Here we go.

Firstly, the removal of the Finkly Interactive version of Fare City was unavoidable. There is no mechanism to allow Digital Chocolate to take over the Fare City application. To enable them to sell the game I had to create a new application bundle using their provisioning profile and they had to submit it to Apple as new. From there, there would be a clear conflict of interest if I were to keep the FI version on sale – and there is (not surprisingly) no mechanism for end-of-life, upgrade-only applications in the App Store.

So, to republish is, inevitably, to leave existing customers out in the cold. On the face of it this may seem pretty harsh, but let’s dig into the details a little.

In the four months since launch, Fare City has managed to sell around X thousand units (I won’t give the actual number but it is about average for paid apps – certainly not a number to make me rich) with most of those sales occurring in the first two months. Of course, only a subset of those copies are still being used, and without analytics we need some detective work to guess at more useful numbers.

Version 1.1 shipped about six weeks ago and by my calculations less than 1,000 copies were NOT updated. This suggests that practically all copies still on device did get updated (though as Frog laments there are exceptions). However, as many people keep stuff lying around after they’ve stopped using it, it would be a mistake to assume most people were still playing.

How about some hard numbers? The 1.0 leaderboard system included just over 5,000 entries when 1.1 launched. At 1.1 we switched to Open Feint for the leaderboard and as part of the upgrade the game submits the previous high score to the new leaderboard. So, as long as the player signed up to Open Feint they would automatically get a leaderboard entry on the Classic/Downtown leaderboard. At switch over last week that leaderboard stood at around 2,000 entries.

So, of all the copies of FC that were sold we know that at least 2,000 were run at least once in the last six weeks. This figure excludes those who play the game but choose not to use Open Feint but includes those playing pirated copies. Based on previous experience watching sales v. leaderboard numbers I am going to guess that piracy accounted for about 50% of entries on the 1.0 leaderboard but less for 1.1, and that people were more willing to sign up for the simpler 1.0 leaderboard. So my guess is that since 1.1 shipped around 2,000 – 3,000 customers have played the game.

Therefore, at this point we have perhaps 3,000 (4,000 if we are generous) people who would like to continue playing Fare City. Of these, probably less than 200 did not upgrade to 1.1 in time.

Hmm, that still sounds like a lot of people. However, at the risk of sounding harsh I want to dissect things a little further.

First, there are those who didn’t upgrade and are “stuck” with 1.0. When people bought 1.0 they paid 99c for a small, fun game that provided hours of entertainment. That doesn’t sound too bad. But, there was the promise of extra content coming in 1.1 and some bought with that expectation; fair enough. And yet, if that was a purchasing decision then presumably they would have picked up the update as soon as it appeared. Version 1.1 was in the App Store for six weeks – it is hard to imagine that many who were looking forward to it missed the chance to pick it up.

For the broader group of active players of 1.1, their problem is theoretical at this point. They are playing the same game that is available for sale; they are using the same Open Feint leaderboards and achievements. Version 1.1 has shown every sign of being stable and robust – the bug list is too short to justify any maintenance update at this time. So concerns here relate to the assumed future appearance of more content.

So the question is, how many of the 3,000 are still interested in playing Fare City when that content update ships? Not sure I am in a position to answer that one but let’s guess at 50% – 1,500.

Finally, how long have these 1,500 been playing? The sales pattern for Fare City was the skewed bell curve common to most applications, so most owners bought the game in the first third of the four months. Allowing for player attrition over time, we may assume that those 1,500 are evenly distributed through the four months – giving an average play time of two months per player before the switch over. Let’s also suppose that the hypothetical content update is out in another month. (And that is NOT a commitment!) This means the average player has had three months play time for their initial 99c outlay, one month in the worst case. And then, they can carry on playing indefinitely or pay another 99c for the extra content. Is that so bad?

In writing all this I am aware that every person’s experience is different and I am not attempting to belittle any genuine grievance. I suppose I am trying to show that considerable thought and heart-searching went into the decision to change. In the end we all want to be understood.

Thanks for listening.

This news raises a whole raft of questions and I will do my best to give answers to at least some of them here.

Why fall in with a publisher?

The days of the App Store operating as the Wild West of the computing world are gone. With over 100,000 apps in the store it is almost impossible for an independent developer to get much visibility. Viral marketing only works up to a point. Firstly, it still takes a lot of time and effort – time that could be used to develop new updates and new applications. Secondly, there is so much noise around the iPhone space as everybody is trying to market virally it is hard to create any momentum. Basically, to be successful you must first be successful – you need an existing customer base to reach your customers.

