We picked languages as a combination of markets where we already do well with IAP sales, and untapped markets we want to grow into. Hit Tennis 3 had a very successul launch internationally in English. Release 3.9 came out March 9th in Japanese, Chinese (simplified), Korean, Russian, Portuguese (Brazilian), French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic.  We didn’t yet do any promotion of the translated versions. Here are the best results, these graphs show downloads per day (iPhone and iPad), over the last 60 days.

South Korea

Previously we didn’t have players in South Korea, now we’re a top tennis game there. We hit #1 top free iPhone, #2 top free iPad, and went on to earn a Korean app store ‘Whats Hot’ editorial placement.

Japan

Japan has been a top performing country for Hit Tennis 2, now Hit Tennis 3 can take its place.

China

We’re not yet making much money in China’s app store,  but we’re pleased to start to build some audience there. Hit Tennis 2 actually did a lot better when it was translated to simplified Chinese.

Russia

This took us by surprise, Russians love Hit Tennis and they buy IAPs too! Chasing BRIC was the right move.

Brazil

Very happy to break into Brazil. Another BRIC win.

Italy, France

Western Europe, especially Italy, France, and the UK, have always been good markets for us. Even though the english word ‘Tennis’ is almost the same across european languages, translating still had a great impact for us.

Others

We saw increases in more countries including Spain, Canada, Chile, Mexico, Portugal, Venezuela. We specifically translated for Sweden and Turkey where we had very modest download increases, and also Netherlands where we saw no improvement. A few other places with no improvement included Belgium, Switzerland, and Arabic speaking countries. Note however that while Hit Tennis 3.9 is in Arabic, the app name and app store description are not because the app store doesn’t support them yet. Note that we can’t conclude ‘translation doesn’t work for Belgium’ or ‘translation works best for Korea’. These are just the results we had at this time with this game. I think we can conclude however that translation can be awesome for downloads.

Revenues

Revenues from Hit Tennis 3 are split between IAP sales and ad publishing with Chartboost. We’ve seen IAP revenues grow in Russia, Korea, Japan, Europe, and small increases in many countries. USA and UK are still the biggest IAP earners for us, but with this translation release Brazil and Russia jumped way up into our IAP sales top 10. Chartboost income has seen a good upswing too. Overall income growth has been modest, and nothing like the gains in downloads in the individual country graphs above. That said, translating is ROI positive for us already.

The Strategy

We’ve done this before with Hit Tennis 2, it’s a specific market strategy:

• The name of the game is a familiar thing ‘Tennis’ so it gets instant recognition.
• We translate the name of the game – instead of building up one brand in all languages we just want easy recognition of what the game is about in all languages.
• ‘Tennis’ is actually pretty much the same in several european languages, so translating the app name isn’t going to make all the difference for recognition in Europe. But its really good for China, Japan, Korea, Russia, etc.
• Translating the name is huge for getting good search ranking in non english app stores, but it does risk reducing ranking for the english word.
• The app store copy, screen shots, and the whole game are translated too, making the customer feel right at home and hence increasing all key metrics.
• We’re not doing localization – ie we are not being culturally sensitive to each country. (Though we did plan Hit Tennis 3 with locations and characters from around the world.) We are just translating as best we can using our app translation company Tethras. Translation can be really good value for money.
• We’re not using local publishers. This is an iOS game, and we think we know how to market using recognition, search, cross promotion, and mobile ads. Android is a different beast though, when we port we may look for local publishers.

Dimensions of Android

Android Version: Google publishes the Android Dashboard which explains how many people are using which version. Right now its 2.3.3+ Gingerbread at 40%, 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich 30% and 4.2 Jelly Bean 23%. We’ll be supporting 2.3 and up.

CPU: There a bunch of different SOCs (system-on-a-chip) used, but they all have ARM cpu cores. There are different speeds, and there are single, dual and a few quad cores, but every one supports either an armv6 or armv7 instruction set. Unity 4 for Android only supports armv7 (which is totally fine with us). Anything with an ARM11 cpu is armv6, ‘Cortex-A’ means armv7, and ‘Snapdragon’ is armv7.  Armv6 is only being sold in cheap low end phones. Its a deployment and customer support issue because you don’t want people with armv6 phones downloading your Unity game and being disappointed it doesn’t run.

GPU: This is a big deal to figure out, especially coming from iOS. iOS devices all use PowerVR GPUs, (Imagination Tech) but androids can sport PowerVR, Adreno (Imageon / Qualcomm), GeForce (Nvidia), or Mali (ARM). These differ in texture formats and how alpha is handled, and of course they all have different drivers and shader compilers. So far we’ve found that using ETC texture compression, which is supported by all Android devices, is working well for Hit Tennis.

