FreeAppADay adds an afterburner to promotional activity says Appy Ent

Despite the App Store being over two years old, such has been the growth in new iOS owners, and indeed the amount of work developers have put into updating their games during that time, that a surprising percentage of titles remain commercially viable.

Of course, you need to re-position them, something US developer Appy Entertainment has been continually doing with its FaceFighter game.

Currently available in basic, Lite, HD and Gold versions, the studio decided to reignite interest in the standard release, which, at that point, was selling a couple of hundred units daily at 99c.

Using the FreeAppADay promotion system, the price of FaceFighter was dropped to zero on October 20 (in fact, this was the second time Appy has pushed FaceFighter through FAAD.)

In the week since the move, the newly free version has done over 634,000 downloads, while - more importantly in terms of making money - during the first couple of days, sales of the $1.99 FaceFighter Gold rose 73 percent, while in app purchases within the basic FaceFighter were up over 2,000 percent.

"Yes, we gave up some daily income to give away FaceFighter for free, but we're making it back on in-app purchases, and the bump in FaceFighter Gold sales is also welcome," said Appy's brand director Paul O'Connor.

The push was more that just about money however. Appy was also promoting its All-In-1 ZombieBox collection in the run up to Halloween, as well as preparing the ground for its new Trucks & Skulls game.

As for the power of FreeAppADay, O'Connor points out that it's the scale of users the system can immediately tap into that gives it the advantage over studios making their game free and trying to promote it virally.

"Going free on our own definitely jolts our download numbers, but the key to vaulting up the ranks is to cluster those downloads in as narrow a window as possible," he explains.

"On our own, going free would have been more of a slow-drip. FAAD adds an afterburner to our free promotion by rapidly bringing in players that would otherwise have a hard time finding us on the App Store."

[source: Appy blog]