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Our first week in the Chrome Webstore (the numbers)

by Matt Hackett, 2010 Dec 14
How to Make a Video Game All By Yourself

Our new game Onslaught! Arena launched mid-afternoon a week ago today in the new Google Chrome Webstore. This is a brand-new platform from Google and many people are curious (if not excited) about it, so we thought we'd share our numbers from the first week. Note: We got this data from a combination of Google Analytics, Google Checkout, and our own Licensing API caching system.

First up is the number of unique visitors to our Chrome Webstore page:

Visitors to Onslaught! Arena's Chrome Webstore page

Our strongest day was easily Wednesday with 7,750 uniques and our weakest day was just yesterday (Monday) with only 1,059. These numbers do seem a bit low for a new product launched by Google, but we are just one game featured in a big store full of apps.

Next up is the number of new players of Onslaught! Arena. These are unique users who visited the play Onslaught! Arena page and logged in with their Google accounts.

Number of new Onslaught! Arena players

So these numbers range pretty wildly, from 863 players down to just 96. Lastly, and I'm sure most interestingly, are the number of game sales.

Number of Onslaught! Arena sales

So our best days have seen only 5 sales, but we've had at least one purchase every day. And you may be wondering what our take is out of the $4.99 price tag. After Google's transaction fees, we get $4.46 per transaction. So given our 21 sales so far, that makes for a grand total of $93.66 in the first week. These comparatively low numbers make some of the press we've seen kind of humorous:

Onslaught Arena has almost 1,300 users, which means its developer has earned about $7,000 in the first week.

That article is inaccurate by a large margin. What that says to us is that the "users" and "installs" numbers of the Webstore pages are confusing. On our app's page, the numbers displayed are currently 2,337 users - 3,200 weekly installs. We're not sure exactly what those numbers mean or where they came from, since they don't easily mesh well with the numbers we have.

So we won't exactly be buying yachts anytime soon. But I'll tell you, after failing for so long to publish a "real" game, it feels good to finally be able to call ourselves professional game developers, even if on a tiny scale. (And the game is at least paying its own hosting bills at the moment.)

What do you think? Surprised? Not surprised? Do you have your own numbers from the Chrome Webstore that you'd like to share?

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