When Fare City launched it got a huge break in being featured by Apple. However, that didn’t last long enough to make a breakthrough in the charts. As many people have found, once you fall off the front of the App Store sales dry up. (Review sites help very little – partly because many have little traffic themselves, but mainly because most users don’t read reviews.) Actually, Fare City sales have not gone entirely, for the past two months numbers have been steady, but with a 99c price tag the volumes just do not generate any sensible level of return.

So, the first purpose in moving to a publisher is to gain exposure for the game. From reviews and user feedback we know it’s a great game. If we can get it in front of more eyeballs it just might start paying some bills.

The second purpose is to remove the burden of marketing from our shoulders to free up more time to do interesting stuff.

How will it affect the game?

Today the answer is – it won’t. That is, the Digital Chocolate version is all but identical to the current version. The game play, maps, modes, leaderboards, etc. are unchanged. New customers will see a new splash screen and credits, but that is about all.

(Actually, I need to nuance that answer. The lite version (now named Fare City FREE) has a reduced game time – it seems that 3.5 minutes was too good and people just didn’t bother to upgrade.)

Longer term the hope is that increased sales will permit us to continue to add new maps and game modes (plus other features like two-player). There are plenty of ideas on the table, but with the need to put food on it as well it has been hard to give them priority.

What about existing customers?

This was the hardest question for us when considering the change. The Digital Chocolate versions are effectively new applications in the App Store with no links to the Finkly versions. Therefore, we have no method to provide future updates to owners of those versions. In this our hands are completely tied by the limitations of the App Store.

Of course, anyone with the Finkly versions will be able to continue to play them as before. The OpenFeint leaderboards and achievements are the same and should integrate seamlessly between the old and new. Version 1.1 (which according to our stats has propagated to almost all owners) has proven itself very robust since launch back at the beginning of December – so much so that the Digital Chocolate version contains only one small bug fix from 1.1.

But what about the updates? Well, it is true that future updates to the game will not be available to existing customers unless they buy the Digital Chocolate version and no doubt this will annoy some folk. However, I hope people will consider that Fare City has delivered incredible game time for 99c, and there is no need (at this time) to buy again. If and when new content is released the game price will probably still be 99c, and then you will only need to buy if you want the extra content. It seems to me that won’t be too much of hardship really.

Anyway, there it is. The die is cast and a new day dawns over this Fare City. Let us see what it brings.

Yesterday I awoke to find that Apple had sent the acceptance email for 1.1 at 11pm local time, so most countries had been shipping the update for several hours before I knew.

Does this matter?

Well, I suppose not a great deal, but there is one of those many quirks of the App Store that makes it annoying. When you submit an application through iTunes Connect you have to supply a load of marketing material along with the application – the icon, screenshots, the product description, etc. (If you have localizations you need to provide descriptions and screenshots for each.) When you submit an update you will probably be changing a lot of this stuff. But for most of it you can’t! There is only one product description and one set of screenshots per application (per localization). So you have to wait until the update is actually in the App Store before you can update the materials.

So, for most of Friday if people looked at the App Store they would see that 1.1 was “coming soon”, even though iTunes showed that the app was version 1.1. Not exactly earth shattering, I admit, but hardly the slick marketing machine of Apple myth. I just can’t understand why Apple doesn’t include product description and screen images in the update – they already have to maintain a second copy of the app binary and icon anyway.

Well, time to climb off the soap box. The good news is that Fare City 1.1 is now in the App Store – enjoy.

For Fare City fans, the most exciting news is that version 1.1 was submitted to Apple a week ago. If recent performance is a guide then we may hope that it will appear in the App Store in a little over a week from now, just in time for you all to update ready for some holiday gaming.

I have already covered the change of leaderboard in a previous blog, and I’m going to do another entry on my experience of integrating Open Feint, so I won’t say much here. However, I will mention that the update attempts to post your existing high score to the appropriate Open Feint leaderboard. In doing so it uses the local cache of your leaderboard entry so it won’t work if you have reset your stats since posting your best score. I did experiment with scraping the online information but it needed just too much code payload. I apologize in advance for any high scores that are lost – you will just have to post a better score with the new version.

So what else is new? For what seems like ever we have been promising a new map for Fare City. Version 1.1 has Metrotown, a more suburban setting with a less regular grid, and a train you need to avoid. Here is a screenshot of the new map in action:

Pretty nice, yes? One of the great things about this map is what you can’t see – the infrastructure that is now built into the game to support maps and their unique features. This means that future maps can be added much faster.

