“We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games. Why? Because it allows us to promote our games more freely, as we are doing here! We rely on the ability to promote our games for our livelihood and control over pricing is an important tool for this purpose.” – Because We May Website

As a part of the Because We May sale, UPSAT will be discounted to $0.99 during the week of May 24th, 2012 – June 1st, 2012 along with TONS of other great Indie games from other developers! Please help us spread the word!

Get UPSAT Full Today: Google Play

DAY 1 Sales Update

So given the increased attention that UPSAT has been receiving this week I thought I’d post an update about the past few days. I had already been thinking about doing some sort of sale for a while, so when I saw the Because We May opportunity and all of the other great developers that had already signed up, I knew it would be a great opportunity to get some people to actually see our game!

Coming into the sale the statistics were about 110 free game downloads and only 13 sales of the Full version (two of those being myself and Ryan). I placed the game on sale for $0.99 at 12:00 AM EST and the downloads started IMMEDIATELY. Since the Google Developers Dashboard only updates once per day, I didn’t notice the sales until I checked our Merchant account, which updates as soon as a sale is made. I have to admit I was in complete shock as soon as I saw the first report. We had sold 40 copies of the full version of UPSAT in less than 12 hours!!

So let me do some quick math for you. (40/13) * 100 =307.69% Sales Increase! That’s pure insanity! Now I know that doesn’t seem like much to some people, but, in the eyes of someone who had all but given up hope on their game, that’s the kind of stuff that gets your heart pumping! Throughout the rest of the day I refreshed the page constantly and watched the sales roll in and by Midnight of Day One we had sold 65 copies! So that puts us at 500% increase in ONE DAY!

To break it down another way: since launching the game on Jan 16th, we had only sold 13 copies which gives us a measly 0.1 games/day in sales. The first day we sold 65 copies which is 65000% above our previous average daily sales!

Oddly enough, we have not seen as much of an increase in our free game sales. I had really expected people to go to our page and decide to try the game first, but it seems that most people have been quite alright with paying the $0.99 as we only had about 20 free downloads.

All in all this has been a very exciting first day thanks to this lovely Because We May sale. We have decided to push an update for tomorrow that will add a screen to ask people to review our game as right now we still only have 5 reviews on Google Play.

Day 2 Sales Update

Day 2 and we are still going strong! We sold an additional 53 full versions of UPSAT! That brings the grand total to 118 in 2 days. I have to say that the COOLEST thing is going into the OpenFeint leaderboards and seeing a ton of new high scores and notifications of people unlocking achievements. It’s awesome to know that people all over the world are now playing our game.

Today we also released our first update, Version 1.1. We originally decided to do it because we noticed that our Twitter link was broken since we switched our account name to @MidnightTangent, but then decided to actually incorporate some gameplay changes as well. The 2 biggest changes we made were to speed up the first level by 1 second and to make the basketball spawn in a random location on the slam dunk game. People had told us that the first levels took too long to get through and we thought that just pulling the basketball straight down every time was a little bit boring. We also added a screen that asks you to review our game on Google Play after 150 mini-games have been played and incorporated a few other performance enhancements related to OpenFeint.

The free version downloads have continued to surprise us and we’ve only had about 20 more. We’re expecting to see a dramatic drop off during the next few days of both versions as all the Because We May buzz starts to subside. In an attempt to keep things going, however, we’re going to try a few different things. The first is this blog. Tweeting about it might get people to read and follow and generate some personal interest in our game. We’re also going to put up a few posts specific to our game on several indie game and gaming news sites such as IndieDB and Indie Game Magazine. Hopefully we can keep the momentum going!

