The Droid market is tough. It appears there are only two routes to success. One is to spend a lot of time and money on marketing and promotion of your app. How many independents (especially guys at uni) can afford to do that? Or secondly, get featured .... and you have absolutely no real control over getting featured in the market. Some Google->Developer relations employees 'find' your app, and if they like it, they contact you, tell you if anything needs tweaking, then recommend you into a feature pool.
I was dubious about the possibility to approach the same guy who contacted me about Space Squadron and ask if Fat Ball could get featured too. I figured it would be some sort of faux pas, because you're essentially asking someone to give you a leg up for fee, forsaking all others, and offering nothing in return. However, as tentatively as I felt, I did get a positive response (after a week or so), so hopefully Fat Ball will get featured. In which case, building a relationship with one of these Google chappies seems to be the way forward, but I would imagine they'd have to find each product you show them great. They won't be doing you any favours. If you knock on their door trying to sell them crap, I am pretty sure they'll soon tire of you and blank you completely.
If featuring happens, your product suddenly goes mental, with several hundred purchases per day. The first day Space Squadron was featured, I made £200. It was priced at 50p, so I only get 35p of that after Google's cut. So it sold over 500 copies on the first day. This continues, in an ever decreasing amount as interest drops off, until eventually you drop off the feature list. Somehow (I have no idea how), Space Squadron remained featured for almost a full month, although by the end of that month £14 was about all it made per day.
After that, it drops back into the normal sea of apps, but having received loads of downloads and votes, it remains fairly high in the charts, and can be found. It dropped down to about 150th in the Brain/Strategy app category, where it can be found by scrolling about 10 pages worth of apps downwards. It makes between £2 and £12 / day.
Pricing is so important though. If you overprice, you will fail. Just take a look around. There are full on 3D game apps, priced at £1.50. By that logic, I don't think a new 2D app can justify being priced at more than £1. People just won't buy it. Apps are a low value commodity, and you have to work on a large volume sales principle.
Having said that, pricing Space Squadron at 50p (the minimum possible amount you can sell an app for) to make it throw away money, was a massive mistake. The amount of kids who bought it without playing the demo because it was cheap, then hated it because it was hard and slow paced, and marked it down with 1 star reviews, was massive. I did irrepairable damage to it's reputation by pricing it that way. All I got were 1 star and 5 star reviews. It's a true Marmite game.
When I repriced it at £1 after it dropped off the feature list, more and more people tried the demo first. The haters rate the demo down and avoid the full version, and the people at love it buy the full version and give it 5 stars. Slowly the ratings for it are climbing again, but there are a lot of 1 star reviews from kids that need to be diluted.
So that's the crux of selling. Make the best app game you can. An average one will never make it. If it's genuinely good, you may get noticed and featured eventually. Otherwise, you'll have to work hard to promote. I have no idea how to succeed this way, though watching the trend with Fat Ball, I would guess it's possible to climb the charts to a reasonable position in about a year, if you keep at it.
As for ads, I have an ad campaign running in Fat Ball Lite, and I find it quite disappointing at the moment. Fat Ball Lite has been on for about 3 weeks and has just under 5000 installs. It's worth noting, it hasn't been featured and the Space Squadron Demo has 28000 installs and has been featured and online for MUCH longer. Fat Ball will obviously overtake it in the coming months. Why? I can only guess it's either to do with the game image, or most likely, the category it's in. Fat Ball is in the Action/Arcade category, which I believe gets many many more viewers. Worth noting.
As for advertisement revenue, Fat Ball Lite makes me $0.20 to $1.00 per day, with 2000 active players. Now, that's obviously rubbish. So to make a nice $10/day, I obviously need at least 40,000 players of the demo. So to get those figures, you have to really be featured, or again, work very hard on marketing. Alternatively, let the app climb in popularity, and continually update it so original players/users don't tire of it and continue using it, thus viewing the ads. It's worth mentioning, I don't use any click fraud techniques though, so the ad isn't easily pressed accidentally, which is frowned upon and can get you kicked out of admob/adsense programme.
So in summary ... phew ...
... to succeed, you need a great app, you need to make it as robust as possible, you need to put a lot of time into it, and you need some luck and patience to get featured. I am still well away from making a good wage. Yes, I had a nice bonus when Space Squadron was featured, but now it's back down to less than £10/day, you can't live off that. So there's obviously a lot of work to do build up a portfolio of apps, and hitting other platforms would be a very good idea too.
It's a tough career path. The only way to make big bucks is to get to the top of the charts, like that Robo Defense game, and that's been there for years. I dread to think how much cash that dude has made. For the rest of us, our only hope is to spend several years building a portfolio of high quality original apps, dip your fingers into as many pies as possible (demos with ads, full paid versions, many different categories, and as many OSs as possible), and then have many small revenue streams from different locations.
If you're really lucky, you might hit on that killer formula and make another Angry Birds. We can all hope ...
Hope that insight helps a bit mate. I was considering writing some article on it at some point, but wanted to wait to see what happens with Fat Ball. I think financial figures are important, and I'm not afraid to discuss them. If I get filthy stinking rich I may become reluctant, but right now while I'm so poor I eat worms out of the garden and cloth myself in old hessian sacks, I will remain open financially.
