understand… it looks like they are sorted by when the app was submitted and not so much when they finally go on sale. Given the variable nature of app review times… that doesn’t seem entirely fair. But oh well.)

We have a lot of sales to go before we break even, though - and we didn’t bill ourselves for the time it took to actually program it! In general terms, Hexy was really cheap to produce since we only had to pay for the art/music. (And we got a good deal… thanks Louie!) Even so, it takes a lot of sales to make that back. If we could maintain this pace of 27 sales every 2 days, it’d still take almost a month to earn what we spent to make the game. If we had to pay for the programming time as well, it’d probably be more like 5 months at a pace of 27 sales every 2 days. Given the drop between day 1 and day 2, though, I have to wonder if that’s even a reasonable pace to expect. We might be looking at 3 months just to pay back the cost of the art… I guess the only way to know is to wait and see.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the awesome reviews we’ve got so far! There’s 3 reviews in iTunes - all 5 star! That’s pretty sweet. Thanks to the reviewers! Side note: I’ve long had a theory that about 10% of people participate in online feedback (comments, voting, etc). Given that there’s 3 reviews in the store and we’ve almost sold 30 units… that fits nicely with my theory so far…