Never scared of kicking the tyres, US studio Appy Entertainment has been poking it in terms of seeing what marketing strategies work best.
"We're not above stunt pricing if we think it will help," says Appy's brand director Paul O'Connor.
"We hoped iPad would be a different story to iPhone, which has shaken itself out to the point that it's difficult to meaningfully move up the ranks by Peggling your price downward."
"Lower volume should equal increased rank volatility and the iPad top 100 paid chart really is the promised land right now, as it is so difficult to be found by browsing on the iPad."
Opportunity knocks
With this in mind, when Appy's FaceFighter Face2Face game was featured by Apple last week on the iPad iTunes section - going from #31 in the paid Arcade category to #10 - the company quietly dropped the price from $3.99 to 99c to see what would happen.
There was also another reason. The game was featured on a Thursday and so it climbed the charts over the weekend, which is the prime time for iPad app purchasing.
"We knew that sales would likely drop off the cliff on Monday, whether we were featured or not," O'Connor explains.
The result was FaceFighter moved as high as #8 within its category, and #101 in the overall paid chart.
"We got stuck at #101 for about three days, and when we started to sink again, we set our price back to $3.99. We've done okay since, and FaceFighter is now at #18 in category, which is better than where we were before our feature," O'Connor explains.
App Store learnings
In terms of wider conclusions, he has a couple of points.
1. Apple features still count for a lot on iPad. It feels like the iPhone market a year ago in terms of the impact of an Apple feature. Our iPhone features still have an effect but they aren't so extreme as they used to be.
2. The iPad side of the market isn't as wired, price-wise, as the iPhone side. When Tune Runner Fusion went to free as part of OpenFeint's Free Game of the Day program last week, my Twitter searches and Google feeds exploded with dozens of sites picking up the price drop. Only a couple sites spotted our iPad price drop. Part of that is down to the OpenFeint promotion, but I don't think the sniper sites are watching the iPad that closely right now.
3. There may be less volume on the iPad, but the market has already ossified at the #101/#100 barrier. We hit that line pretty hard with a quality, featured product at a crazy price and still couldn't break through it. This speaks to how hard it is to get noticed on iPad right now. Momentum counts for everything.
4. It's an increasingly a word of mouth business. The only sure way to build volume is by reaching the opinion leaders (who actually shop the iTunes lists) and get them to recommend a particular app. Apple's feature and the volume we moved during our price drop appears to have developed a critical mass - albeit a small one - of users, which resulted in increased sales and improved ranking for FaceFighter, even though we went back to $3.99.
You can follow Appy's future experiments via its blog.
