I thought it would be nice to start with a numbers post as they’re usually popular!

There is a focus of this particular post and it’s not meant to be a negative – more of a ‘this is a problem we have’ and ‘now we want to fix it’ - advice / support is very welcome!

The Game!

“Very slick + addictive”; “Fantastic value for money.”; “Hugely addictive.”; “Perfect for snackable gaming”;”QuizQuizQuiz is the ultimate iPhone trivia game.”;”QuizQuizQuiz sets the bar for trivia apps.”;”QuizQuizQuiz is a breath of fresh air in the trivia genre.”

QuizQuizQuiz is

• An addictive pick up and play trivia game

• Packed with over 36,000 professionally written questions for English US, English UK, English Australian, English New Zealand, English International, French, Italian, German, Spanish markets
  • Specific topics related to each, i.e. less ‘soccer’ questions for the US, no baseball questions for the UK.

• Adjustable difficulty setting offering a challenge to everyone from children to masterminds!

• Features a unique sub-category selection feature letting users pick the topics they want as they play through

• 4 different game modes (2 single player, 2 on-device multiplayer)
  • Beat The Clock – answer as many questions (correctly) in a specific time
  • QuizMaster – 3 lives, 3 lifelines, how will you do?
  • Challenge – Head to head multiplayer all players answering the same question
  • Passaround – Select a category and all players answer a different question from that category each round

Personally I believe that as long as a trivia game modes are fun the question content is the main value in any game of this genre, our cost to the user per question is probably 3 times lower than any competitor. The questions are also written and checked by professional quiz writers.

What shall we do tonight Pinky?

World domination wasn’t quite our plan but we felt we had a very strong title upon launch though we knew we were up against some big traditional trivia brands.

A chart of worldwide sales then

Just looking at the chart and ignoring the numbers this looks like a lot of initial sales charts I’ve seen (or even a retail sales chart) – high initial sales with a long tail.

Including the numbers however we were very lucky and had high initial sales (on this chart around 70,000 at $0.99 – $2.99, more the lower end), unfortunately the long tail numbers are fairly small right now though do pay for the free drinks and beers for everyone in the office I guess!

The main reason for our high sales was mainly due to being featured by Apple after a strong start in both UK, Europe and US. Our support for all the major markets helped massively with this we feel.

Once we were in the top 10 charts (and #1 or #2 Paid App in some European stores which was an awesome feeling!) we wanted to stay there and so dropped the price when we dropped below 5th. We believe this kept us up there longer and I think this was the correct decision as it kept us in front of peoples eyeballs and allowed us to build something of a recognised brand – at the time at least.

Time to order the Aston Martin? Not quite!

If you’re not in Europe it’s likely you’ve never seen our game anywhere on the charts, if we look at US sales it unfortunately doesn’t match sales in Europe.

This is further illustrated on the following piechart (which also shows Spanish localisation support wasn’t that worthwhile!)

When we were enjoying the success in Europe we were praying that we’d get a staggered mirror of the results in the largest App Store market, this didn’t happen and our US sales before Europe took off were actually higher than anything we did later on bizarrely

To be honest though we didn’t expect sales to ever be massive in the US and Canada due to the lack of brand attached to the product.

Speaking to other local British developers not as informed about the product they assumed we didn’t have US specific content and therefore we were putting people off but we had custom written App Descriptions explaining the content for each.

Riddle me this!

Of course with this kind of App Store evaluation you never really know why at a particular time something didn’t sell.

I do think A/B testing is possible on the App Store I imagine it’s just a bit of pain (both in setup and maintenance) and still has uncontrollable variables depending on how you do it. i.e. Release a separate app in different regions you believe to be similar, try a different price in each, release under two different names / icons across certain regions (possible to upset people buying twice here though).

Some ideas

• Lack of brand
  • Still our main theory though this doesn’t seem to matter for all iPhone games (see Doodle  Jump / Angry Birds – although I guess they did become brands in their own right?)

• Losing featuring in the US store
  • We lost feature in the US pretty quickly, this is most likely directly linked to lack of sales during the featured week however. I’ve not checked what else was released / featured that week but something probably took our sales if this was the main issue.

• Poor initial reviews in the US store
  • We had some pretty harsh reviews early on, I seem to remember someone getting one of the few incorrect answers in the 5,000 US questions we have. Obviously some sneak through the QA and we’re quick to correct them. When people see something featured the current reviews is the only other guidance to go off I guess (as there is no indication of that items chart position).

