Today I crossed the two million total downloads mark. This is a pretty cool milestone for a small indie developer.

At the moment every 7 days more than 100’000 users are downloading my apps, every month I get around 400k to 500k downloads.  Here is a chart how my downloads developed during the last months:

So the big question is: How did I manage it to improve my downloads so much without any marketing and advertising.

Well, the popular app stores like iTunes, google Play or amazon are complex, very dynamic ecosystems.

It’s very hard to make good predictions. Often you’ll hear things like “Make a quality product and you will make money!”.

I’m very sorry to disappoint you but in my experience this is NOT true.

I’ve seen so many developers that worked hard on their game for many, many months. They created a fantastic end result. They released their amazing game and…… NOTHING happend. No Downloads. And “no downloads” equals to “no revenue”. So sure, quality is important, but it doesn’t guarantee you anything.

With this in mind I choose another strategy. My assumption was: Make more apps and you will get more downloads.More downloads = more revenue.

So with this in mind I focused to improve my workflow and tried to cut down the development time of my apps. I don’t want to get too technical but what I’ve mainly did to achieve this was:

• I’ve created a “framework/codebase” for fast prototyping and developing games (reusable components, cross platform, data driven, a scripting language for easy customize existing games/components, tools/editors that integrate well into the workflow)
• An easy workflow with lots of automation to create, maintain and publish an app as well as maintain assets and marketing material (description, keywords, screenshots, icons, resolutions for different stores etc.)
• Re-Skin existing apps for another target audience (with no or less coding involved)

This weekend I released my new app for iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch: Bass Constructor. If you’ve ever dreamed of creating your own club/dance/house hit record without any prior knowledge this app is for you.

It was the best app start I’ve ever had and people seem to LOVE this little gem.
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I recently released my new app Beat_Machine for iOS. A fun drumpad-computer simulation with great sounds. Here are the first reviews I got from my users so far. Thank you so much:
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Captain Backwater is more near to completion than ever before. So, what happend during the last two months?

First of all I was in holidays in Mallorca with some good friends for 10 days. It was planned to stay there for 7 days but we missed our plane back home (note to myself: never book a return flight again that starts off early in the morning). » more

Since serveral weeks now I’m not able to use my facebook account anymore. I flaged my account as developer account about a month or two. When you’re in the facebook test developer network you can’t communicate with others. So I left the network again, but it doesn’t work out so fine. I don’t have the “Leave”-Button anymore, but I neither can’t communicate nor I’m able to visit other users profiles, so I guess internally my acc is still flaged. » more