This is the first of probably a whole lot of posts about how well ActionChess is doing in terms of sales. In general I am a proponent of radical transparency, and since this isn’t my full time gig anyway, I feel no compulsion not to share this info.
Read on for all the nitty-gritty sales data from the first two weeks of ActionChess in the App store.
The first day ActionChess was available, I tweeted and posted on facebook that it was finally out. Turns out, that was my highest sales day to date. Here’s the data (I’m sorry it’s not formatted better):
2009-03-29 US 6 USD 2.1
2009-03-30 US 1 USD 0
2009-03-30 US 5 USD 2.1
2009-03-31 US 4 USD 2.1
2009-04-01 CA 1 CAD 2.1
2009-04-01 GB 1 GBP 1.09
2009-04-01 US 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-02 JP 1 JPY 245
2009-04-02 US 1 USD 0
2009-04-02 US 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-03 RU 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-04 US 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-06 GB 1 GBP 1.09
2009-04-06 US 23 USD 0
2009-04-07 RU 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-07 US 1 USD 2.1
2009-04-07 US 1 USD 0
2009-04-09 US 2 USD 2.1
2009-04-10 US 1 USD 2.1
Incidentally, the number before the money amount is the number sold at that amount. So you can also see that on monday (4/6) I had one sale from Great Britain, and gave away 23 promo codes ($0 sales — on the touchArcade forum). According to AppViz, I’ve now made $57.76, but of course that’s spread over all the regions I’ve sold any apps to. I’m not sure how to see just my sales in the US in AppViz. It would be sweet if under graphs it showed the dollar amounts as well as the percentage from each geographic location. Also, it would be nice if there was a way to export with the actual dollar amounts (daily totals) in the file. (An export where we chose the columns for export would also be super-awesome.)
Again, I haven’t really done any real promotion (yet), and in fact, the one review I’ve definitely lined up, I asked nicely for him to wait until my first update hits before he writes the review. That update fixes a number of bugs, and while they are mostly minor, it would still be frustrating to have them all show up in his review. I’m slowly compiling a list of places to submit the game to for reviews. Let me know if you have any suggestions on that front. I’m planning on hitting all the major iphone sites, but I’d also like to send press releases to chess clubs and chess-related organizations. More on that in a future post.
Grats sir! :D