New version submitted!

Two weeks after the first version was released, and updated version was posted today of both the free and premium versions of DiceFeud.

Here is what's new in version 1.1:

-Improved look and feel on main view.
-Added sorting on Last played on main view.
-Chat now scrolling to bottom.
-Chat message now stays in textbox when loosing focus.
-Chat bubbles in different colors for you and your opponent.
-Added confirmation before setting score.
-Finished games now removed after one day instead of two.
-Accent-colored tile and application icon.
-Added Statistics and Top list to paid version.
-Added refresh button in menu bar instead of in menu.
-Rematch-option added in context menu on Finished games list.
-Changed message when final scores are equal from "Tie! Noone won." to the friendlier "Tie! Everybody won!"

-Important messages may be shown in client on startup.
-"Rate this app" link added.



Minor changes, but the app looks better and the confirm button was an important improvement because people somtimes taps the wrong slot on the score board and in the first version, the score was instantly saved when doing so. Most annoying when you roll a Yatzy but accidentally tap Chance.

The numbers
Right now DiceFeud has been downloaded 927 times, but that number is one week old. Since then, DiceFeud was mentioned on a dutch Windows Phone site: http://www.wp7.nl/20279/dicefeud-verslavende-yahtzee-variant-windows-phone/I sent an email to them saying I was trying to promote my app and they were kind anough to write about it. Here is a Google translated version. 

The very same day that article was published, over 100 new users signed up to play and now more people are playing DiceFeud in the Netherlands than in Sweden or any other country. It's all very sweet.

One thing that puzzles me is that from 927 downloads, only 386 users have actually created a user and tried the game. I guess most downloaders uninstall it straight away when they see they have to register to play. All that's needed is username, password and email address (which I will NEVER give out to anyone) and only 40% bother to sign up. Maybe it isn't clear enough what to do the first time you start the app? Or maybe it is because the app is only available in english? I don't know. Translating the app would be interesting but very time consuming and I don't really see that happening.

Also, out of 927 downloads, the premium version has been downloaded 16 times. That's 1,7%. I was aware that the vast majority go for the free version, and that's totally fine - I'd probably do the same thing. It is just something to think about if I ever do this again. I guess you need to add more value to a premium version if you want to push your users in that direction.

So, the first two weeks haven't made me rich. DiceFeud brings in a daily average of 2 USD on sales from the premium version and about 0.5 USD on ads. It is very rewarding to see people actually playing though. And I still think it's fun to play myself.

Statistics, marketing and revenue

DiceFeud has now been public for three days. From now on, I thought I'd update the blog from time to time with statistics of downloads, played games and - most importantly - how the app is doing financially.
Before I started writing DiceFeud, I was interrested to see if there were any money to be made on the Windows Phone platform. Either there was very little information to be found on the subject or I wasn't very good at finding it.
So, if others are looking for that kind of information I'll try to write here about how the app is doing, and if I can figure out how to increase the revenue, I'll share that too.

Parameters

The current parameters are these:
-DiceFeud is only available on Windows Phone.
-Today is the third day DiceFeud has been available for download on Marketplace.
-It is published in all available countries. That's about 60 countries right now.
-It is available in a free version, with one ad in it, and a premium version priced at two dollars (15.90 SEK)
-The ads are served from Microsoft PubCenter through the ad control which you just drag onto your project.

Here are som other facts of interest:
-I have spent about 130 hours on development.
-I have bought an SSL certificate for about 167 dollars.
-The web hotel costs me 9 dollars a month.

Revenue

Over the last three days, 170 players have registered. That's more than I had hoped for.
The Marketplace statistics on how the app is doing are trailing a few days so I can't really see how many people have bought the premium version, but four players (yes, three of them are friends of mine) have told me they did. That's 8 dollars. A qualified guess is that all other players are using the free version.

The most interesting part is of course how much ad revenue the free version brings in. This data is available in real-time on Microsoft pubCenter and here is the verdict:

In three days, I have made 12.27 SEK. That's 1.5 dollars.

Now, when you set up your ads, you choose up to three categories and "These categories set the general guidelines for what types of ads appear in your ad unit."

I don't really understand what this means. Should I categorize my app, or tell the system what ads I want in my app? I had only set up one category, and I added two more an hour ago. We'll see if that boosts the earnings.

Anyhow, the bottom line is that you seem to need one hell of a lot of users to make a living on ad revenue. On the other hand, you need a pretty good app to be able to sell it.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if the game was available on iOS and Android as well. Since it is a game where you play againts your friends, the app would really benefit from being cross-platform. I'll start on an iOS version shortly and hope I can make time to finish it. 

Marketing

The only marketing I have done is on a swedish Windows Phone group Facebook, where people have been very friendly and supportive, and on Twitter where I have 8  followers. (Yes, eight. HardConsulting is the worst twitterer ever). I would need to figure out a way to reach out to a wider audience but I am not sure how. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

More to come on this subject...

Libraries and components

Since I didn't know very much about phone development when starting on DiceFeud, I tried out quite a lot of open source components, both for smaller details and for infrastructure. Some of them were tossed out but other ones were kept has proven to be very good and has really helped me figure out how things are done right.

If you are a Windows Phone developer and haven't checked this stuff out, you should. If you know of a good framework or component which I don't, please tell me about it.

Here is what I used:

ServiceStack 

http://servicestack.net/

I can't even begin to say how impressed I am with this project. ServiceStack is a web services framework which does everything right where WCF and other frameworks fail. It is developed and maintained by Demis Bellot, and a community of contributors are pitching in.

Whenever I have run into what I think may be a problem, ServiceStack has an elegant solution already in place.
In short, you publish a service in a most convenient fashion by writing a request- and a response class and boom! - you get endpoints for all kinds of client-server communication. Json, XML, Soap, REST and more, without any configuration hassle what so ever.
There is a whole lot more components in ServiceStack, but DiceFeud only uses the service-goodies and part of the authentication framwork. I can't see why I should ever use WCF again.

RESTSharp

http://restsharp.org/

As much as I wanted to use ServiceStack on the client as well as the server, I ended up using RESTSharp on the client for serializing/deserializing JSON messages and sending requests to the server. ServiceStack didn't have a library suitable for WP7 when I began all this, and I figured it would take me too much time to make it work on my own. RESTSharp seems to do the job though.

MVVM Light

http://mvvmlight.codeplex.com/

MVVM Light is a toolkit (not a framework) which essentially helps separating you UI from your businesslogic. It is written by Laurent Bugnion and he seems to have a pragmatic approach to application development which I find very compelling. DiceFeud is not a slave under MVVM - sometimes I had to cut corners in the codebehind files to make a detail work - but a lot of problems are solved for you by using this toolkit.

Windows Phone Assets

http://wpassets.codeplex.com/

This package contains a few controls which are very useful. I used the Notification Tool to present message boxes in a very convenient way. The only problem with this control was that it didn't consider light/dark themes out of the box. Your app will fail certification if it doesn't look ok in both, so I had to tweak it a bit.

Phone7.Fx.Preview

http://phone7.codeplex.com

This package contains an application bar which works very well with MVVM. The standard application bar doesn't because it doesn't support commands in a convenient way.

Chat text block

http://ctb.codeplex.com

This is a balloon message control used on the chat view in DiceFeud to get Metro looking messaing. (yes, Metro. Shame that name went down the drain)

WP7Contrib

http://wp7contrib.codeplex.com

This is a very sweet community package which contains page transitions and other stuff to make the app look a little more alive.

It really is a treat to see all the efforts of people sharing their work in libraries like these. Thank you so much. I wouldn't even want to think about the amount of time it would have taken me without them.