Day 3 Sales Update

So, as expected, we saw a rather drastic dropoff in sales today. Unfortunately, we only sold 15 copies. I think it has to do with the combination of it being a Saturday on a holiday weekend here in the US, staleness of the Because We May news, and also the fact that I really didn’t talk about it at all today. I’ve noticed a direct correlation between how much I tweet about our game being on sale and the number of downloads so I guess I need to just continue spamming twitter! I really can’t complain, however, since 15 is more than the total number of downloads we had coming into this! The free version performed about the same and came in with about another 20 downloads.

The good news for today, however, is that the update seems to be performing just as it should. We haven’t had any complaints about anything being broken, and we’ve gotten a few more awesome reviews on Google Play which is pretty much exactly what was supposed to happen! Overall, I’d say today was still a success.

Day 4 Sales Update

Today was another pretty awesome day for UPSAT! We pulled in 27 sales of the full version and about another 20 downloads of the free game. It’s definitely not as great as the first couple of days, but considering it’s more than 2X as many downloads as we originally had and it’s mid-way through the sale, I’m pretty happy with how we’re doing. If you’re keeping track, that brings our total downloads so-far to 160! Wow wow wow! Not bad for the little game that started out as a demo! We also got another 3 reviews (all positive!) on Google Play so the Version 1.1 update has definitely been doing what it was supposed to do.

Unfortunately, with the busy holiday weekend, I haven’t been able to get around to all the blog posts and articles I wanted to write on various sites. I am going to have a nice relaxing day at home tomorrow, however, so I will definitely use that time to get this game as much exposure as I can.

Day 5 Sales Update

So today was another lackluster day for UPSAT. Like Day 3, we only sold 15 copies today. That brings the total to 175. Again, it’s hard to be too disheartened by this considering where we started, but the low numbers have definitely encouraged us to do more.

Today we FINALLY got around to posting some updates on various gaming sites. The first site, gamedev.net, is a community of other game developers who share their experiences and knowledge with eachother through forums developer journals. We started a journal on that site which we plan to keep updated with posts from this blog and also announced UPSAT in the relevant section of their forum. You can check out our announcement post here: Forum Post

The other site that we posted on was indieDB.com. We have maintained a constant prescence on that site and frequently update it with pictures and updates to let other developers follow the progress of our game and so only posted an update about the Version 1.1 upgrade and the Because We May sale. Thankfully, our article was approved quickly and you can currently find us on the front page of that site or by following this link: UPSAT Update We’re hoping that these will garner some attention within the indie and developer community and get our downloads back on track. I guess we’ll let you know how it goes tomorrow!

Day 6 Sales Update

So we only performed mildly better than yesterday with 17 copies sold to bring our total up to 192. I had really hoped that the various forum posts would have inflated that number, but unfortunately that was not the case. I’m still very suprised to see that people are barely trying the free version as it only had a couple downloads today. The momentum on this Because We May train has all but come to a halt, but never fear, we still have some surprises in store. I won’t get into too many details here since this post is supposed to be specific to the sale, but Ryan and I spent about 3 hours on Skype last night coming up with all kinds of good ideas for both game improvements and marketing that will hopefully propell us a lot further than a 1 week sale ever could! When this is over we’ll make a post just for that so be sure to check back in a couple of days!

The good news of the day is that all those forum posts didn’t go to waste. Our blog received hundreds of page views today as a result of all those websites and we beat our old traffic record as a result! Hopefully we’ll have a few people that decide to stick around and keep up to date with the masterpieces dysfunctional art we’re creating! We also received some pretty good news in the way of reviews. Not only did we get several great ones on Google Play, but while randomly searching the internet I came across a couple from real review websites. It was pretty cool to know that people out there played our game on their own and actually thought it was good enough to be worthy of their time instead of us having to beg them like in some of our other reviews 🙂

With that, I leave you with this particularly interesting review from a spanish website called Para Tu Android: UPSAT! Los Microjuegos Invaden Tu Android

Day 7 Sales Update

There is great sadness in the world of UPSAT today; we only sold 9 copies. Que melancholy and reflective music so we can fondly remember the good times. In all honesty, we pretty much expected this. The sale is a week old and it has run its course. The people who were going to be persuaded to buy games they’d never heard of before have all done so by now and most of my fellow developers participating in the sale have pretty much stopped talking about it at this point. With the total after today at 201, I’m simply glad that we have enough of a user base that when we start pushing our updates in the next couple of weeks there will be a community of users ready to play them!

