So yesterday we made Forever Lost: Episode 1 free for 24 hours as part of the App of the Day promotion with AppTurbo ( who I am very happy to say are a very friendly and approachable bunch ) and we would like to share some numbers with anyone that is interested.

For comparison, when we went free a few months back by ourselves we got around 60,000 downloads which we were very happy with.

For those that aren’t interested in colour charts and the like I will summarise quickly here, we got 598,085 downloads and 235 new reviews on iOS and 85,000 downloads on Android ( however Android being what it is that was a special Free version of the app that now has been pulled ) and 160 ratings.

Needless to say we are very happy with those numbers. We don’t know how much of an effect, if any, this will have on our paid downloads over the next few days but we will update this post with those numbers when they come in.

Our website also temporarily went down as we were getting over 30,000 hits an hour according to our host.

First, here is an image showing the downloads over the last 7 days:

A look at the daily IOS ranks shows we jumped up the free charts pretty quickly:

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AppTurbo is currently not in every country, for reference these are the stores that it was targeting:

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Here is a more detailed listing of the ranks, the list keeps going with other countries but we figured this was enough to show how well the promo worked:

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Our total reviews jumped up quite nicely too which currently we think will be one of the biggest reasons for doing a promo such as this as it dramatically helps to increase discoverability:

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In conclusion, we now have 600,000 more ( hopefully happy ) customers that are looking forward to episode 2 when we release it and if a fraction of those new users decide to buy the game it will be a pretty good day for us.

UPDATE 8/3/13 – 1 WEEK LATER:

One week has now passed since the promotion and we decided it was a good time to share just a few more numbers to show the affect it has had on our paid sales. As you can see from the following image  ( click to embiggen ), before the promotion we were getting around $50 a day on iOS.

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These sales then naturally disappeared on the day of the promo and then shot up to $808 on the day immediately after it. They then started dropping off again and have now just about settled down to slightly above pre-promo numbers. The next few days will tell us if they actually have levelled off or just the drop-rate has decreased.

We have also seen a similar effect, yet to a lesser degree, on Android.

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Overall we are happy with these numbers, in fact they are better than we expected. The reviews, and fan e-mail, are also still coming in pretty constantly so that’s nice too!