• People thinking that we didn’t have US content
  • I put this on here as lots of people say this to us, I don’t really think someone looking on the App Store at the game would actually think this – please let me know if you think otherwise though!

• The US don’t like trivia games
  • I’ve been told that some of the popular multi-platform trivia games don’t do full releases in the US due to lack of interest in the genre. This may be true but obviously we’d still be higher up in the specific Trivia category chart if this was the case.

Avast, me hearties!

We were told by other developers that piracy was a big problem, at the time I posted a few times on twitter saying this either wasn’t a problem at all for us or our piracy test was broken. I had tried to find someone posting the game online and it just seems the pirates weren’t big fans of trivia.

That was until almost 1 month exactly after launch when a version got posted up on a file sharing site. The current stats show that 23% of the people who have played the game were playing pirated versions.

As I mentioned we do detect pirated copies but we didn’t do anything about them as we hoped they’d convert to purchases or encourage friends to try (though I guess they’d encourage them to try for ‘free’ as well!). We also have stats showing these people did play just as much as paying users though they tailed off a little earlier (due to less investment in the product I would think).

What we did next

With Christmas fast approaching we decided to try a ‘Lite’ version in the form of a Christmas edition, this featured around 300 questions for all the markets we supported in the full product. It contained a splashscreen which popped up quite a bit with a link sending people to the full game on the App Store.

The chart above shows around 210,000 downloads.

Believe it or not this still gets downloaded a lot and we think it has helped maintain our long tail of sales of the full product.

This again failed to touch the US market but did have a massive uptake in the Italian market which encouraged us to increase the amount of Italian content in the main game in the first update we did.

The first update fixed a couple of question selection issues, some of the incorrect answers and added even more question content making ours the highest value quiz game on the store.

What we should have done (maybe?)

So what should we have done next – or what could we still do perhaps?

• Engage with more US journalists sooner, we mailed and tried to get their attention but they’re busy guys and Trivia is a hard sell (or it feels like it is!). We sent out review codes and had offers of reviews but unfortunately few materialised at the time.  We met a few of them at GDC and this will hopefully help in the future.

• Actively look for potential buyers on twitter and forums, we could have done this while we were in the European top charts and talked about the success a bit more to help that transition to the US.

• Buy advertising space focused on the US with the money we were making in the UK/Europe.

• Produced an actual lite version rather than just the Christmas version. I’m not sure if this would have helped.

• Produce more updates. This is one I really would have liked to do though we didn’t have much feedback after the first update which perhaps caused us to lose momentum on this, people seemed generally happy with the changes and we saw playtime increase.
• Maintained the website. I’m not sure how much this does effect things and due to various reasons we didn’t have much access to site analytics. It’s still pretty out of date however and in the future we plan to make website updates something we schedule in with other marketing updates.

What we’re currently doing

We’ve been working on lots of different projects this year and now QuizQuizQuiz and our other trivia brands are getting even more of our attention.

We released QuizQuizQuiz World Football as a 59p app as a mid-way point lite version before the World Cup, this unfortunately got a little lost in the World Cup app frenzy. It did seem to gain us some extra fans though and the content is valuable for the future.

We’re currently working on updates for the app for the upcoming iOS features to see if we can revitalise sales of the game as the content is still very current.

Another trivia game You Are The Ref (a football / soccer trivia app based around the amazing artwork of sports artist Paul Trevillion) which we have developed is gradually growing its fanbase and we plan to cross-promote all of our apps in the near future.

We’re also listening and learning more as we go along, at the end of the day we’re developers trying to do marketing which is really good fun but we’ve learnt that we need to be disciplined in the approach we take and make sure we don’t let the ball drop at anytime.

Thanks!

That post certainly ended up a lot longer than I imagined!

Any feedback / ideas for us would be very welcome (and indeed any comments on the article or the blog in general).

Thanks for reading! (please check out the mini section below, will see how long I can maintain that too)

Things we’ve been enjoying this week

• Some fun new hardware in the office including a HD camcorder for filming our antics!
• http://www.pixelprospector.com/2010/06/235-free-indie-games-in-10-minutes/ – Awesome video of 235 FREE Indie games, some really interesting ones I’d not seen before in here
• http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html – David McCandless giving a talk at TED on Data Visualisation
• http://volpinprops.blogspot.com/2010/08/mass-effect-m8-avenger-assault-rifle.html – Awesome prop construction with a howto guide!
• http://www.cg.tuwien.ac.at/research/publications/2010/Habel-2010-EIN/Habel-2010-EIN-Efficient%20Irradiance%20Normal%20Mapping.pdf
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKogQf9ooR8 – Time Crisis Live Action!

