18 January 2012

Regional Variation

It’s interesting to look at some of the sales figures. Denmark just became our number 9 market (with 1.61% of revenue), edging out Norway. This appears to be largely due to a single review (I don’t know if this is an online review or also appeared in print).

This is a bit like the original version of King of Dragon Pass, where a review in the print magazine Pelit made the game a top 10 hit in Finland.

But it’s unlike Norway, where we got 50 sales in one day thanks to a single review (I suspect this was online only).

We can see the difference in these graphs. The bottom graph shows worldwide revenue by date. You can see the birthday sale, and the Sacred Time sale (and the overall effect of the holiday, which is to raise sales to a somewhat higher level — apparently there are a lot of new devices). The top graph shows Finland (orange), Norway (light purple), and Denmark (dark purple). All three Scandinavian countries have about the same population, so they’re interesting to compare. Sales in Finland more or less track worldwide sales, except for a bump when we got reviewed by the print magazines Pelit and Pelaaja. The effects of the Norwegian review are very obvious — but there is almost no long term change in the level of sales. Maybe nobody in Norway let their friends know about the game. But Denmark has a sales spike from the review, but then sales continue at a significantly higher level than before.

I don’t really have an explanation as to why these countries have such different responses to the game. But I think this does show that reviews are still an important way for people to learn about games.

13 comments:

  1. Although I am an the US, a review is the reason i bought the game as well. As there is such a large quantity of games on iOS devices i rely and reviews and word of mouth for nearly all my purchases. Anyway, thanks for the game and keep up the good work!

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  2. Which review? They certainly help anywhere, it’s just harder to spot the difference in a market like the US.

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  3. Any updates on the iPad Version? I am trying not to play again till it´s universal, but it´s realy hard to withstand. (willpower +1)

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  4. Artwork is taking longer than we'd hoped.

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  5. The review i first saw was on touch arcade (http://toucharcade.com/2011/09/08/king-of-dragon-pass-review/). I looked at a couple others after that and was convinced to get it in spite of the relatively expensive $9.99 price tag.

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  6. Any eta (month) on the universal version? Thanks so much for doing this by the way, longer kodp sessions will be so much better on he iPad

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  7. No ETA — the artwork is taking longer than we'd hoped.

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  8. No worries! Thanks again for making such a great game, I can't believe it is so old yet I never even knew about it until recently

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  9. At least another month right? Gonna start another game if so, using scaled res on iPad. Can't wait for the universal version

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  10. Sadly, we don't have most of the art yet. We have an update waiting for approval, but it's still at iPhone resolution.

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  11. The update is great. It's quite frankly pretty amazing how dedicated you guys continue to be with providing content and fixes, not to mention the universal version.

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  12. The update clears out the current star ratings and reviews, so we wouldn’t mind if you say something like that in an App Store review :)

    I wish there were more progress with a Universal version.

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  13. Good things are worth the wait! I'll add another review to the app store today

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