**UPDATE**

In May 2012 we participated in the Because We May sale and have seen a large increase in Downloads since then! We posted a full day-by-day update during the sale and included all of our new information : Because We May Sales Update

**UPDATE**

UPSAT has officially been live for almost 2 months, so I thought it would be cool to share some facts and figures with you. Unfortunately, the launch of our first game has been somewhat disappointing. Despite all of our social networking, press releases, and even getting a good review, we haven’t even been able to break the 100 download mark yet.

FACTS AND FIGURES

I’m going to start this post off with the cold hard facts and then later on I will get into what went wrong, and our plans for the future. To date we have sold 13 copies of the full version for a grand total of $9.10. The free version isn’t doing much better with only 84 total installs, of which only 25 remain active. I honestly don’t think this is a bad retention rate, but the total installs just isn’t doing it for us.

SQRT(X) ??

We’ve received all 5 star reviews (only a couple of which were from friends and family) and no bugs have been reported, which leads me to believe that the people who actually play the game seem to be enjoying it. We just simply aren’t reaching enough people. We had expected to see a bump in downloads when our review went live on January 23rd, but as you can see from the graph, there was no significant change. Several other websites have said that they would  be glad to review our game, but further correspondence with them has left us waiting by our computers for an email that would never come. The only good thing about all of this is that we only spent $6 on the game (for music) so technically we have turned a profit!

WHAT WENT WRONG?

Plain and simple. We haven’t been able to reach enough people. We thought that being active on Facebook and Twitter and keeping a blog from the start of development would help get people interested, but unfortunately we haven’t attracted enough attention. We’ve spent countless hours sending emails to websites and magazines, but just haven’t been able to break through the barrier that gets us the almighty “Hey, check out this game” from someone of note. And to make matters worse, the Android Market has absolutely no methods by which to discover new apps. They used to have a list of “Newest Apps,” which worked really well because people could potentially see your app just because it was new, but they got rid of that sometime last year and now the only way to discover something that isn’t popular yet is…. well, wait until it’s popular.

The biggest issue, however, is one that we pretty much knew from the start, but weren’t able to do anything about: We’re not on iOS! It seems like everyone and their mother (literally) has told us, “Hey your game looks cool, let us know when it’s on iPhone.” We even had a potentially huge opportunity when Action Flick Chick Katrina Hill offered to take a look at our game, but after a few messages back and forth she told us, “Sorry, I have an iPhone and am surrounded by people with iPhones.” We were crushed. Unfortunately, it’s just not something that we have plans to do because it would require an extensive amount of work on our part. If the game ever becomes mega popular, then we’d be idiots NOT to port it, but in it’s current state it just really isn’t lucrative. You can rest assured, however, that our next game will be using an engine (Shiva3D) that lets us easily port to all platforms.

All that being said, we’re still grateful for the community we HAVE created and we love chatting with all our followers. We know that this community will continue to grow (we get about 3-4 new followers a day now) and hopefully one day we’ll reach critical mass and people will start downloading it again. Until then, we’ll just keep doing what we love and making games.

WHAT NOW?

Although Ryan and I have pretty much switched focus and are gearing up to start work on our next game, we’re not ready to throw in the towel on UPSAT just yet. We have several new micro-games planned, although I’m not really sure when they’ll be released, that will hopefully spur a renewed interest in the game. We’re also planning a huge sale (FREE!) that will coincide with an upcoming “Get More Followers” campaign. We’re thinking that offering a limited time only free download might create some buzz with various media outlets. And if not, then at least we’ll have made some new followers that will help us with the next game!