All eyes are on Halfbrick Studios and the success of their early adoption of a new cross-promotion feature offered by social gaming network, OpenFeint. In what will surely become the latest of many strategies for game app developers to get more consumer eyes on their releases, OpenFeint's Developer Announcements feature allows developers to promote their other titles to gamers whilst in-game. With a simple tap of a promo, gamers are able to immediately install and play the new game.
Halfbrick Studios is the perfect candidate to take advantage of Developer Announcements, having sold well over 6 million copies of their fruit slicing hit, Fruit Ninja. By promoting their endless runner title, Monster Dash, to the huge number of playing Fruit Ninja fans, the Brisbane studio has seen a sharp rise in Monster Dash sales. From Venturebeat.com...
After OpenFeint did the cross promotion, Monster Dash's downloads spiked 123 percent in two days, said Phil Larsen, head of Brisbane, Australia-based Halfbrick. The game also jumped from No. 143 on the Apple App Store to No. 4 in free apps. In paid apps, the game moved from No. 267 to No. 84.
As games developers find crowded app marketplaces increasingly challenging for their titles to get noticed, Developer Announcements from OpenFeint could prove to be an important cog-wheel of a developer's marketing strategy...
Slightly incorrect.
There is no free version of Monster Dash so not sure where they got the #143 -> #4 free charts data from. Phil also isn't the head of Halfbrick, he is the Marketing Manager. Shainiel is still the CEO.
The 267 -> 84 is accurate for paid where we kept it at the 84-120 range for about two weeks before changing our news feed to promote something else. OpenFeint didn't technically promote it... we just made use of their technology to do our own cross promotion.
Oh and this isn't a new feature... we were using it back in December 2010 and even spoke about it at GCAP :)
oh boy...
Thanks for the corrections, Michael. What about the line about Fruit Ninja "selling its game to 23 million players" - I'm guessing that's incorrect too? Or is that total downloads?
That's correct as they are
That's correct as they are including both the paid and free iOS versions in the total. The paid iPhone version alone is now well over 7 million. Awesome to see it still performing so well since it's release.... 1 year ago today actually.... HAPY BIRTHDAY FRUIT NINJA! ;)