If you want a clear picture on the life of an app in the App Store you could do worse than read Noel Llopis’s blog post on the 9-month saga of Flower Garden. It’s a story full of ups and downs and various travails complete with handy charts and graphs to illustrate his point.
Noel hits upon a certain point midway through the post that I feel is pretty important. At the end of last year with sales declining again after one last attempt to extend the game he ponders if he should move on at this point.
You’d think that I would give up at this point, wouldn’t you? And I don’t say that with pride. I mean, it probably would have been smarter to quit a long time ago. But somehow, every time I was ready to move on, something else would come up that would entice me to try something else with Flower Garden.
The beauty of releasing a game online for the web or on the App Store is the ability to continue tinkering your game far past the initial release. Finding that secret sauce or right combination of gameplay and content and stickiness that attracts people to your game can often be quite difficult and take countless iterations to successfully find. In the story of Flower Garden so far it finally seems like Noel/Snappy Touch has found that balance. Oftentimes its not the best idea that wins, but the one with the most dogged determination to continue going on.
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