Taptitude - a Windows Phone Success Story | Hacker News Reader

Taptitude - a Windows Phone Success Story

fourbrosstudio.com

72 pointsloarabia29 comments

There's probably a decent amount of money to be made on Windows Phone apps. A smaller market, but far less competition- and lord knows the current batch of apps aren't up to much.

One problem for indie game developers on WP7 is that Microsoft pushes Xbox Live titles in front of everything else in the 'games' tab of the Marketplace app (the equivalent of the iOS 'App Store' app). I'm no expert but it appears that getting XBL status isn't trivial or guaranteed.

The situation is made worse, in my opinion, because of the Metro design aesthetic; after all that whitespace there is room for only 3 app icons in the 'games' tab on my Lumia 710. If you drill down via games->genres, there is room for 5.5 app icons. And the first two tabs in games->genres are 'Xbox live' (all XBL titles) and 'top' (again, all XBL titles).

[Taptitude Developer Here] Yes, I agree with what you're saying. We too feel like XBL titles get pushed far too heavily, which turns away indies.

That being said, I don't believe its possible for a small indie studio like ours to compete with Zynga types on iOS either due to the delta in marketing budgets.

Our reason for disclosing our data is to show indie studios that they may be missing an opporunity on windows phone.

Thanks for the disclosure! It looks like you guys have put in a lot of effort too with the 60+ minigames. What I'm wondering is whether the same effort on iOS might not have fetched greater returns given the same marketing budget.

Anyway, congratulations!

[Taptitude Dev Here] I'll second what Brandf said. Despite the Xbox Live games being front and center, we think being one of the highest rated free games helped Taptitude get noticed. If we released the same game (same effort put into both programming and marketing) on iOS, I don't think it would have gotten as much attention.

It's even more unfortunate because about half of the XBL titles are 'meh' at best. Some are really good, some are pretty poor and pushing out far better indie games

>We've asked our users why they don't update to Mango, considering it's free, and most of the responses were because they didn't have a computer to update their phone with. Unfortunately this can't be done over the air.

Wow, this is very interesting. I was always under the impression that the smartphone crowd always synced their phone to their computer first. Maybe the way apple does it has ruined my perspective.

Until I started listening to Podcasts regularly (before Mango you could only download podcasts with Zune through your computer) I would routinely just charge my phone with the wall adapter.

I sync with my computer every night now, but isn't a big stretch to imagine lots of people doing what I used to do.

I only plug my phone into my computer when it needs an update that can't be done OTA. With Zune Pass and Skydrive, my music gets to the phone wirelessly and my videos and pictures get to my computer wirelessly. I think the phone has only been plugged into my computer twice, once to do a backup before I installed the SD card and once for Mango.

[Taptitude Developer Here] The trouble is many people who have phones don't even have computers. This never occured to me, being a tech guy, but it's apparently true!

I knew lots of people didn't sync their phones with their computers. I never thought it was because they didn't have a computer to do it with. That's pretty surprising, but with smart phones being as good as they are, lots of people probably don't need a dedicated computer.

Android doesn't need to plug into a computer. Though it can be done for file transfers and for development/hacking purposes.

This is the app story that all my Windows Phone friends talk about as "a success story". It's really "the success story", as it's the top downloaded free game (except for XBox Live Extras).

I wonder what the revenue numbers for the top free iPhone and Android games are? Tapitude looks like it's doing about $3,000 a week / $400-500 a day. (Am I reading their chart right?) Didn't we hear plenty of stories about how Draw Something was doing $100,000 a day (now that's probably combining ad revenue and in-app purchases from the free version plus the sales of the paid version).

I'm not saying that there isn't money to be made on Windows Phone, but if the top free game is only doing $400 / day, it's orders of magnitude less than on iOS. Is it worth it to have your app in the "smaller pond" of a less-crowded app store? Maybe.

I suspect their huge spike over the past 2-3 weeks is due to the Lumia 900 - everyone trying out some new apps on their new phone. Time will tell if this is the phone that really sells the public on Windows Phone, but it's clearly their best success yet (top selling phone on Amazon).