Something that keeps coming up is the difficulty of the game. Quite simply, the speed is just too much of a challenge for some players. Well, help is at hand in the form of Rookie mode. In it the game is still the same but everything is done at a more leisurely pace. The taxis are slightly slower and they arrive less frequently. And to give you a helping hand you start with two insurance stars – just like that. Of course, Rookie mode is not just for new players, anyone who wants a little more relaxing play will enjoy it.

At the other end of the scale is Time Trial mode. If you thought First Shift was frenetic, just wait until you’ve tried this! You compete against the clock, with a starting time of just 90 seconds. Each fare you deliver buys you a couple of seconds more, so you really have to keep motoring. Also, the taxis arrive much more quickly than in the classic game, so the last few seconds of the game can be pretty crazy. That is, if you can get there – normal insurance rules still apply.

Well, I hope that has whet your appetites. It has been a long time coming but I hope you will find Fare City 1.1 worth the wait…

Meanwhile, the news is that the free version of Fare City is now available in the App Store. Fare City Lite lets you play a time-limited version of the full game – hopefully long enough to get to see how addictive the gameplay is without quite satisfying the need for more. It also lacks the global leaderboard because … well, because there had to be something else missing, didn’t there.

So now I’m trying to figure out how to publicize a free application.

One lesson I did learn today is that the App Store is really dumb. The story goes like this.

When you submit an application to Apple you are invited to set an availability date. This is the date on which you hope your application will appear in the App Store. I say “hope” because Apple has to review the app first and no one knows how long that will take, so the availability date just defines the earliest date it could possibly show. When I submitted Fare City Lite I chose the date of October 28 simply because it was two weeks later and I figured two weeks was a good time to do some market warm-up. (It’s just a shame that the two weeks passed without any start to the warm-up process…)

Now, for whatever reason, Apple took slightly longer to approve than previously. To be precise, they took two weeks and one day so FCL was released to the App Store on October 29. But if you go look at its listing here you will notice that it was posted on October 28 – the original availability date.

So why does this matter? Well, it also shows in the release-date listing under October 28 too, so the day FCL arrived it was already on the second page of the listing! Apparently, the smart people correct the availability date as soon as they get the approval email from Apple; lesson learned for next time.

But I have to ask, what earthly reason can there by to have a release date that is prior to release? I just don’t get it.

Anyway, back to finding places to shout about Fare City.

Talk to you later.

So this week I have been having fun with alternative suppliers. To keep the story short we have settled on Open Feint as our new service. Although I will miss seeing all the different country flags on the leaderboard, OF is bringing many benefits, including multiple leaderboards, achievements, challenges (if I can figure out how to do them well in Fare City), plus all that great social gaming network stuff of friends lists, comparing games, etc.

Current timeline for all this new goodness is about two weeks, plus Apple approval time. Unfortunately that still means a probable four weeks before the players finally get it, but good things take time.

However, a new leaderboard is not the only thing to look forward to in 1.1. I can now confirm that there will definitely be a new map that will bring some new challenges to the game. We are also hoping to squeeze in some other goodies, but only if it can be done in the two-week timetable.

Before then, the lite version is nearly ready for submission to Apple. We hope this will allow us to reach a much wider audience for the game (and result in lots of upgrades to the paid version!).

In other non-news, there is still no word from Apple on 1.0.2. Hopefully they won’t take much longer. I’m sure everyone will be glad to see the back of the parsing error message!

Next week I expect to get back to work on version 1.1. One of the central features of that release will be a new high-score service. At the moment we are evaluating the different options, with Open Feint and Scoreloop as the front runners. If any players have strong opinions on which is better you can drop us an email through the support page. Thanks.

Fare City continues to get great reviews from players and review sites, overwhelming 5 stars. This is a great encouragement as it is quite a slog as an independent developer to get the word out there. We also monitor Twitter and it is exciting to find people posting about the game.

OK, this is becoming an end of the week ramble. Time to stop.

That is all it took for Apple to respond to my plea regarding 1.0.1 (you can read the whole crisis here), review the update, and post it on the App Store!

Wow! Thank you so much!

(Is that enough exclamations? I don’t know, maybe I should do a few more.)

Yes! Yes! YES!!!

I think that will do.

The game includes a global leaderboard. This is hosted by the very generous cocosLive team. In the game it is displayed in a control called a UITableView. Now, as I began implementing this feature I hit a little problem. The first thing a UITableView needs to know is how many entries it has. However, the cocosLive APIs didn’t seem to support a call that would give me the number of entries in the leaderboard.