This post has two audiences – the lovely followers we’ve gained in recent years as we’ve started on more of our own projects and the new readers from iDevBlogADay , which is an indie developers weekly blog initiative we’re lucky to be part of.

Essentially this means I’ll be trying to keep up with writing a new (and hopefully interesting) blog post every Saturday. I did debate for a bit whether to have a separate site for these posts as some people may be glad to see only a rare monthly post from me!!

We’ll be taking the opportunity to make some improvements to the site and we’re trying our FeedBurner for our RSS feeds now – please subscribe! Also if you aren’t already be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

WHO ARE WE?

Some of you may not have a clue who Four Door Lemon Ltd are (apart from being a really weirdly named British company!).

We’re a five year old games developer based in Bradford, West Yorkshire in the North of England. We started out as 2 guys, grew quite a bit with remote contractors at one stage in 2008 (while having a core team of 5 in the office) and we currently have 7 people in the office.

It’s been a very interesting journey so far and we’ve been involved in a huge variety of projects across pretty much every gaming platform. Internally we are fairly code orientated but the last year or so has seen us performing a lot more design and working more closely with our art guys (who are mostly external contractors we have had close relationships with for  many years).

When we started out we aimed to earn enough money from work-for-hire and licensing out our engine to produce our own titles for 6-12months. This money never materialised due to various reasons (not helped by the financial crisis) but we survived and then ended up falling into self-publishing on iPhone (starting with QuizQuizQuiz and more recently You Are The Ref) which has led to us starting on similar fun projects.

We see our future being a healthier split of our own work across a large amount of digital distribution platforms and client projects.

WHAT’S COMING UP?

I’ve got a list of topics for the blog but looking at other iDevBlogADay posts I’m not really sure where exactly to pitch it or whether people have specific queries that could coincide with stuff we’re working on.

Feel free to post a comment on this post or to contact me on twitter with any suggestions for posts!

Please get in touch if you’d like to meet up with Simon while there or at Game Horizon or Develop Brighton in the coming weeks!

Game AI Conference 2010 Press Release

For more information on You Are The Ref please see the official site!

Read more over at Screen Yorkshire and some of the comments below!

Also be sure to download the game from Apple via iTunes

Reviews

‘’Aurifi deserves major kudos for taking an interesting risk and creating such a unique product. For those looking for something different or those who are mere curiosity seekers I would definitely recommend checking it out. I can promise you you’ve never really played anything like it before. As someone that relishes new gameplay experiences this one definitely scratches that itch.” - Gamezebo

“Aurifi marks the beginning of a completely new genre of gaming” – BornTechie

“4 out of 5 : Download this app if you’re ready to try a state-of-the-art audio game” – Snapcase07, Appolicious

“Aurifi is unlike any game available for the iPhone, and is likely the first of its kind for any gaming device.“ – Appolicious

“Aurifi uses a finely-woven tapestry of sound effects and music to create a gaming experience unlike anything you’ve experienced before.” -TouchMyApps

“Welcome to the advent of audio games on the iPhone and iPod Touch” - N4G

“This concept is totally revolutionary… This is one of the must have games. I LOVE IT!” – Davide

“…an enjoyable and oddly hypnotic experience.” - PocketGamer

The website will be coming soon at http://www.youarethereferee.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Four Door Lemon announce football trivia game “You Are The Ref”

Four Door Lemon are pleased to announce the upcoming launch of You Are The Ref on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

The ‘You Are The Ref’ cult football art strip, which has been hugely popular with fans and players since 1957, features a series of awkward football refereeing decisions to challenge your knowledge of the football rules. This exciting new trivia game will bring the series to interactive platforms for the first time.

Keith Hackett said “We’re very pleased to be announcing the game version of You Are The Ref which will bring the great artwork and puzzling questions to a whole new audience as well as our long established fan base.”

The game will provide a great challenge to football fans young and old just weeks before the World Cup kicks off.

Simon Barratt of Four Door Lemon added “Working closely with Paul Trevillion and Keith Hackett during development has been great fun. I have been a football supporter from a very young age and having learned quite a bit while playing the game, I was staggered at just how little I did know about the rules of the beautiful game!”

The games launch date and further details will be released shortly.

For the latest information please go to http://www.youaretheref.co.uk and be sure to follow us on Twitter (@youaretheref) and Facebook.

