So we actually launched BallFallDown last month! On December 14th, to much fanfare, or as much as we were able to muster. We got some great reviews (here’s my favorite) and some less great reviews, but overall things went relatively well for the first few days. We even featured in Apple’s “New and Noteworthy” in the Entertainment section, though that didn’t cause any massive download spikes.

Overall a good launch week as far as downloads go. The problem was the upgrades: we really haven’t had that many people paying for Deluxe version or other upgrades.

In retrospect and 20-20 hindsight, the Christmas season was extraordinarily noisy for the App store; the big publishers such as Electronic Arts and Gameloft were having huge sales to boost their rankings ($4.99 apps selling for $0.99, etc.) so I suspect it was easy to get lost in the shuffle.

I also think that I really messed up by handing off the marketing efforts to a third party PR and marketing guy. In the end, nobody is going to care about your product the way you will, and it doesn’t help when you’ve hired someone who, well, let’s just say it’s not clear how much work he actually did (but it wasn’t very much.) I’m just now starting to get things back on track by sending out review requests and such, but I’m afraid that based on what I’ve been reading, if you don’t have a strong launch, it’s quite hard to get noticed later on. Let’s see if we can prove them wrong.