Compared to any of my other game releases, the Breaking Block Appstore release has been amazing.
I had received Appstore approval late Monday night. I got up early the next morning, before any activity had been reported. I had cleared my schedule so that I could spend the day marketing the release for both platforms.
Chartboost usually has the most-frequently updated statistics, so I was using that to monitor the progress throughout the day. The updates started coming in at roughly an hourly rate: 10, 20, 40, 70, 175 – the faster the number grew, the more excited I got. By the time it hit 20, it was already a record for one-day downloads. All prior records quickly became meaningless.
The number was still climbing by the hundreds when I went to bed. Yesterday, I found out that the final, official total for the first day was 980. Nearly a thousand, on Breaking Block’s first day on the Appstore. I think the main factor that fueled this quick rise was Breaking Block’s appearance in the Free list directly on the front page of the Arcade Games section of the iTunes store. It looks to me like all game releases hit this list, but only the newest releases closest to the beginning of the alphabet each day are shown on the front page, as far as I’ve observed. Should this be the case? I’d think it would be better to randomize the front page choices for egalitarian exposure. At any rate, I’m grateful for the exposure I received.
Yesterday, Breaking Block moved into the second day section of the Free list, and predictably, activity slowed considerably. It is still far above the level of traffic I am accustomed to, though. It does not seem that the Apple numbers are official yet, but there were at least 300 new downloads yesterday. Apple’s official numbers for yesterday show an additional 452 downloads. Many players also returned for a second day, according to Chartboost’s “Uniques” metric, which measured that the number of unique devices that ran the game yesterday was far greater than the number of new installs.
Reviews on both Appstore and Google Play have been positive for the most part, with the only actionable negative feedback so far being over my choice of tilt-only controls. If demand from interested players warrants it, I will add a different control scheme, though telling me I’ve already lost you as a customer is not a real motivator for me to do so =P.
I’m not sure where things will go from here. No matter what happens, this is a release I can be proud of, with nearly 1,300 downloads in 2 days. Thank you to everyone who has downloaded, played, and rated the game. I hope you enjoy it for many weeks and months to come!