Screen: Screens vary in resolution and size, so they also differ in pixel density. Android deals with this by defining screen density generalized size: mdpi hdpi, etc. Unity does a great job of helping code for resolution independence, but we still need to test different screen sizes for usability, and different resolutions for visual quality of both game graphics and supporting media like icons, splash screen, etc. Google mentioned at GDC that they care a lot about high end xhdpi devices like the Nexus line having great user experiences, so its important to have an xhdpi device to test on.

Our Test Devices

I figured out what devices we could buy cheaply, and be able to test the main variations on all the dimensions. My goal isn’t to test every combination, but to cover all of the main dimensions of variations. Helpful sites for checking device specs are GSM Arena and Phone Arena.

The Huawei Fusion 2 is a really cheap phone, I grabbed one new at Target for $80 as a prepaid / no contract AT&T Go phone. I know it makes me sound old, but it blows my mind that $80 buys a armv7 CPU pocket computer with Android 2.3. The Fusion 2 runs Hit Tennis 3 at 60fps just great. I actually started off with the LG Optimus before realizing its an armv6 device and hence won’t run Unity. On the high end I got a Google Nexus 4, which is actually an LG device. (Funny that Google’s phone isn’t a Motorola.) Its just $299 contract free for an xhdpi device with the latest Android 4.2 Jelly Bean. Wow. Makes iPhone 5 seem pretty expensive. To fill in the middle range and cover the other graphics chips I found some devices from ebay. This includes the Samsung Galaxy II, which is a good test case just because its one of the most popular Android phones around. For the same reason, I should probably get a Galaxy III too. We took our first baby steps on Android by publishing with Amazon to the Kindle, so we have a couple of Kindles, and we’re making some changes to get the game working right on the Kindle 1. We had a shader problem there, not sure why, specific graphics driver issue is my guess, easily fixed by using a slightly different shader.

Let me close by reminding you that I’m an Android beginner, so I welcome any comments from readers with advice about which devices to get for more testing. Looking forward to releasing Hit Tennis 3 on Google Play in a few weeks. Thanks.

• Ran the majority of ads on Chartboost, mostly as direct deals for barter with our cross promotions partner companies.
• Took a little more time before the campaign to test 6 different versions of the ad creative using paid downloads on Chartboost. Difference in final install rate between the best and worst ad was 2x. This can make a huge difference… our cross promotion partners can only run so many impressions, and every impression they run for us has an opportunity cost, so we want to make the best of our partners generous help.
• This time around we were not running the promo during tennis season. (A key part of our launch campaign was that it ran during Wimbledon.) This promotion was timed to come after thanksgiving but before the busy holiday season rush, so we would not be asking our partners to run our ads for free when they could be getting ‘holiday high’ ecpms. So instead of a global iOS promotion, this was only on the iPad, and only in our major national markets (9 in total).
• Ads ran between Nov 26th and Nov 30 inclusive, which was Monday-Friday.
• Showed a total of 690,000 impressions, which generated 15,000 installs over that 5 day period.
• Total downloads over those 5 days was 110,000. Over the preceding 5 weekday days, downloads were at  33,000. So the campaign received an organic lift of 77,000 installs, which is 5x more than the ad drive installs. (Thats pretty good!)
• Hit Tennis is sitting nicely in the charts now, so we will continue to enjoy a higher than normal install rate for a week or two at least.
• We entered into the top 50 in all the markets we advertised in, except Germany and Japan, where we didn’t break into the top 100 free. The game isn’t yet localized, its just in english. We will localize and have another crack at these markets next summer.
• Come the last day of the promotion, we were sitting outside the US iPad top 100 free, so we decided to give the US an extra push with a paid Chartboost campaign. That campaign ramped up quickly and drove an additional 4700 installs, which pushed usup into the top 25 free in the US. (This was in addition to the ads our partners were still running for us in the US.)

This has been a successful campaign for our launch of Hit Tennis 3 on the iPad, and it will certainly be profitable:

• The slide back down the charts will take probably 2 weeks, during which we will enjoy downloads higher than our ‘base rate’. The weekend directly following the promotion achieved 87,000 installs worldwide.
• We now have a Hit Tennis 3 user base on iPad to spread the word to friends.
• We have more DAUs in the game, which means more IAP and advertising revenue (we’re a Chartboost publisher), and we’re seeing higher advertising ecpms on iPad compared to iPhone.
• With our larger audience we are able to offer our cross promotion partners more impressions for their app promotions.

