DEO Sales Report

 

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.

2 Comments

  1. Posted on October 19, 2011 at 12:59 am by stu

    very nice of you to publish sales.

    interesting to compare with my own blackberry sales.

    however you are still in a very poor financial state having spent $30000 to make and you have only made $2800 before income tax.

    look forward to the update is great game

  2. Posted on March 3, 2012 at 12:11 am by Peter Babiy

    Thanks! We’re hoping to really shake things up with DEO 2 but if nothing else, it was a great learning experience. Something we can apply towards our future games.

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