For further information, please contact:

Simon Barratt, Four Door Lemon, simon@fourdoorlemon.com
www.fourdoorlemon.com

Four Door Lemon Limited develops, provides and supports cutting edge game and interactive media technology services. Since formation in early 2005 this multi-platform development studio has worked on over 30 titles across all major platforms as well as providing high-quality middleware to many other projects.
Paul Trevillion is a legendary illustrator with a career as a comic/sports artist spanning 50 years. He has met and drawn some of football’s biggest names including Pelé, Bobby Moore, George Best and Franz Beckenbauer.

Keith Hackett is a former Premier League and International referee. As well as playing his part on the pitch Keith has been involved in publications around the rules of the Beautiful Game since 1986 and has worked with Paul since the 1970s.

You Are The Ref Announcement

We’re keen to meet up with lots of people while we’re in the US so if you’d like to talk to us please get in touch via the details on the contact page.

We’re really pleased to see that IndieRelief.com raised over $140,000 so far and hope to see further support for good causes in the future from games developers small and large.

From Sunday 17th January till Sunday 24th January ALL revenues we receive for QuizQuizQuiz in the US / Canada will be donated to the DEC Haiti Appeal.

We’re also taking part in Indie Relief on the 20th January which will see us and over 100 other indie developers donate their entire revenue for the day to charities (again we’ll donate this to the Haiti Appeal).

Please click the image below to go direct to the QuizQuizQuiz iTunes page

Please help spread the news (click the posts link and see the various sharing options such as Digg, Twitter, Facebook at the bottom of the post)

We encourage all our friends to help out in anyway they can, thanks for your help.

Please vote for us here in the Best Trivia Game category and here in the Best Family Game category.

Also please note we now have a Facebook fan site, please ‘Become a Fan’ and share with friends.

We’re up against some great competition so we’re asking for further help from our many thousands of fans across UK + Europe. With great professionally written localised quiz content for the English (US/Canada), English(UK), English(Australian), English(New Zealand), English(International), French, Italian, German and Spanish markets making up over 33,000 questions we want our game to reach even more people.

Please vote for QuizQuizQuiz here (and spread the word to others to do the same!)

We’d also like to say hello to Dan Grigsby over at Mobile Orchard who is offering further support in the competition to readers / listeners of their awesome blog and podcast!

'QuizQuizQuiz Xmas' cake!

We’re proud to be taking part in this years ‘The Great App Bake Off’

As well as a couple of promo codes for QuizQuizQuiz we baked a cake of the QuizQuizQuiz Xmas app icon to hopefully get competitors into the spirit!

There are some great prizes available so get baking today!

Christmas Fun for everyone!

QuizQuizQuiz, the worldwide #1 Trivia app, is pleased to announce the release of QuizQuizQuiz Xmas a festive fun-filled FREE version.
This early present is packed with a mix of Christmas and general questions plus includes a sneak peak of the upcoming QuizQuizQuiz update which will feature

* Answering time increased to allow more sociable and less stressful play. The scoring system has been adjusted to ensure the integrity of the current global leaderboards.

* Correct answer shown if you get it wrong so you can learn for next time (can be switched off if you don’t like to be told!)

* Improved category selection to help players avoid subjects they don’t like. We’ve found that some players like to play subjects they are not strong at to try and improve. Others prefer to avoid them. We’ve updated the game engine to keep everyone happy!

* Even more content carefully targeted at each market. QuizQuizQuiz is committed to being best value quiz game with the most questions. Every one of the question sets (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) will have new content.

* Several new achievement awards. QuizQuizQuiz is unique amongst premium trivia apps in giving players awards for a wide range of achievements in the game, and the update will contain several secret awards to unlock.

Be sure to purchase the full version now packed with over 28,000 questions in total! (varies depending on question set selected).
QuizQuizQuiz Xmas is available at http://bit.ly/qqq_xmas (iTunes link) and the full game is available at http://bit.ly/qqq_iphone (iTunes link).

The game site with trailer can be seen at http://www.quizquizquiz.com/iphone

QuizQuizQuiz_Xmas press release doc

We’ve been working hard on this project with Sports Director for the last few months and are pleased to be launching on the minis store.

- Even more content carefully targeted at each market. QuizQuizQuiz is committed to being best value quiz game with the most questions. Every one of the question sets (UK, US, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy, Spain) will have new content.

- Answering time increased to allow more sociable and less stressful play. The scoring system will be adjusted to ensure the integrity of the current global leaderboards.

- Improved category selection to help players avoid subjects they don’t like. We’ve found that some players like to play subjects they are not strong at to try and improve. Others prefer to avoid them. We’re updating the game engine to keep everyone happy.

