Last month I wrote about a change I had made to one my old games in Ovi Store, Palleggio, and going from a paid to a free download. The results in downloads were pretty dramatic, and now at the end of the month here’s the numbers:
- March 2009 – Feb 2010: 63 paid downloads (@€1 EUR)
- 1st half March 2010: 3302 free downloads
- Total March 2010 (one day not shown in chart): 9462 free downloads
As I had seen earlier with free downloads, the tyop 5 countries had changed, and Italy remained out there on top, and the non-touchscreen devices were clear leaders (even though there was a touchscreen version available).
In looking at those downloads, I also then started experiementing with including some AdMob advertising into some free apps I created using the Ovi App Wizard. I created free apps that turned the RSS feed from some of my websites into Nokia WRT widgets and also Java apps so that basically all devices supported by Ovi Store were covered. The apps covered OviFlash.com, ToyTragic.com and this blog, DaleRankine.com, and in the last 2 weeks of March, the app for OviFlash.com had 7324 downloads and started earning about AU$3 a day from AdMob advertising. Guess I’ll have the deposit for that Maserati sooner than expected 
Overall, interesting stories have come out of this for me with Ovi Store. One is that without marketing these apps at all, or having them highly visible in the Ovi Store clients (web or mobile), you can still achieve some reasonable downloads. Add into that an ad-funded model, and depending ont he app you might make a tidy little sum of cash over a reasonable period of time (and by reasonable I mean you might be able to pay for the beer and pizza you used to bribe your developers to do the coding!). Real money will still only flow from paid apps that are heavily promoted and visible, or that generate significant word-of-mouth marketing.
I recently decided to do a small experiment with the Flash mobile game titles I have in the Nokia Ovi Store. They’ve been there from the very beginning of the Ovi Store at the lowest price point (1 EUR), and over the past months I’ve watched the sales dwindle to nearly zero. In saying that, I stopped marketing the apps at the end of 2009 when I started working for VHA, so to be completely fair I haven’t been putting anything into getting sales – which of course you need to do on any app store to see downloads!
So I wanted to see what the impact would be on an app that’s been in the Ovi Store for around 12 months if I turned it into a free app and continued to do no marketing (apart from what was already out in the open, which really at this point was a listing on oviflash.com). I went into the Ovi Store publish system (which has dramatically improved over the past 12 months in speed and stability) and chose one of the more (surprisingly) under-performing apps in our catalogue – Palleggio. And here’s what I discovered …
From March 2009 through to the end of Feb 2010, Palleggio (a football skills / juggling game) had a grand total of 63 paid downloads. For the first two weeks of March 2010, it had a total of 3302 free downloads.
Where were all these customers before when I was making money off these downloads hey?! So is this really surprising? No, not really – free VS paid is pretty much always skewed in this way. But does the radical jump in downloads indicate that the Ovi Store is easier for customers to download free content? Does it mean simply that Ovi Store customers (as like much of the app store patronage across devices and platforms) are LOOKING for free content? I wonder what I would see if I had a freemium version in there (i.e. a limited version of the game for free, plus a paid version with all the bells and whistles), as is the case with so many titles in the Apple App Store?
And while this might be seen in some quarters as poor app-store-etiquette, I’d be interested in doing another experiment and see what happens to the numbers if I change it back to a 1 EUR price point. If and when I do that, I’ll be sure to post the results here as well 
I’m also working with the Ovi App Wizard to create some free apps that include AdMob advertising – the results of those (Java and WRT) apps through the store will be an interesting read also!
Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and comments on your experiences with free VS paid content on Ovi Store.
The 6th annual International Mobile Gaming Awards have opened their Call for Entries. The awards have some new categories this year, including:
- Grand Prix
- Excellence in Design
- Excellence in ConnectivityAward
- Excellence in Game Play Award
- Best Real World Game
- Best Casual Game Award (developed using Flash or Java)
You have until January 18th 2010 to submit your entries.
A little while back I suggested that I would try and be forthcoming with our sales numbers through Ovi so that the Flash development community could see what was happening behind the scenes with us on this new sales channel. This certainly wasn’t to say that I thought Moket’s content would be the biggest selling through the store (far from it) but I thought it would be helpful since we have been in the Ovi Store from the start.
As some of you will know, Ovi’s reporting screens were removed for quote some time while they were “fixed”, and have just become available again over the weekend. Here’s what I can show you now in terms of how things have been progressing for us: Read More
OviFlash.com is a new website just launched today that aims to promote and direct traffic to Flash games and applications on the new Nokia Ovi Store deck. This is an independent website (not run by Adobe or Nokia, and takes no revenue from them or the developers featured) and is all about growing the Flash mobile market for developers, and raising awareness of what Flash content can be found on Ovi. It’s also aimed at increasing visibility for Flash developers on a mobile portal, which will become quite crowded like like other app stores – making content discoverability one of the key issues that independent developers must face.
So if you’ve had Flash games, applications or themes published on the Ovi Store, email your information to info@oviflash.com and get it linked up and featured. You can also follow along on Twitter @oviflash.