I know a lot of indies are skeptical about advertising. Many have tried by spending a few hundred bucks and seeing no effect and concluding that advertising doesn’t work, or is only for big publishers, or is only for games with really strong IAP sales. I hope this article shows that:

• Advertising free to play games can work for indies. The key is to work with other companies and cross promote with them. When we help each other we can run promotions just like big budget publishers.
• You need volume. 690k impressions to drive 15k installs for this promotion. (15k installs at paid CPI rates would have cost us about $20,000.)
• You need a good game that people want to check out, because the organic lift is the key ROI driver.
• Spending a few hundred dollars is ‘pissing in the wind’ in terms of effecting downloads and revenue.
• Spending a few hundred dollars in order to measure click through and install rates is a really good investment.
• Spending a few thousand dollars tactically can work if you are watching the charts closely.

Thanks again to our partners for running our ad campaign. Thanks also to Chartboost, who continue to be a great partner for us.  What’s so great about Chartboost?

• 100% fill and strong ecpms for publishers. Its an important revenue source for us.
• High click through and install rates… ie their ads do engage users and we get hardly any complaints about ads in our apps.
• Fully transparent detailed reporting to both advertiser and publisher. However, country and device type reporting is not available in their web portal. These would be welcome improvements.
• The direct deal marketplace is a great way to work with partners.
• The staff are friendly, helpful, and responsive.

• Rob made a couple of apps each back in 2008 that we have since retired. Then met at the Silicon Valley iPhone Developers Meetup thanks to Tim Burks.
• We teamed up to start the Hunter and Johnson partnership at the start of 2009, which we’ve since morphed into Focused Apps LLC. Our goal was always to split our time between consulting and making our own apps. In 2009 and 2010 we shipped 5 apps for clients, and we wound down consulting in 2011. Thanks especially to Jason and Anu for hiring us and being awesome clients.
• Sept 2009: published our companies first app, Focus for Facebook. It now has 750,000 downloads and found a niche with visually impaired users due to its clean presentation of the Facebook feed and support for voice-over. We released another app, Duck You Undo, that we’ve retired.
• April 2010: we shipped our breakout game, Hit Tennis 2, and went freemium as soon as free apps were allowed IAPs. Its now at 14.1 million downloads. Its gone through 15 revisions, and is still popular on iPhone and iPad.
• Dec 2010: shipped Santas ‘lil Zombies, which was our ‘lets learn Unity‘ project, it has only 6000 downloads. We’re now updating the gameplay and will be re-releasing it in a few weeks.
• Jan 2012: built 2 (more?) new prototype games, but we didn’t bring them to market. One of these led us to the design of the controls for Hit Tennis 3.
• Feb 2012: shipped Super Txt, which is now at 181,000 downloads. This has been our lower priority project this year, but its KPIs are good, so we’ll be investing in new features and marketing next year. We are lucky to have found a couple of awesome artists who work with on this.
• June 2012: shipped Hit Tennis 3, our sequel to Hit Tennis 2. Its now at over 5 million downloads! Many thanks to our indie colleagues who work with us on cross promotion ad campaigns. HT3 has had 6 updates, and we’ve recently brought it to iPad and Kindle Fire devices. Expect to see wide Android support next year. HT3 would not be possible without our wonderful 3D artist and character illustrator.

Its been a very fun few years, we’re profitable, we’ll continue to grow next year. Thank you Rob Hunter, you are an awesome business partner and friend.

Thanks to Ann & team for hosting the conference.

• #2 Top free app in the USA (Angry Birds Seasons as Apple’s free game of the week was #1).
• Top 100 free game in 45 countries
• Over 1 million downloads.

Hit Tennis 3 has not (yet) been featured by Apple, we didn’t spend any money on ads, and we didn’t get any press. We are a 2 person self funded indie company. So how did we do it?

Cross Promotion

We cross promoted heavily from our game Hit Tennis 2, and we arranged for five friends to advertise Hit Tennis 3 in their games. Hit Tennis 2 has about 1 million monthly active users, obviously a really good audience to promote the new version of the game to. We have users on two different versions of HT2, our newest version has ads implemented with Chartboost (we love you Chartboost!). The previous version has a home grown system for house ads, and both version also have a news feature. Our five friends who advertised for us have apps & games ranging in audience size and they use a range of different ad solutions. (Thanks everyone for your amazing help… we owe you!)

Below are details of the ad campaign. Data in black is measured data, blue are estimates from similar measurements, and red are guesstimates.

The campaign ran in 2 phases for a total of 10 days starting 6/28.  On 6/28 we released Hit Tennis 3 worldwide, and we turned on ads in Hit Tennis 2, and apps B, C, D, F. This was enough to get us into the top 25 in several big markets after 6 days, but in USA we had only charted in the free sports games category. So for that first week we were showing about 60,000 daily impressions for nearly 2000 ad based downloads a day, which grew total app downloads up to 74,000 on 7/3. By comparison our category charting Hit Tennis 2 has been getting around 10,000 downloads a day.