- Several new achievement awards. QuizQuizQuiz is unique amongst premium trivia apps in giving players awards for a wide range of achievements in the game, and the update will contain several secret awards to unlock.

- Multiple player profiles per device!

- Minor bug fixes and tweaks to improve performance.

In addition, we’re also working on some new multiplayer modes for future updates – watch this space!

QuizQuizQuiz is available via http://bit.ly/qqq_iphone (iTunes link) and the game site with trailer can be seen at http://www.quizquizquiz.com/iphone

QuizQuizQuiz_UpdateAnnounce

We’re now number one in the US and Canada trivia charts as well as being in the top 10 in the majority of the other stores.

Simon also did an interview with Pocket Gamer Biz which can be viewed here

Four Door Lemon Ltd have just launched their latest game project trivia game QuizQuizQuiz for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and are currently involved with several other projects covering multiple genres and platforms.

Simon Barratt, Managing Director of Four Door Lemon said “We’re very excited to be involved in BAF Game which forms a key part of the wider BAF event, there is always a great mix of people from different animation backgrounds. It’s great to see such a successful event in our own city and the event gets better year on year.”

The 16^th Bradford Animation Festival takes place from the 10^th – 14^th November 2009 at the National Media Museum in Bradford and is the UK’s longest-running annual animation festival. Visit http://www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk/baf for tickets and more information.   BAF’s splinter strand, BAF Game takes place on Tuesday 10 and Wednesday 11 November at the Museum and the University of Bradford.

BAFGame-FourDoorLemon

The game stands apart from other trivia and quiz games with its huge bank of market specific questions and a question engine that prevents repeats. There are hundreds of interesting and fun categories (such as ‘Music for Losers’, ‘Beautiful People’ and ‘Pirates’ to name just a few) and full Facebook and Twitter integration for sharing highscores with the world.

QuizQuizQuiz is available via http://bit.ly/qqq_iphone (iTunes link) and the game site with trailer can be seen at http://www.quizquizquiz.com/iphone

For further information, please contact:

Simon Barratt, Four Door Lemon, simon@fourdoorlemon.com
Jack Waley-Cohen, QuizQuizQuiz, jack@quizquizquiz.com
www.fourdoorlemon.com

www.quizquizquiz.com

Four Door Lemon Limited develops, provides and supports cutting edge game and interactive media technology services. Since formation in early 2005 this multi-platform development studio has worked on over 30 titles across all major platforms as well as providing high-quality middleware to many other projects.

QuizQuizQuiz Limited are quiz specialists with an enviable reputation in the world of trivia. They were formed in 2003 to bring a fresh and original approach to quizzing, and have since then run over 1300 quiz nights across the UK and Europe. They have also developed an internationally-recognised question-writing service, providing quiz questions for high profile clients throughout the world. Run by a team of passionate trivia enthusiasts, QuizQuizQuiz take quizzing to a whole new level.

QuizQuizQuiz Available Now Press Release doc

AGON Online, the complete social platform for games from Aptocore, is now available in four new languages.

To coincide with the launch of the multi-language trivia game QuizQuizQuiz, AGON has increased its multilingual capacity to support French, German, Spanish and Italian. The localisation of AGON Online has been facilitated by Four Door Lemon and QuizQuizQuiz and the multilingual platform is immediately available for all other games using AGON to provide a better experience for all European customers.

Simon Barratt, Managing Director of Four Door Lemon, said: “It was clear to us that AGON was one of the most fully functional systems available for online leaderboards and player profiles, plus they are backed by a great team. AGON Online was the final piece of the jigsaw for our first trivia game, QuizQuizQuiz, and we were delighted to work with AGON to localise their interface into several new languages. And of course it is all the better that the new multilingual version of AGON Online will be available to all other game developers on the platform.”

Daniel Povlsen of AGON Online commented: “Online and mobile gaming should have no international barriers – and we’re very excited that we’re doing our bit by making our platform more accessible to non-English speaking gamers.”

About AGON Online

AGON Online is a complete social platform for iPhone games developed by Aptocore. Aptocore’s background is high-end, multi-platform game technology development for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PSP and PC.

About Four Door Lemon Ltd

Four Door Lemon Limited develops, provides and supports cutting edge game and interactive media technology services. Since formation in early 2005 this multi-platform development studio has worked on over 30 titles across all major platforms as well as providing high-quality middleware to many other projects.

FDL_QQQ_AGON_Localisation