Hi all,
Sorry about the lack of updates on here, but a lot has been going on with releasing the new game — as well as us buying a house and moving to Davenport! In TBG news though, the game I have been working on for Android for quite some time now has been released finally. The game is called Baby Animal Solitaire, and the name is actually pretty self-explanatory. It’s a classic solitaire including Klondike, Spider, and FreeCell variants. The thing I that I think really sets it apart though, is that the backgrounds using the game are high res photographs of actual, adorable, baby animals. New Images download from my server on a weekly (or even more often) basis, so it’s not just the same ones over and over. The game is also free, ad supported by default with an option to remove them for $1 via an in app purchase.
I have also decided that in keeping with the whole theme, I am going to be donating 3% of all proceeds from this game (whether through ads or purchases) to the World Wildlife Fund. The WWF is a very well run non-profit that I have respected for a long time, and I hope I am able to make some meaningful contributions.
The game is out in the wild at this very moment on the Android Marketplace, and can be found at this link. If you have any android devices, please give it a download (it is free afterall) and give me a good rating/review. I want to try to make as big a splash as I can early on, so that hopefully I can get in front of a decent number of eyeballs on the store.
I am working to bring the game to alternate android distribution platforms very soon. I will probably try to get it on the Amazon Appstore next, which should open up the game to Kindle users. After that I will probably try the alternate phone stores like AppBrain, and then after that I might try to send it through for the Nook tablet and the BlackBerry Playbook. As far as iOS and Windows Phone goes, we’ll have to see how it does on Android — as making those ports would be a fair amount of work.
Meanwhile, Avatar Chess continues to plug along. I didn’t make a blog post about it, but some time ago I raised the price to $3 as an experiment, and at this point I’d call it a success. although the numbers are more volatile, I firmly believe that I am earning more now than I would be at the old price point of $1. Here is some chartage, although it’s a bit different this time. Since I have data from two different prices in there, I graphed the total money earned (after Microsoft’s cut) in maroon, with the rolling 7 day average of money earned in blue.
As you can see it’s hanging right in there between $30 and $40 earned per day, which I find amazing given how long it’s been out there. What the chart won’t easily tell you is that as of March 2nd I have earned $5733 from Avatar Chess, which is quite respectable given I only spent about 6 weeks developing it (and could do it again in 3-4). At this point I’m sure it will break the $6k level, and for all I know maybe it will keep earning $30 a day till Microsoft kills the platform.
Thanks for reading this rather long post, and hopefully soon I can start hitting you all with some nice Android numbers.
