FingerGaming

The sandbox adventure title Payback has emerged as the latest original title to achieve a significant degree of success on the iPhone platform. James Daniels at developer Apex Designs has posted App Store sales data recorded over Payback’s first two months of release, revealing that the title has sold 65,000 copies so far for a revenue total of $400,000.

Daniels notes that Payback has surpassed the sales achieved by previous iPhone successes Trism and iShoot in their first two months of release. He also details the title’s lifetime sales performance in a graph, reprinted above.

“The second peak roughly in the middle of the graph is when the game was featured on [the iTunes front page category] ‘new and noteworthy’ in the US,” Daniels notes. “You’ll also notice there’s a dip in this peak and then it goes up again – this second spike was when we reduced the price from $6.99 to $4.99. It’s also worth pointing out that even the “low” level we’re now at is higher than we expected the peak to be before the game was launched!”

Daniels attributes Payback’s continued success to the well-timed release of a free Lite demo, which has been downloaded more than 500,000 times to date. The title may not have been as successful if it had not initially earned a spot in the “top 50 sellers” section of the iTunes Games category, however. While Daniels describes the turn of events as fortunate for his company, he notes that other developers aren’t as lucky.

“Unfortunately, the paid app charts are sorted by sales, which is inevitably going to skew things towards the cheaper apps and so will make it harder for relatively expensive apps like ours to break through (in fact, we have only occasionally been in the charts in most countries).” he writes. “We’ve been lucky (and the lite version certainly helped), but others haven’t been so fortunate.”

Daniels closes with some advice for Apple that could benefit independent iPhone developers: “We’d therefore like to humbly suggest a solution to Apple – please sort the paid apps by revenue not by units sold. This would effectively allow the better value apps to rise to the top irrespective of price, giving them the visibility they deserve. This would benefit customers and developers alike because it would encourage quality software rather than cheap novelties.”

Tags: adventure, apex designs, iPhone, payback, sales data