2018-12-07 - Tinytouchtales

Recap: Card Crawl Halloween Special + Steam Numbers

Since we did a pretty cool Halloween Special for Card Crawl (it was free for one day) and a lot of people have asked me how it went, so here’s a small recap of what happended.

Halloween Special

We used the Halloween Special to give out Card Crawl for Mobile for free for 24h. Since this was the first ever free sale for Card Crawl since it’s release in March 2015, i was expecting a lot of long time lurkers to finally convert into Card Crawlers. On the Android side i ran into an issue i could have researched before hand, but oh well… On Google Play you can’t switch an in App purchase to be free. Because of this i had to upload a special unlocked .apk which was available for 24h as well. After that i had to switch back to the regular unlock .apk version. Since the unlocked version will stay unlocked even through updates i think it went ok and not too many people complained. Again i could have looked up this earlier but i was under the impression that i did reduce iAps to free in other Android games before.

Anyways, the sale went pretty well quite a few mobile sites including Pocket Tactics and Toucharcade made special posts (thanks for that) and most of the App tracker sites pushed out messages of Card Crawl going free as well. I did not get into any special promotions from Apple or Google this time.

On iOS we could get about 22.400 free downloads. Most came from the US, Germany, Taiwan and China. On Google Play, where the game is free already we could increase our downloads to 2800 with the top countries US, UK, Brazil and Canada.

For one day these numbers seem quite ok. But in honesty i was expecting way more downloads on iOS since the game never had been free. But it seems Card Crawl is still a niche game and not many of the players who have never heard of it were interested in trying it out.

Secret Price Change

The big thing i did after the special was to secretly raise Card Crawl’s price on both stores to Tier 5 or $4.99 from $2.99. I did not talk about this at all on purpose just to see what it would do to my sales numbers. My guess was that if a player would want to play Card Crawl he must have heard about this game somewhere or got a recommendation. Card Crawl is quite old and niche and is not an impulse buy game anymore. Non the less i think it offers a lot of value and with the recent Localization update it even offers more value for those translated languages.

I waited 1 Month to see if there would be any significant change and wow, yes there is. My revenue for Card Crawl on both platforms more than double in November. We have to see how this pans out long term, but so far it’s been working great.

Steam Sales Numbers
Valve recently changed the policy regarding publishing real sales data on their platform. This is why i wanted to give you an update on Card Crawl’s numbers on Steam. We did release Card Crawl Steam earlier this year and it took us about 3 month to redesign and adjust most of the UI to make it work for the Desktop. My expectations for the port weren’t to high since we all know how critical the Steam user base is towards mobile ports. I think most of the sales we got were from long time Card Crawl players on mobile that bought the game to have it in their Steam library as well. I was expecting maybe $10000 in revenue from this port for it to be somewhat viable for other projects of mine. So far we could sell about 2900 units at $2.99 which resulted in about $7500 total since January 2018.
We’re a bit short of breaking even right now and as i’ve posted already elsewhere i don’t feel like porting mobile games to Steam is the right way to go for me and i rather focus on Mobile with new games in the future.