Hard to believe that it’s been over a month since DEO went live, and yet we’re still trying to wrap our minds around the thought of being up on the App Store amongst other great developers!

As I promised a few weeks back, I’ll be sharing with you some of our numbers (ain’t that why you’re all here?). I swear to be as transparent and open as possible.

Before I get into anything else, let me just say this; DEO (being our first paid game), nevertheless is a tremendous success in our opinion! We’ve learned a butt-load of crap; stuff you can’t get out of books!

Currently, we’re prepping a major update to address bugs (little that we had actually) and introduce a bunch of other craziness. 3 new worlds, lots of achievements, brand new mechanics, revised main menus, revised levels, etc! More on that topic later…

Let’s get down to business!

– Dev. cost from start – live on the App Store: $30,000 (including resources and labor)
– Dev. period: 3.5 months
– Initial release: Aug 18th, 2011
– Marketing budget: $0 (LOL)

– Total units sold on day 1: 660
– Total units sold during its first week: 2,080
– Total units sold to date: 4,000

– Day 1 ranking charts: strategy – #12; adventure – #19; all games: #93
– End of week 1 ranking charts: strategy – #26; adventure – #35; all games: #210

– Free for 24 hours on Sep 14th – total free units downloaded: 50,000

– Most popular countries: 1. United States 2. China 3. France 4. Taiwan 5. Israel 6. Canada 7. Russia 8. Italy 9. United Kingdom 10. Germany

Of course being in the top 25 and top 100 overall didn’t last very long but for what it’s worth, it felt good hanging around titles like Plants vs. Zombies hehe.

DEO had great momentum from the start but it wasn’t able to sustain its position. We have some ideas on how to change that! Hopefully after some revision and a bit more thought, we can have a second re-launch with hopes for better sustainability.

Most valuable lesson learned: Building momentum on day 1 is important; sustaining your position is even more important! Achieving both is a product of 2 things which cannot be separated – appealing art style and engaging gameplay mechanics.