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Comment by dpcan | Hacker News Reader

Reading this gives me hope, but leaves me dumbfounded.

I've seen about $30 in two weeks from a simple game I have in the Android market. It's not a terrible game, but it's not great either. The free-version reviews are not very good (technical reasons), but some people who bought the paid version left raving reviews.

Like everything else, it's about quality and marketing. Once you leave the "just in" page in the Android market, you vanish. If you want to make this kind of money, I "guess" you better be good enough to be featured, have a 4-5 star rating, and find ways to get noticed (blogging, etc). That being said, I haven't done any of these - so it's all assumption.

As for price, I can attest that for my second game I put out, lowering my price killed sales. The numbers weren't high enough to say what price works or not, but statistically, lowering didn't work. The price was raised from $0.99 to $1.99 again today and I'm waiting for new results.

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My team has a game that's doing well on the quality side (~100 reviews and 4.74 average rating), but the marketing is pretty tough. We've got a near-perfect substitute for a massively popular game that's missing from Android - if we could only put it in front of the casual gamers who only look at the featured and top ranked list, I'm sure it would be a bigger hit than most of the games currently featured. I'm hopeful that the great feedback and very good sales relative to our position that we receive will eventually catch someone at Google's notice, but until then we'll just keep making the game better.

On a down note, the recent rating reorganization seems to make it tougher for newer apps in our position to move up the list - a lot of poorly rated and abandoned junk from early in the Android platform's life is above us again now that the ranking algorithm seems to value raw sales above all else.

Still, things are worlds better than they were 6 months ago. We'll continue to bet on Android for the future.

We are on the same page. Our second app was a puzzle game that (we feel) is WAY better than some of the games they have featured right now. It's entertaining, endlessly playable, and has multiple levels of difficulty. It's a new puzzle game that nobody has really played before, but we're losing to games of much lower quality.

Plus, our downloads are very low, but I blame this on the fact that there's a single "Brain & Puzzle Game" category for EVERYTHING!

I could scroll for an hour and probably never see my game.

The "Just In" category was all that I had, now, I don't even see a way to get noticed at all after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

Very frustrating, but I too am sticking with Android for the long haul.

I was thinking about trying to advertise with AdMob maybe - so our paid game shows up at the top of some other free games.

> after getting pushed out of there (which I did by someone who posted about 50 different crossword puzzle apps in one day)

This is a real problem on the Android market; I experienced that myself. In almost all categories there are people pushing 10 or 20 (mostly poor) apps in one day, driving all others out of the first pages... Maybe a submission timeout would help.

This is problem is avoided pretty well by Apple's approach, although I prefer the open market of Android.

FWIW - every roughly 2 weeks, an update to your app pushes you to the top of the Just In list.

Just curious, but how did you come up with 4.74 rating? Is there some place that I'm not looking to get that info?

Google doesn't make it officially available, but http://www.androlib.com tracks it for each app. This is also how we read our international comments.

> but the marketing is pretty tough

Especially when you don't mention the name of you app!

I didn't want the point to be overshadowed by seeming like I was just talking up our app. If you're curious, it's aTilt.

* The free-version reviews are not very good (technical reasons), but some people who bought the paid version left raving reviews.*

People value things for which they paid more.

That's a significant bias, but perhaps a more significant one is that most people buying the game have probably already tried out the free one and enjoyed it enough to want to pay money for it.

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