Firemint, the company behind the best selling iPhone game ‘Flight Control‘, has put together a fascinating report outlining the sales trends the company has seen over the last month, from March 24 to April 25. The application has dominated the App Store over the last few weeks, reaching the #1 paid spot in over a dozen countries (though it’s currently fallen to #7 in the US). Since launching on March 6 the application has been downloaded over 700,000 times. It’s unclear how much money the application has actually made – it’s currently marked as ‘on sale’ for a limited time, but even at its current 99 cent price point the app’s developers will have made $485,000 dollars after Apple’s 30% cut.
For those of you who haven’t played it, Flight Control is a highly addictive game that involves directing tiny aircraft to their landing pads. The game strikes the perfect balance between accessibility (you can figure out how to play it in about two minutes) and offering a significant challenge. It may not be the sort of game you’d want to sit and play for hours at a time, but it’s a perfect diversion for the doctor’s waiting room or a bus ride.
Firemint has gone to great lengths to record its data, but it isn’t quite comprehensive – apparently the studio forgot to download its reports from Apple on a couple of days, and there’s no way to get them now. Still, this is probably the most detailed set of data to be released by a top developer to date.
Among the revealing insights:
- The United States accounted for the vast majority of sales, with 57%. Second in line was the UK with 17%, followed by Germany and Canada, with 4% each.
- Each Top App List is country-specific (your downloads in the USA don’t help you reach the chart in the Austrailian version of the store). At the high end of the spectrum, Flight Control was able to reach the top spot in the United States with 9586 daily downloads, while it took 3061 to hit the top spot in the UK store. Reaching the peak position in Finland took only 23 downloads in a single day.
- In the US, Flight Control saw a downward trend in sales over time as it maintained the #1 spot in the App Store. This isn’t particularly surprising given the finite number of iPhone owners who check the App Store on a regular basis, but it gives an idea as to why the top apps lists have such a high churn rate. Firemint speculates that Flight Control was able to maintain its top spot even as sales declined because the App Store uses a moving average rather than the number of sales in a single day to rank apps.
- Sales were impacted by outside events, including Easter (when there was an increase in sales) and media coverage.
The data makes a few things clear. For one, adding localization support should probably be placed on the back burner for applications that would require a large time investment to add new languages. Over 80% of Flight Control downloads came from English-speaking countries. It’s also clear that, at least in the case of Flight Control, there isn’t sustained growth once an application hits #1 on the App Store. Instead, the application quickly peaked and has gradually lost steam over time, though it remains popular. Be sure to look through the full report for more details, including a day-by-day breakdown of download stats.
That is definitely one addictive game.
These stats are awesome! Very revealing and very useful for developers.
And Brazil is nowhere to be seen in any of those charts and graphs because our freaking laws prohibit games to be sold without passing through our government’s rating system.
god, I hate my country.
Is there no way to tunnel your internet connection? Perhaps through a more App Store friendly country? I’m sure it’s possible.
The App Store doesn’t care about your point of connection to the network, rather, you need a credit card with an associated address on the country in question.
What about just using a iTunes gift card to create the account?
cheapertunes.com
I haven’t played it, but it sounds like a remake the original “Kennedy Approach” for the Commodore 64. Here’s a YouTube video of a PC Remake: http://www.yout...h?v=3Dvku3jjOBk
Hmm, that seems like a nice strategy for inventing new iPhone games. Delve into the 8-bit past for obscure games not many people new about and port them over.
Hmm, should search before I post. I saw a video on Flight Control on youtube and it plays a lot different than the Microprose simulation (in all honesty, the C64 version seems to have more depth.
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nice info. watch the app here.
http://www.yout...h?v=2Qti2ffpu2k
I too, am a fan of this game.
Flight Control is a simple but great game! I’m only playing Flight Control and PocketGod when I’m have time for gaming on my IPhone.
As an IPhone game developer myself, I really appreciate their openness with their sales figure and that certainly is a motivating factor for us. I’ve also been collecting a list of sales numbers that other Iphone developers have released. Probably will write out a blog post with those resources when we launch our first game.
Will be interesting to see what PocketGod does.
While this is interesting, the data *starts* with the app already a best-seller. By that time, you’re going to make a bunch of money, the only questions is exactly how much. I’m not convinced you have much control over sales at that point. It would be much more enlightening to see how the app got there in the first place. Was it viral growth, or a sudden spike by some event like being a ‘Featured App’?
I could have provided the same findings a month after the store opened from one of my apps that sold 1% of what this app has. These sort of trends are pretty much universal for every app in the store just on a smaller scale.
I love this game … By the way your hi-score is pretty pathetic
To argue that a product shouldn’t be localized because it isn’t selling well abroad is a rather silly argument. How are people who don’t speak English supposed to see the value of an English-language product in the first place?
You may very well be correct about this particular app, but the logic is flawed.
No, I still think I’m correct. This was the TOP application in many of these countries and it was only getting a few dozen downloads. They’re just smaller markets. If an app doesn’t take long to localize, go for it, but if it’s a text-heavy app then I’d worry more about shipping the English version first.
I too love this app… and for localization, you really don’t need to read anything for this game in order to play it. So localization for a game like this is pretty moot. The user can always look up a translation of what “super” or other successful landing words are but I think those are the only actual words which appear on the screen for this particular game.
The key really is to create a game which does not necessarily need localization. If game play is obvious, it will be easy for anyone to pick up and play, regardless of language, or reading ability (think 2 and 3 year old kids entertainment while Mom/Dad need to concentrate on an activity like driving
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Just FYI, as far as figuring out how much money Flight Control has made, it has been priced at $0.99 the whole time. So with 700,000 copies sold so far, Firemint has made $490,000 after Apple’s cut.
You can see the history of every app’s price and update changes in AppShopper:
http://appshopp.../flight-control
I would also really love to see the immediate post-launch stats that led to them being at #1.
Flight Control is an addictive game – congrats to Firemint on the success.
These stats are awesome! Very revealing and very useful for developers.As an IPhone game developer myself, I really appreciate their openness with their sales figure and that certainly is a motivating factor for us
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A Firemint game being a #1 hit is no great suprise. The CEO Rob Murray is a visionary and a true leader in the mobile gaming arena.
Thank you for sharing the app store data.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new version of this game soon. I can also see some revenue coming from using the new 3.0 software for the iPhone and iPod Touch. For example, they could offer new levels, new planes, different airports, etc. for additional fee.
I am at 104 now and working on beating a few of my friends who are over 125! Btw, bus is not the best place to play – it shakes too much and my planes end up crashing
I love this game. Easily among my favorites (139 is my high score). While the data is interesting, I think the biggest driver is a good name for the application, great (and unique) game concept and fantastic game (I told others about it). The concept simply resonated with consumers. As someone who launched over seventy mobile games in a prior life, these are big drivers and I didn’t get any sense that marketing played any role in the success of this title. No free version, it came out at $0.99 and stayed there, no (or little) PR, etc. Don’t think apple promoted it until it was already successful.
One of the best iphone App of all times:)
Wow, and our app isurvival is only getting 10 to 20 sales per day!