[Taptitude Developer Here]

Hi ja27, thanks for your questions. We are currently doing $1,400/day and our data indicates we're still growing. As a part time hobby project, we consider this a success.

Yes, the top iOS games make much more, but that's not the point. Our game would never succeed on iOS because the market is too crowded. We feel there are great opportunities on windows phone that small indies may be overlooking.

There are other examples. Farseer[1] has been pretty open about his numbers and makes a nice side-income from it.

Sure, not iOS, but considering the size of the market this isn't really unexpected either.

Also, totally unrelated, but the development environment is ridiculously nice. It's very pleasant to work in.

[1] http://www.farseergames.com/blog/

Is it just me, or is a 1$ eCPM average unusually high?

Anecdotally, I've heard or read that around $1 is decent but I don't have any data to back that myself = /

It depends a lot on who your users are, what ads you show them, how they're positioned. It seems like a decent number for a bunch of mini-games, but it's really hard to generalize.

Seems really high to me. I don't have any experience with mobile ads, but I used to run some pretty high traffic websites and we worked hard to get $0.50 across all of our traffic. First tier serves always got more, but it dropped off quickly.

It can be very low, depending on which impressions you're buying. Not all impressions are equal, and more importantly, some impressions are worth more to some advertisers than others. The more finely-targeted your ads are, the higher your CPM will be. Note that "targeting" can mean serving ads to a narrow audience segment on a large network, or it can mean running indiscriminate ads on a small site with a very specific audience, or anywhere in between. "Windows Phone 7 users" is a very specific audience, but I don't think it's an incredibly valuable one compared to the broader segment of "mobile gamers," so they won't get great $CPM unless advertisers can segment their users.

Its not really. We're still figuring things out, nowhere near their traffic, but similar eCPM. (Android/AdMob)

http://imgur.com/9pT9V

Comparatively we get $5-10 eCPMs from AdSense on websites.

How did you get such a high eCPM? Care to share any more info on the matter? :)

For AdSense? (assuming, I'm surprised how high it is too)

Honestly AdSense eCPM is through the roof since they started doing retargeting. Its now much more about your demographics than your content.

For example, back in the day, a forum for a Warcraft Guild would have triggered "Buy Gold Now" ads which paid pennies per click. Now ads are targeted to the user and know the user's search history, so the ads can be much more relevant. Given that Warcraft players are often rich techies, suddenly the ads being shown have a much higher CPC.

In short: sites that 3 years ago would have paid pennies per click are paying dollars per click on AdSense. Its kind of insane. If you wrote them off before I'd consider taking another look.

[Taptitude Developer Here] I've heard of much higher eCPM (and much lower) on pubCenter.

It's a factor of many things including click through, rotation frequency, ad category, user demographics, etc.

I don't have experience with other platforms, but I've heard that pubCenter is one of the better ad networks.

Pubcenter / Microsoft's ad exchange performs (eCPM and fill rate) better than anyone else out there. I know because I work with 20+ networks. As mentioned in other parts of the thread it's probably because there is more demand and less supply.

I created a WP7 app that utilizes Microsoft Pubcenter. My eCPM fluctuates between $0.90 and $1.00. When I first released the app, about a year ago, my eCPM was much lower (around $0.25).

That's only .1 cents per view.

As a Windows Phone user and developer, I've noticed frequent updates help promote app usage tremendously, which is confirmed by the analysis. With so many apps installed on my phone, I tend to forget about 70% of them until there's an update notification and then I'd want to check out what's new. So this is a perfect model as long as there's no shortage of content ideas. This is reminiscent of one of the most successful PC games today, League of Legends, which has had new content released every two weeks since launch couple years ago.

Devs, have you considered microtransaction for Taptitude? You did mention "coins to purchase game updates." Maybe some users prefer to pay for those updates instead? Congratulations on the success!

Frequent updates with fresh content promote app usage. Frequent updates for tiny bug fixes promote app removal, at least for me.

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