Antair Games An independent game developer blog

Our Sneezies update hit the App Store sometime during last weekend. And, in common with the experiences of other developers, it was almost off the new releases pages by the time they refreshed. It was interesting for us, it’s been a while since our last update, and that was back in the days when you used to get a nice sales bump on release day. Now you just seem to lose your rating.

Since submitting v1.3, we’ve been hard at work on the biggest update (by far) we’ve done since we released the game. Hopefully it’ll hit the App Store queue next week.

We’ve been making good progress on other things this week too, and our next game is shaping up very nicely. Good times!

—— ELSEWHERE ——

It looks like the mainstream press have accepted the fact that the iPhone gold rush isn’t all gold, and I enjoyed this article from the NYTimes.com. Worth highlighting this data point from ngmoco on app releases after the first 25,000: “Only 40 of 5,000 made it into the top 100,”. Less than 1 percent, and it probably gets worse if you look at the 10K apps from 30-40,000.

So onto some positives! Great sales stats released by NimbleBit this week. They show an App developer in a very healthy position on the upper east side of the window between rags and riches. These guys are where Craig and I (and no doubt most of the other indie teams out there) would love to be. We’re grateful for the openness, it’s very encouraging.

I also need to mention another great Indie collaboration effort that just kicked off yesterday: App Treasures. Read all about it on Owen’s blog (or Noel’s blog). We’ve tried a few things in the past to tap into the indie strength in numbers, and I’m still a firm believer that a gang of small teams can do great things by combining their efforts. Good luck to all involved. I’ve been playing a lot of one of the games on the label, Imangi, for Clan Wars this week.