We’ve tried to make this as affordable to users as possible and have options to pay per script, per month or per year, depending on your own needs.

Take a look at our “5 minutes to Rehearsal” demo/training video below learn more, and check back here or on the Rehearsal website for more info as Rehearsal is realeased.

In my role on the IGDA Board of Directors I have been helping to craft our response to this unfortunate situation and that response has just been posted on our website and e-mailed out to our membership. I’m very glad the IGDA has been able to take a stand on this issue, though I realize issuing a statement is just one step in the process.I also realize there are some people who feel we should have responded sooner, but this statement has the full support of the entire board of directors, a cross-section of industry representatives from studio heads to independent developers. The process to gain that support takes time and I am extremely happy that we were able to do this so quickly.

The IGDA’s 2nd Quality of Life white paper is currently being written based on the data gleaned from our survey run last November. The final paper is slated to be released in Q2 2010. The IGDA released our first Quality of Life white paper in 2004 a few months after “EA_Spouse” posted a similar letter condemning the practices of EA and what those practices were doing to her then boyfriend. (As an aside EA_Spouse has since been outed as Erin Hoffman and she serves with me on the Board of Directors). That original paper showed a significant number of people in the industry were forced to endure crunch time of 65+ hours/week in their jobs. While our latest research shows that most developers today rarely crunch and feel that their studios work to avoid it, the scenario described by Rockstar Wives is still far too common in our industry.

It is my firm belief that the management at studios which engage in these activities are operating in a reprehensible and unethical manner.

I believe this regardless of whether the practices are disclosed during the interviewing and hiring process (as is purportedly the case at Epic), or whether it happens as a result of poor management and planning (as may be the case with Rockstar San Diego).

I myself have worked in a studio that enforced 80+ hour weeks with no end in sight, and while I was able to quit and move on to a better company more respectful of their employees, not everyone has that option. It is very easy for people outside of the situation to simply say “if you don’t like it then quit” but the reality is that for many people, particularly those with a family to support, are not in a position where that is possible, especially in today’s economic climate.

I have also been on the other side as a manager with people working 70+ hour weeks for me, and I know just how easy it is to slip into these scenarios. Fortunately in my situation we were able to keep this time down to just a couple months, and I believe I maintained the respect and appreciation of the people working for me. Ultimately people decide to make games for a living because they want to be here, and most are willing to put in a reasonable amount of extra time and effort to do what they love, and to make their games great. Issues like these come to a head when management loses respect for their employees and fails to appreciate the contributions and sacrifices their employees are making on their behalf.

My heart goes out to all those currently working under these types of conditions. Know that these studios are not the norm and it is absolutely possible to work in the game industry for a company that respects you enough as a person to allow you live a proper life. If there’s anything I can do to help either as an individual or as a member of the IGDA Board of Directors please let me know!

Sincerely,

Brian Robbins
Founder, Riptide Games
Member IGDA Board of Directors

As a special incentive for all of you, we’ve decided to release Gravity Sling Deluxe for just $.99 to the first 5,000 players, $1.99 to the next 5,000 players and then the price will reach it’s normal price of $2.99. This won’t last long so be sure to act fast!

We hope you enjoy playing and look forward to hearing your feedback. While you’re waiting for it to download, go ahead and check out our gameplay trailer:

This update has a lot of big changes and improvements to it. Most notably is that we’ve introduced moving planets, which adds a huge amount of complexity to the levels that have them. We’ve also added star pickups to most levels giving you more opportunities to earn points on each level. With these changes we added a total of 64 more levels to the game so there’s a LOT more content to play too. Here’s a list of all the big changes we’ve made:

• Moving Planets
• Star Pickups on most levels
• 64 new levels (4 free + 2 new level packs)
• Display indicators for if you’ve met a level target or not
• Better help for the first few levels
• Improved game flow between levels and retries
• Much better UI performance
• Updated OpenFeint to 2.3.1
• New achievements
• Fixed multi-touch bug in gameplay
• Numerous other tweaks and bug fixes

We hope you enjoy this update, and as always let us know what else you’d like to see!

Circle of Life from Gravity Sling v1.1

Gravity Sling Deluxe has not yet been approved for sale. It is identical to this version except that all level packs are automatically unlocked, and you will need to purchase it from the start (instead of it being free with In App Purchase).

(Press the Full screen button or view it directly on YouTube to see this in it’s full HD glory).

Many thanks to the guys over at HDDenver.com for putting this together for us. Keep checking back here or follow @RiptideGames on Twitter to be one of the first to know when v1.1 of Gravity Sling is approved.

