One Week In

Rapture has been in the App Store for a week now, been a bit of a roller coaster for 7 days, but very enlightening, we’ve learnt a lot.

We submitted the game to Apple on the 1st September and looked happily at the “Waiting for Review” status. The time dragged on and the game remained seemed stuck with that status. Supposedly the average time is about 8 days, but that came and went and it became hard not to impatiently hit refresh on the browser. Our submission time may have been bad with the release of iOS 8 and the new iPhones possibly dominating Apple’s collective attention. On the 13th the email finally arrived switching us to “In Review” and a few hours later the approval email arrived. I’ll admit that I thought it might stay in review longer with Apple employees unable to put the game down 🙂 But in the end it quickly went through.

We had decided to do a “soft launch” – starting the game in a small english speaking territory to double check that it was all fully working – that there was nothing we had overlooked. So the game launched in New Zealand and we both nudged friends and family down under to buy and check the game. Most were asleep when the game appear on the NZ app store, but in the morning, it was successfully purchased and worked.

By the 15th there was nothing really holding us back. For me it was like sending your first child to school for the first time, letting them out into the wild world. Would they have the skills to cope out there? With a slightly shaky hand we pushed the game out to everyone.

The next day we were hitting refresh for figures. The downloads so far have been reasonable. We somehow managed to get featured on the US and Canadian New Games Chart, which helped give us a slight boost. Most of the start of the week was spent writing countless emails to journalists and websites. The response was surprisingly quiet – we had only a handful of responses. We did however get a news piece on Pocket Gamer and one on a new games list for IGN, both of which were great to see, though it’s hard to know whether that helped sales.

We also posted on several forums. The forums weren’t quite so much fun. We were knocked around a bit for having in-app purchases in a paid game. Hardcode gamers seem to take exception to IAPs, even though our title has very light coin pack style IAPs, which don’t affect the game at all. After reading and discussing with people, it seems as though many hardcode gamers feel that IAPs are having a damaging effect on gaming, and that they somehow “dirty” a game. There’s possibly a grain of truth in that, but it stung to have that charge levelled at Rapture.

On Thursday we uploaded an update to the game with a few bug fixes and a small change to try and add some balance to the coins you get in game. We also added a new Scottish Civilization to commemorate Scotland’s independence referendum. Perhaps the new civilization will be some consolidation to the Yes voters. We had hoped that it might get picked up by the press, but no luck.

Currently the sales are starting to dip down, whether this is after a weekend, we shall see. We’re still hoping for some big reviews to appear and we’re starting work on translating the game into French, German and Spanish (to start with). We’re also looking at Multiplayer and Android in the near future. The initial euphoria is starting to wear off now and it’s heads down again to push some updates.

Thanks again for the support we’ve had. And please get in touch if you have any thoughts or feedback.