Takeaway: William J. Francis shares how many downloads his puzzle game app has received in Google Play,
Amazon’s
Appstore, and the
Nook App Store.
It's been about four months since my son and I released version 1.0 of our puzzle game Who Moved My Cheese? (WMMC) into the
Android ecosystem. We chose to release our app for
Kindle Fire, B&N Nook, and the army of Android phones and tablets associated with Google Play. I wouldn't exactly call the game a runaway success, though my son and I are very proud of the 13,000 and some odd downloads we've had to date.
Recently I was discussing this project with another budding game developer, and he was very interested in getting my feedback about the performance of the various markets. I explored these venues previously in terms of the submission process, but with a nudge from a TechRepublic reader, this time I'm sharing my experiences in terms of the one thing app developers can never get enough of: downloads.
Google Play
I thought Google Play (formerly called the Android Market) would be the sure thing and initially that was true. Within the first few weeks, downloads in Google Play were growing in leaps and bounds, often hundreds of new downloads a day. For about a month we were in the top 500 listing of
Google's "new" games in the "brain and puzzle" category. I remember the morning I saw WMMC show up at the 100 mark. I was so excited I snapped a picture (Figure A) and immediately sent it to everyone I knew.
Figure A
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