None of these were worth having a dedicated blog post, so I just clubbed a bunch of things together into a single post.
Small Screens
Here’s the best graphics so far that shows the impact of my ‘small screen’ screw-up over the last few days. This is the install count from the Google Play store page:
Speaks for itself. The store dashboard, Distimo, and Flurry, they all pretty much show the same trend. Except that on Flurry, I can see today’s data as well. It’s recovered, but it’s not back up to where it was. Of course, Flurry’s data for today will finish updating sometime in the middle of tomorrow, so the numbers should go up some more.
India
As expected, the bulk of the drop-off has been in India. And that hasn’t recovered as much as I would have liked. I guess there’s some kind of momentum that comes into play here? And once you lose it, it’s harder to get it back, or it takes some time. Not sure. It’s too soon to tell anyway, I’ll have to give it some more days to see where things settle.
Brazil
Neil Rajah seems to be an ‘emerging markets’ game 
I’m not really sure what this site is, but Baixaki picked up Neil Rajah yesterday. Here’s their page – I got the gist of it from Google Translate, but if anyone speaks Portuguese and can translate that for me, that would be great. As far as I can tell, Baixaki is one of those “We’ll find fun apps for you” apps, and it has a Brazilian focus. I can’t get any data on that website on Alexa, so I can’t tell how big it is. Their Android app has 500k-1M downloads, which is pretty good. Anyway… I was getting about 10-20 downloads from Brazil per day. I got 60 yesterday, I’m at 160 so far today. Not sure how long this will last, but it was pretty cool to see the game get added to Baixaki, and then see the downloads go up. I like when I can correlate an effect with its cause. Hopefully ads pay more in Brazil than they do in India
Barnes and Noble
I just got the email today – Neil Rajah has been approved for the NOOK Family of Devices by Barnes & Noble (yes, they require you to say it like that, or in a few other approved ways that all sound equally stilted). I’m being a little ambitious here, and I’ve priced it at $1.99. We’ll see how that goes, I may be having a sale pretty soon Based on a couple of threads on Reddit, it seems that they release new apps in groups, once a week or something like that. So it’ll be a few days before it’s actually live on the store. Also, someone said that last week there were only 30 new apps released, so it seems like a pretty small market. Many other developers report good sales on the NOOK store, so it’ll be interesting to see how it does there.
Amazon
Amazon rejected Neil Rajah again today, this was the 4th test failure in a row, I think. Except this time, it wasn’t my fault. They said that at the end of a level, there is a ‘pop up’ screen that links to games on the Google Play store, and that’s not allowed, all links to my games must point to the Amazon app store. I emailed them back and told them that the ‘pop up’ screen was actually an ad, and I have no control over what ads get shown. I was pleasantly surprised to get an email back within 30 minutes, saying that they’d reversed the rejection and the submission had moved on to the next stage. Hopefully it will get approved, and more importantly, finally get approved for the Kindle Fire.
Using google translate + some corrections (since Portuguese is similar to Spanish I can understand part of it):
“When playing Neil Rajah, you enter the atmosphere of old platform games. The style of interface, background music and sound effects are classic and will please the most nostalgic players.
The interface is not the most beautiful, with designs in low quality, little variation in color and little detailed scenarios. Furthermore, looking at the graphics under retro perspective, everything is more interesting.
The gameplay Neil Rajah is simplified, with only two buttons. On the positive side, you have the chance to improve your attack power and increase the number of lives so easy.
However, the two push buttons are small, and there is an error on the screen. That is, if you do not play exactly on them, can have errors that will cost an entire phase.
Still, Neil Rajah is fun and ofecere many levels, yielding a good pastime and a beautiful love story.”
Thanks. I understood that they complained about the small buttons. I’ve gone to some lengths to keep the button hit detection area be a lot larger than the button images, but I can see how it could still be too small on some screen sizes.
Hi Ziggy, i’m brazilian and I know Baixaki, it’s a popular download place for any type of software and it’s very popular in Brazil.
How did you know that baixaki had put the Niel Rajah game on the site?
Just Google searches for ‘Neil Rajah’. I try to check every few days to see if anyone is talking about it