(At this point I should add a disclaimer – this describes my experience during development. It may not reflect the true situation with these components. I will be checking into this more when I have a chance and will update accordingly.)

To get around this technical gap I decided that I would just give a fake table size to begin with and then figure out the actual size if the player attempted to scroll of the bottom. To test I set the initial number to 200, fully intending to change it to something more sensible later…

…So, of course, I forgot all about it. Everything was working fine, even when we populated the table with a hundred test scores. Only after the game shipped and the leaderboard passed the 200 mark did I notice that you couldn’t scroll down to the bottom anymore.

I was pretty annoyed that I had left in this stupid limitation but it didn’t really seem that big a deal. So I worked on a few fixes and changes for 1.0.1 and submitted it to Apple on Friday (as mentioned in my last post).

What I didn’t realize was that this simple mistake was about to blow up in spectacular fashion. A “nice little feature” of the leaderboard is that when you first load the board it shows where your score is. This is done be remembering the rank awarded to the score when it is submitted. Great, but suppose you have just played and achieved your new personal best and although it’s not super compared to the taxi-jocks out there you are proud of your achievement and submit it. And suppose that puts you at 385 in the table. And now the game switches to the leaderboard so you can see how things stand, and the game asks the UITableView to display line 385 – and the UITableView says “Exception: invalid argument”. And you are staring at your homescreen wondering what happened to your game!

Ouch!

Worse yet, when you go back in the stats don’t show your score so not only did it crash but it LOST YOUR SCORE!!!

The irony is that the score was successfully submitted to the leaderboard so if you were to view it on the website or at cocosLive you would see it. But as you can’t see it in the game because you can only see 200 entries, it looks like you’ve just wasted a little bit of your life that you will never get back.

I first began to hear noises about the crashing on Friday but by this morning it was apparent that there was a serious issue. I won’t bore you with the details of how I managed to diagnose the problem in the end but there is some good news to this tale of woe: because 1.0.1 fixes the 200-entry limitation it also, at a stroke, fixes the crash (which is why no one on the team spotted the problem – we were all busily testing 1.0.1).

So now the million dollar question is: when will Apple approve the fix?

I guess the most significant event was at the start of the week. Exhausted as I was from a busy weekend and all the frenetic activity preceding it, I was looking forward to an early night. Somehow that didn’t happen. Instead I was still poking around at midnight when I happened to open the games section of the App Store to look for inspiration on a product description update -and there was the Fare City icon. No. Yes. No, it can’t be. Yes, it is!

That is how I discovered that Fare City was in New and Noteworthy.

Now, many people have commented on the boost that comes from this distinction but I had not appreciated quite how significant this effect can be. Sales jumped ten-fold on the day after appearing – and this is only the games section, not the all apps. The strange thing, though, is that in the days since Fare City sales have remained fairly constant at the new level, even though its position in the action and strategy subcategories has steadily improved. I assume that Apple has some cunning algorithm, or there is just a lot of lag built into the system.

I’ve also started to try out AppViz, a nice Mac application that monitors your sales figures, rankings and reviews. So far I like what I see so I guess I’ll be spending $30 when the trial expires.

Oh, and we just submitted version 1.0.1 to Apple.

What? One week in the App Store and there’s an update?

Yes, that is right. Mainly I wanted to clear up a few bugs in the routing algorithm that had been annoying me but couldn’t be fixed for 1.0 in case it destabilized things. But then I discovered a very annoying glitch in the leaderboard that meant only the top 200 scores showed up in the game. And then there was the size issue…

Yes, we were well and truly bitten by the 10MB limit on over-the-air purchases. When I submitted 1.0 to Apple it was 9.8MB. It worried me to be so close but I decided to not risk making any changes. What a mistake! On the App Store Fare City is 10.1MB – no easy purchasing.

But what did we cut from the game to get it under? With some reluctance I have made the menu music mono. Not so good with the headphones now but sounds the same through the speaker (of course) and I think it’s better than cutting the bit-rate. Of course, we don’t know for certain that lack of over-the-air buying has hurt the sales at all, but I figure it has to be worth a try.

Well, there we are. I knew I would end up rambling in this post. Time to come to some sort of a conclusion.

Week one has been far more successful than we dreamed possible with a first game from an unknown team and no marketing preparation. At the same time Fare City still stands outside the doors of success. To break through to the big time it still needs more publicity, much more publicity.

So if you are reading this, and you have the game, and you like it, can you tell people about it? I’d really appreciate it.

And if you’re still reading, thanks. And have a great weekend.