A lot has changed with this version:

Moving Planets

By far the biggest update is that we now have added in support for moving planets. While we like the static puzzle nature of some of our current levels, we love the effect that moving planets has on the game. It can make things a lot more challenging in some places, and a bit easier in others. Ultimately it definitely makes the game a lot more fun. Can you imagine trying to create a path like this in the current version?

Screenshot from the "Quadruple Box" level in Gravity Sling v1.1

Star Pickups

While most people seem to love creating long paths and seeing them play out, we always felt like Gravity Sling needed just a little bit more. With v1.1 we’ve added star pickups to most levels. Sometimes the stars will help you see the way to get a big score, and other times they may be a bonus to encourage you to try to get somewhere difficult.

"Oklahoma" level from Gravity Sling v1.1

Over 60+ new levels

We’ve more than doubled the number of levels in Gravity Sling increasing the total from 45 in the initial release up to 109 in this release. 4 of those levels are free to introduce you to moving planets, and the other 60 come in the way of 2 new level packs. We also updated almost every original level to add star pickups for an added challenge.

Deluxe Version

While we still believe that Free + In App Purchase is the best way to go for apps like Gravity Sling, we have decided to introduce a deluxe version. We’ve heard from several people that they can’t or are unwilling to purchase levels from within the app, and we also didn’t like that the initial release kept many iPod Touch users who haven’t upgraded to iPhone OS 3.0 from being able to enjoy the game. The deluxe version will sell for $2.99 (or your equivalent local currency) and comes with every single level pack unlocked from the start. Further any future updates we do will also be released with the deluxe version.

Numerous Bug Fixes and Improvements

We also spent some time improving the overall user experience. A few people had found some issues with menu performance, and some general bugginess in the UI. We think we’ve fixed all of those issues, so the overall experience should be much better.

Follow @RiptideGames on Twitter to keep up to date on the latest releases and be among the first to know when v1.1 is approved.

We’ve always thought that free+IAP was a better way to go for most small-form and simple titles that typically sell for $1.99-$.99 on the app store. Ultimately it provides a better experience for the end user while allowing developers to provide an easier upgrade path for “Lite” users who want to go full. However the issue is not whether or not we think it’s a better way to do things, but if end-users agree and that this type of model can result in a sustainable business.

With that in mind, we have been tracking our sales and a few other metrics fairly closely since launch, and this post is the first of what will likely be several posts in the coming weeks and months sharing our results thus far.

Results so Far

Gravity Sling has found some limited success already. It has not (yet) been featured by Apple, but we did get a few decent reviews on iPhone game sites, and several blogs picked it up. In the US, it has been ranked between 25 and 50 in free Puzzle and free Strategy consistently since launch. The most success however has come in Italy and Japan, where Gravity Sling climbed up the Free app charts peaking at #10 of all free apps (#3 of all free games) in each country.

Gravity Sling ranking graph as pulled from MajicRank (highly recommended utility!)

Conversion Rate

The most important data point we want to know is the overall conversion rate. That is, what % of users who download the game decide to purchase a Level pack via IAP. Right now our overall conversion rate is 1.91% so approximately 1 out of every 50 people who download Gravity Sling purchase our level pack for $.99. This compares favorably with the typical conversion rate of .7-1% seen in many PC downloadable casual games.

In actual #’s we have had 66,346 downloads of the app from Nov 5-Nov 22nd and 1,267 sales of the first (and currently only) level pack.

Purchase Timing / Delay

We expected there to be something of a delay between a user downloading Gravity Sling for the first time, and when they decided to purchase the Level Pack. What we found is that this is somewhat true, and the delay seems to be about a day, however the delay also appears to increase over time. That is, for the first few days Gravity Sling was available, there was little to no visible delay between downloads per day and purchases per day. 2 weeks later, we’re seeing that purchases seem to happen 1-2 days after download.

Gravity Sling's global download totals and Level pack purchases per day

Regional Variation

We have found significant regional variation to our conversion rate. To date almost 85% of our downloads have come from Japan (25,705), Italy (18,434) and the US (13,709). 80% of our purchases have come from the same three countries with the Japan leading (486), followed by the US (406) and then Italy (143). This results in a conversion rate for the US of 2.96%, Japan is at 1.89% and Italy is all the way down at .78%. Or to put this another way, US users are 3.8 times more likely to purchase a level pack than users in Italy. The difference between the US and Japan is much less pronounced with the US having a conversion rate 1.5 times higher than Japan.