The second phase kicked in fully on 7/4 by adding one of our larger partners (App E) bumping our ad impressions up to over 200,000 per day for 4000 ad based downloads a day. That made enough difference to kick us up into the top25  free in the USA, and ultimately up to 300,000 downloads per day in total.

Costs

We agreed these ad campaigns on a barter basis… we get n clicks and installs now for our launch, and we will repay this debt for similar clicks and install of their games, either for new launches or for existing games. This is an amazingly good deal for a two person self funded indie company because it didn’t cost us cash up front (but it will cost us reduced ad-publisher earnings later). How much would it cost to do this with cash instead of goodwill & trust? Fiksu maintains an index of ‘cost per loyal user’ which is a measure of measure of how much one has to pay in order to drive an app install. Their most recent index is $1.26, which is a bit lower than its been. A lot of the app ad networks are Cost Per Install bidding systems, and to get a lot of volume you have to make higher bids spending more per install. I don’t know the bid needed to get the impression volume we had. I know that some games companies with deep pockets will bid more like $2.50 CPI and the feeling in the industry is that CPI cost is on the rise due to supply and demand.  Lets use a CPI of $1.50:

• 20k installs from our own cross promotion,   20k * $1.50  would cost $30,000 purchased from ad networks
• 27k installs from partners, would cost $41,000
• Total equivalent cost about $70,000

Organic & Paid Installs

So would spending $70,000 on any game get the same results? Heck no. As MachineZone’s Gabe Leydon said at Games Beat yesterday ”nothing helps reduce the cost of user acquisition like a great game”. For what we did with the Hit Tennis 3 launch, the promotion works like this:

1. Ads get  the game somewhere into the charts
2. Now its in the charts, more people see it
3. So gets more organic downloads,
4. Makes it go a bit higher up the charts.
5. Now even more people see it and it gets even more organic downloads.
6. People like it and start telling their friends to get it too
7. It goes up higher in the charts.
8. Repeat from 5.

Background

Rob and I been working full time in the apps business since the app store opened in 2008. Hit Tennis 3 is our 17th app I think, and our 5th mobile game. We started making apps & games in 2008, and we spent 09-10 making apps under contract for other companies.  We’ve been studying games, marketing, and the apps business very hard the whole time. We made the effort to attend conferences & events like 360 iDev, WWDC, GDC, Unite, iOS Dev Camp, SViOSD, SVIGDA, et al. Thats how we’ve built our network of friends and colleagues to ask for help. We didn’t go to school with these people or something, we showed up and met them, and then we reached out asking for help. Aka networking and biz dev ;-)

Hit Tennis 3 is the sequel to Hit Tennis 2, but we deliberately designed the controls to be very different from Hit Tennis 2. As much as we love Hit Tennis 2 and we have loyal fans, the controls to Hit Tennis 2 are hard to learn. The majority of people who try it are put off by the controls and we don’t retain them as players. (Ie the trier to player conversion is poor.) One of the 3 main goals of Hit Tennis 3 is to ‘fix’ this problem. I think we did, but it puts our core Hit Tennis 2 fans at a disadvantage because they have to ‘unlearn’ the controls from Hit Tennis 2. So we’ve gotten some blowback for this… sorry Hit Tennis 2 fans!

The biggest factor for how we designed this launch was the timing during Wimbledon. If it wasn’t for Wimbledon coming around just once a year we would have done things differently. Probably would have worked more on the game before releasing it. (Updates coming soon!) Wimbledon is a worldwide thing, so we went with a worldwide campaign. Otherwise we wouldn’t have advertised in every country. We would have picked just a few places to advertise. We didn’t localize yet so we would only have advertised in english speaking countries, and we would probably have left out USA too in order to start with smaller campaigns.

We’ve done paid ad campaigns before with Hit Tennis 2 in 2010 and 2011. We’ve had mixed results, sometimes driving really well up the charts, and sometimes failing to. This time it looked different, I think that burst ad campaigns can’t push up chart rankings as fast as they used to be able to. The market is bigger of course, but my guess is that there are real changes to how the chart rankings work, and it just takes longer now. 1 day bursts won’t work any more.

Pitch Perfect is a fantastic new book that explains how app developers can up their PR game when pitching apps to bloggers and review sites. It’s packed full of advice, case studies, and mistakes to avoid. Pitch Perfect is a practical and very engaging read, so much so that I today I rode the train to Balboa Park, and that ain’t where I live!  Eria Sadun and Steve Sande are your teachers. They really know their stuff because as TUAW.com staffers they read tons of app pitches every day. In fact, I personally emailed Erica twice last week, making a total of at least 4 of the mistakes she points out in the book. [Cringe.]

So app developers, here’s the bottom line – get it, read it, and use the advice. Or would you rather your apps stay in the 99% with 3 downloads a week?

Amazon Kindle edition

Apple iBooks edition