Gravity Sling shows how virtual goods sales work on the iPhone

Riptide Games has revealed how well virtual goods sales work on the iPhone with its new game Gravity Sling. It’s yet another case study in how to get ahead in the iPhone economy.
There’s a lot of hope that virtual goods sales — known as in-app purchases on the iPhone — will help make Apple’s AppStore much more profitable for apps developers. Virtual goods have generated huge revenue growth for Facebook apps this year, but the business model has been slow to take off on the Apple platform.
On Oct. 15, Apple announced that it would permit in-app purchases in free games. This was a big deal for developers, because it let them use the free-to-play business model, where you give away a game for free and make money on purchases inside the game. Riptide submitted its Gravity Sling on Oct. 19. The game had 15 free levels in the free app, but players could purchase another 30 levels via the in-app purchase system. The game has seen limited success, with 66,346 apps downloaded from Nov. 5 to Nov. 22, with sales of the level packs hitting 1,267.
I met Riptide’s founder, Brian Robbins, at the recent IGDA Leadership Forum, where he gave a talk on how to submit games to Apple’s AppStore. A game industry veteran, he has helped program more than 100 games to date. He wrote about the results in the Riptide blog. Since the iPhone is an experimental platform in many ways, results like these, as well as our case study on iPhone developer Backflip Studios, are quite valuable.
It hasn’t been featured by Apple yet, but it did get some decent game reviews on iPhone game sites and blogs. In the U.S., the app has ranked between 25 and 50 in the free puzzle and free strategy game sections of the AppStore since launch. The app did better in Italy and Japan.
Brian Robbins, founder of Riptide in Aurora, Colo., shared his results today in a blog post. He says that so far, about 1.91 percent of the players have converted from the free game to purchasing the extra levels for 99 cents. In downloadable PC games, the conversion rate is just 0.71 percent. The conversion rate varies by geography, with 2.96 percent conversion in the U.S. and only 0.78 percent in Italy.
Robbins said that the company incorporated the Open Feint social platform into the game. Users who sign up with Open Feint can automatically submit a high score in the game to a leaderboard. That is apparently working well, as Open Feint users convert about three times higher than non-Open Feint users.
The typical delay between the time when a user downloads the app for the first time and when they buy a level pack is about a day. That delay increases over time. Robbins wrote, “The surprising thing here is that there was very little to no user backlash at having paid content in a “free” app. We expected this to be a huge concern since this was one of the first free apps with in-app purchase content, but we have not seen any complaints about this yet.” In a revised version, Riptide will do a better job of letting users know that there is a level pack available for purchase.
[The excitement in this industry is one of the reasons why we're holding an executive event called DiscoveryBeat on Dec. 8 in San Francisco. The event will explore the secret recipe for getting your social game or mobile phone application "discovered" in an age of increasing noise. Get your ticket today].
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