Gravity Sling downloads and purchases by day for the US

Gravity Sling downloads and purchases by day for Japan

Gravity Sling downloads and purchases by day in Italy

The OpenFeint effect

Perhaps the most interesting and somewhat unexpected result we’ve found is the correlation of OpenFeint usage on purchases. As of last night 55% (36,980) of all Gravity Sling players had submitted a score to one of the leaderboards (which happens automatically for anyone signed into OpenFeint). However 73% (925) of all users who had purchased a level pack were OpenFeint users and had submitted a score to one of the leaderboards. Digging into this further, what we found is that OpenFeint users are almost 3 times more likely to purchase a level pack than non-OpenFeint users. Our conversion rate is 3.4% among OpenFeint users and drops to 1.2% for non-OpenFeint users.

Conversion rate % for OpenFeint and non-OpenFeint users

Also interesting here is that it appears OpenFeint users are more likely to purchase early. In the first few days of app availability over 5% of OpenFeint players bought a level pack, and that has since dropped to our current 3% level.

Non Monetary Discoveries

While we still believe that Free + IAP makes the most sense for games like Gravity Sling, there are some tradeoffs aside from the pure technical implementation. Most notably was with regards to reviews and trying to generate media attention at the launch of Gravity Sling. While many sites did cover the game, there were several which would not stating that as a matter of policy, they did not review free applications.

We also were forced to limit Gravity Sling to iPhone OS 3.0 so any users (primarily iPod Touch users) who had not paid to upgrade to the latest OS were unable to play Gravity Sling.

Anecdotally we’ve also heard that some users were confused by the In App Purchase, and would have liked to have bought the game if they knew how.

The surprising thing here is that there was very little to no user backlash at having paid content in a “free” app. We expected this to be a huge concern since this was one of the first free apps with IAP content, but we have not seen any complaints about this yet.

Conclusions (for now)

Based on our sales data to date, we can make several conclusions:

• General conversion rate for IAP is around 2%
• Region matters as US conversion is 2.96% while Italy was just .78%
• OpenFeint usage is corollary to purchase as OpenFeint users convert 3 times higher than non-OpenFeint users.

Next Steps

We’re submitting v1.1 of Gravity Sling to the app store very shortly, and are hoping to learn a lot more once that is released. With v1.0 we did not do a good job of letting the user know that a Level pack was available to purchase. With v1.1 we’ve added a couple upsell screens to make this more obvious (though hopefully not super annoying!). We’ve also created 2 new level packs so we can start to learn how many people will purchase multiple level packs.

To address the issues of getting reviews, and allowing OS 2.2.1 we will also be releasing a “Premium” version of Gravity Sling for sale. This version will not have any In App Purchase, but will come with everything in the game already unlocked. While our focus will still be on pushing the free+IAP version of Gravity Sling we’re hoping that the premium version will pick up sales from OS 2.2.1 devices, and other users who aren’t able or willing to do IAP.

• Movable Planets! We wanted to do these from the start, but didn’t have time to get them in. We assumed they would be fun, but already we’ve seen what a huge impact it has on gameplay. Levels become much more interesting and challenging, as this adds a totally new dynamic to it.
• Pickups One challenge that we had was trying to make levels with an easy solution but that also allowed for much more complicated and longer “good” solutions. The problem was that a lot of users didn’t realize how to overachieve like this and ended up beating many of the levels very quickly and easily. With v1.1 we’ve added in pickups that help direct you on places to try to get the astronaut to go.
• More Levels We’re hoping to be able to add 65 more levels to this update. While we’re not quite there yet, there will definitely be another 30, and hopefully a lot more. Or to put this another way, v1.1 will more than double the amount of gameplay available.
• UI Improvements The #1 issue that people have had with Gravity Sling is an unresponsive and occasionally buggy UI. We think we’ve fixed up nearly all of these problems, so it should be much less frustrating to use.

We still have to finish up a few more things, but are planning to submit this over the weekend or early next week.

For US developers that have never even been to either country this is incredibly awesome, and we’re absolutely thrilled to see it. We only wish we had any idea why players in those countries have taken to Gravity Sling so much. If you have any ideas please let us know!

On a related note, we’re all getting together later this week to try to pound out the last tweaks on the first update to Gravity Sling. Our target is to get everything finished up by Friday, leaving the weekend to test and then submit the update next Monday or Tuesday. Hopefully that will mean that it will be released in early-mid December!