Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Lite versions are a bit of a hot topic in the iPhone market right now. Everyone’s looking at them, everyone wants to know how they’re working out for the developers who have them. It’s mostly down to iShoot, which didn’t have much luck originally, but became a roaring success after the release of its free Lite verson. It’s been the on and off best selling game on the iPhone for several weeks now. 

So now not only are many developers reconsidering the Lite option because of iShoot’s success, but the increasing numbers of Lite versions in general also provides added pressure for developers to join the crowd. Realistically, a Lite version alone is unlikely to make another iShoot, things like that only happen very occasionally. I think most developers go into this well aware that their Lite version isn’t going to send them straight to #1 (although, if they tell you they’re not even hoping for that, they’re lying).

Sneezies Lite

On to our personal experience, we originally ruled out a Lite version of Sneezies, thinking a try-before-you-buy option for a game that was on sale for 99c would be unnecessary. It seems like it should be an impulse buy, but when so many games are vying for attention at that price point, they cease to be impulse buys. With the economy biting, consumers want to make sure they chose the right game, even if it is only 99c, many have just been burned too many times already.

Sneezies Lite was released on Friday, so I’m reporting back with my feelings now we’ve had a whole weekend on the market. This might be a little premature, but I will provide more updates as more time passes.

Results

Firstly and most importantly, sales of Sneezies have gone up since the introduction of the Lite version. They haven’t exploded, but they’ve gone up. I’ve heard from some developers whose sales went down, so this is a positive start.

In the UK charts, for example, we’ve moved up a couple of places in the Family and Puzzle charts, and Sneezies Lite is ranking at similar positions in the equivalent free charts. The increase hasn’t been enough to break us into the overall top 100 games, but I don’t think we’re a long way off that. One more place in the Family chart (currently held by a $3 popcorn toy) should scrape us into 99th or 100th position. Hopefully we’re still heading up.

The results in the US are similar, we seem to have gained a few places in the two niche charts, but we haven’t broken into any of the overall charts.

It’s always hard to read anything into a few days results on the App Store, because various press mentions or reviews will always create little fluctuations. Sneezies Lite was mentioned by a couple of blogs and Twitter users on Friday, so that probably helped us get off to a decent start.

Summary

Based on this small amount of sample data, I’m glad we released Sneezies Lite. Even excluding the sales impact, it’s been worth it for the goodwill from the players who’ve contacted me about it, and for the extra exposure. The slight increase in sales is a welcome bonus, hopefully this will all lead to a few more word of mouth referrals.