We just make the Steam versions of the games & don’t actually sell the tabletop versions ourselves, but I’ll pass along the request to John Yianni of Gen42 (the game’s designer & the company that was selling them on Amazon).

Thanks again!

I would buy hive color $29, but $10 per expansion is a bit much.

I also own 2 steam licenses of hive complete.

In the code above, we set the Expiration caching header it in these lines:

$SECONDS_IN_MONTH = 60*60*24*30;
header(‘Expires: ‘.gmdate(‘D, d M Y H:i:s \G\M\T’, time() + $SECONDS_IN_MONTH)); // needs to be after session_start if session_start is used.

Although I didn’t mention it in this post, a very common method of bypassing that caching when you push changes, is to have a site-wide cache-buster for your assets, so you’d have a file somewhere with a cachebuster value in it, like:

$cacheBuster = “20160304_00”;

Then on each line that you include an asset, you would append the cachebuster:

global $cacheBuster;

StaticResources::addFooterFile(“http://code.jquery.com/ui/1.9.1/jquery-ui.js?cb=$cacheBuster”);

This is a pretty simple method of purging, and it’s the one I usually use. There are other methods now that CDNs are offering instant purging APIs.

I hope that answers your question 🙂 please let me know if there’s anything you’d like me to clarify!

Those places often take a reasonable percentage, so there has to be some good evidence that they’re increasing sales for that to make sense. I’ve heard mixed reviews from some devs who worked with Adult Swim.

Great Article. Any reason you didn’t use a small indie publishing company to help with the press/marketing push side of things? Interested in your experiences in working with such firms in the past (if ever), and any pain points associated with doing so? Thanks.

The first spike was release. Apple has a page somewhere (that I don’t even know how to find) that shows what came out that day. We got a decent amount of press without even trying (this was sort of a early access release [but you are not allowed to say that on iOS] so we weren’t hoping to get a lot of users yet) because our game looked unique compared to all the other drivel that came out that day.

The second spike was on a major update, and we also worked with someone to get featured (not too prominently) on the front page of the App Store as a “best new update”. We also had a price drop. This brought in about as many sales as the first release.

The third spike was when we worked with a free app of the day service, at which point we obviously made it free. That earned us more users than the first two spikes combined, but made us about $30 in advertising, so was more for users than anything.

One interesting note about the free app thing, is that there are services all over the place that automatically trawl the app store to find price drops. So we got only something like 2,000 downloads through the free app of the day service, and another 23,000 that were completely organic based upon those automated services.

So, you can do many of the same things as Steam, but the store in general has poorer visibility (and the fact that the top 100 grossing category is one of the most visible is a travesty), more competition (but most of it is shit), and price drops and the like are only exposed through third-party services.

We’re doing an Apple TV release soon that includes another major update and multiplayer, so we’ll see how that spikes. There’s much less competition as of now on the Apple TV, but less users too, so I’m curious. And we’ll likely increase the prominence of ads in our game and try another free weekend.

My impression of mobile is that the only ways to get visibility spikes are to be Featured (which is hard to get more than once) or to buy the exposure from other games.

Would love to know more!