150,000 downloads!

It has been a milestone day for me today as the total number of CastleMine Beta downloads hit 150,000 and the total number of downloads for all my games cracked 180,000! Here's a pretty graph showing my experience with the Windows Phone marketplace. 

 

 

It’s fairly easy to see when CastleMine was released. Prior to that I was happy whenever any of my games made it to 5,000 downloads. Here are the total numbers so far:

 

 

There are a couple of interesting things to note here:

CastleMine versus CastleMine Beta.

CastleMine (the paid version) is superior to the Beta in every way. It has better graphics, more levels, better performance, new features… and yet still to this day the Beta version gets downloaded at a ratio of 10 to 1. I think this just shows the strength of free apps. For a lot of people, any game with a price tag next to it is automatically dismissed regardless of its quality. In-app purchasing fixes this and it’s great to see it available in WP8.

 

 

Serenity’s Fail

I must admit it's a little sad to see Serenity not do so well. Despite it being such a simple game I’m still proud of it and wished it had made it into more people’s hands. If you’re reading this, please give it a try here. I guarantee you’ll like it or your money back!


Now what about money?

Prior to CastleMine it was pretty hard to recommend getting into WP7 development for the money. Post CastleMine it is clear there is money to be had, but I won’t be quitting my day job just yet. To date I have earned around $3,000 through pubCenter ad revenue. $3,000 doesn’t sound so bad, however my games have served almost 10,000,000 impressions which gives an average ecpm of just 30 cents. I believe the main reason for the low ecpm is not entirely pubCenter’s fault (although it does fluctuate wildly) but more to do with large number of my downloads coming from countries that ads just don’t pay well such as China.

I’ve also sold around 900 copies of the paid version of CastleMine (at 99c) which isn’t bad considering it’s only been downloaded 7,500 times.


Where to now?

With the release of Windows Phone 8, XNA and Silverlight seem to have been forgotten. So I had the choice of following Microsoft and learning WinRT or moving onto something more cross platform. I’ve decided to go with the latter and am now investigating Unity, which will run on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone 8. For me, this seems like the wisest option as I try to maximise the return of time spent on this hobby.