Bang2D.com

Mouse House Wii Approved for Sale in North American!

It took 4 submissions and about 3 months but it is finally ready to go.

I will post when I find out the launch date.

I sent off Mouse House for Wiiware to Nintendo for approval last week.

Mouse House 1 and 2 sales without advertising are steady now ataround $9 a day day for the last week.  This is what we might call App store B where you make a steady trickle of money with out advertiseing and with out being on the top 100 charts.

One thing I found out that does work is to cross promote your new app in your other apps.  Doing that brought our sales for Mouse House 2 from 0 once off the new release section to on par or better then MH 1 on all days for the last 2 weeks.

That is an easy and cheap way to multiply sales.

Mouse House Update 1.1.2 was approved on sunday night.

New in version 1.1.2
User Requested Features:
Music!
Saved game slots.
Level Select Screen.
Swipe Control is now default.
Adjusted learning curve by reordering levels.
Added 5 new levels.

Bug Fixes:
Tiled Floors crack now.
Fixed Random Crash on death.
You can no longer sneak by bees when pushing a ball.

Engine Improvements:
New culling system for visibility and hit detection which will allow
for giant levels in future games.
Faster hit detection do to culling.
Faster Sprite spawning.
Faster Math engine.
Faster level / Screen load times.

1. Finally got sound working on the Wii and learned how to pack up a project for distribution. Hopefully this means I have all the really hard stuff in the port down now.

2. Here is the Mouse House sales curve up and down based on the huge boost we received when iJiggles the top FREE app from 2 weeks ago gave Mouse House  a mention in its’ itunes description. Sales Graph

On the top 100 Games Sales lists that is.

Positions were  #100 US, #66 UK, 75 IE.

Update… actually we knocked off the US top 100 4 hours later

Whats even worse I was talking to the author of the app that did it on IRC when it happened.  LOL.

Our actual position on the Adventure genre seems not to have gone down.

Anyhow current ranks look like.

2009/02/23

US Adventure 10
UK Adventure 8    Top Games  65
IE Adventure 4      Top Games 40   Top Apps 64

2009/02/25

US Adventure 12
UK Adventure 8    Top Games  61
IE Adventure 8      Top Games 54

2009/02/28
100 Top Games lists in UK, IE, NZ now.
Getting steady Sales from those and holding on to ranks.

Weekend unit sales look like…
2009/02/18  - 217 - $148
2009/02/19  - 275 - $183
2009/02/20  - 376 - $249
2009/02/21  - 416 - $273
2009/02/22  - 354 - $228
2009/02/23  - 262 - $171
2009/02/24  - 230 - $148
2009/02/25  - 173 - $108
2009/02/26  - 156 - $99
2009/02/27  - 169 - $105
2009/02/28  - 220 - $137
2009/02/01  - 226 - $143

Or about $1997 profit in 12 days.

01/01/2008 - Units  95 - Price $.99 - Gross $94.05  - Profit $62.55
01/02/2008 - Units  110 - Price $.99 - Gross $108.90  - Profit $73.01
01/03/2008 - Units  87 - Price $.99 - Gross $86.13  - Profit $54.23
01/04/2008 - Units  75 - Price $.99 - Gross $74.25  - Profit $47.84
01/05/2008 - Units  64 - Price $.99 - Gross $63.36  - Profit $41.86
01/06/2008 - Units  46 - Price $.99 - Gross $45.54  - Profit $28.78
Last night I changed the price to 1.99$ and tonight an update was approved
So we will see what effect that has next.
01/07/2008 - Units  29 - Price $1.99 - Gross $0.00  - Profit $31.13
This day is off, from price raise
01/08/2008 - Units  52 - Price $1.99 - Profit $70.91
01/09/2008 - Units  37 - Price $1.99 - Profit $49.70
01/10/2008 - Units  52 - Price $1.99 - Profit $67.85
Even though MH is slowly dropping in rank world wide with the price rise and a actively visible update we are  making better money on par with some of hour better days with press coverage. The general conclusion for us is that shipping an update is as good as a press story for sales.

Anyhow we are now aiming to make $1000 a month on Mouse House using a combination of weekly updates and sales. 10 Day into January and we are 1/2 there.  If things go maybe we can bring in $1200.  Maintaining that for a year would generate a nice $12k-18K, Which might not sound like a whole lot for a full time developer. But living up here in Minnesota it is possible to live  happily on 35K a year.  Shipping 2 more products on par with Mouse House should get us past our break even point for 1 full time employee. Now that our engine technology and tools are completed and proven this should go fairly fast.

01/12/2008 -  01/24/2008
Settled down to a steady 40 copies a day at 1$ or around 30$ a day profit.
Raising the price to 2.99$ only made of lose a lot of ranks.
Lowering the price to .99$ has let us slowly gain ranks world wide.
MH is now 22 on the Adventure list in the UK for example.