So since tomorrow is the last day of the sale I do have a little bit of hope for a spike in interest. I’m expecting many developers to tweet and blog stuff like , “ZOMGSH Today is the last day to get our amazing game of amazement for cheap #becausewemay!” and any customers out there who were waiting till the last minute will pull the trigger in fear of deeply regretting it later once all these great games pretty much double in price. So wish us luck and please be sure to spread the word. Also,  if you see a random guy on the train and you notice he has a droid, take it from him, hang up on his wife, and then proceed to download UPSAT and say, “You’re Welcome.” (You may want to do this as your stop is approaching)

Day 8 Sales Update

Alright, I lied. APPARENTLY today was not the last day for the Because We May sale! If you couldn’t tell from the above, I really thought it was. However, around noon, we received an email from the Because We May folks telling us that it would actually end tomorrow night. So, HOORAY FOR YOU! If you still haven’t picked up UPSAT than this is pretty much a divine signal that you need to go and do so ASAP. I’ll wait…..

…. Ok great. We thank you for your business!

Today was pretty much identical to yesterday and we rang up another 10 downloads. Nothing too exciting, but still 10000% (that’s the actual percentage) better than our average daily sales were before the kickoff of Because We May. If we kept pulling in 10 downloads a day for the rest of the year I would be ecstatic. We only managed to rustle up another 20 downloads of the free version. So our total now is up to 211 full versions and around 220 free versions. That’s a pretty awesome ratio!

Now, since tomorrow is ACTUALLY the last day, go back up and reread that whole paragraph about the last day of the sale from yesterday.

Final Sales Update

So the Because We May  sale is now officially over! We’re sorry if you’re reading this and thinking, “OH MAN! I wish I could have been as cool as all those other people who got UPSAT for only $0.99,” but unfortunately you missed it. The good news is that you can still get it for only $1.99 and we’ll think you’re just as cool!

Apparently, I am a horrible sales forecaster because none of my “last day of the sale” predictions came true. I had hoped that we’d sell another 30-40 today due to the increased hype of people talking about the last day of their sales, but instead we only increased slightly back up to 15. It was a slightly anticlimactic end, but Ryan and I are still thrilled by everything and are glad we participated.

Let’s look at the big picture. 9 days ago we only had 13 sales of the full version. Ryan and I had given up hope on our creation and were already starting to move on to our next project. We had thought about updates and adding new mini-games, but it was so hard to justify doing all that work when nobody seemed interested in playing our game. Now, everything has changed.

Throughout the sale we sold a whopping 226 copies! That’s 226 new members of our community and 226 people who actually care whether we make the game better. Not only that, but we also got reviews from websites, feedback from twitter, and new followers on our blog who all contacted us and showed their support. We even had some supporters give us new mini-game ideas and one who will be translating our game into German! 226 may not be a lot compared to a game like Angry Birds with millions of supporters, but to us they are important. What kind of developers would we be if we just left them all out to dry and didn’t continue improving our game? Because of them, we’re now planning future updates that will bring around another 50 mini-games to UPSAT along with many other improvements that we hope will keep them playing and telling their friends about it.

So the Because We May sale has been so much more to us than just a message about developer freedom and pricing control; it was a sign that we need to keep going. I know it may seem to some that I’m blowing this whole thing out of proportion, but, when a week ago we had all but given up on UPSAT, I can’t help but feel that this sale changed us a little bit. It spawned our small community and reinvigorated our desire to support them by making continuous improvements. It showed us that our game had promise and that there are people out there who actually want to play it. It gave us a new beginning.