Top of the world (a small bit of it)

Blog posted by Ste Pickford on Sun, 31 Jul 2011
Subject: Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint

I woke up early this Sunday morning and stumbled into my office room to check for overnight emails before putting the coffee on.

I complained in the previous two blog posts about the difficulty and stress of wating for our Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint app, and then our in-app purchases, to be reviewed and approved by Apple. I foolishly thought that once the game was released I could calm down a bit and stop checking websites every five minutes. Hah! Little did I realise that the wait for approval was nothing compared to the constant regular checking of the progress of our game once it was released. At least I only had a single website to check before the game was out in the wild.

After scanning emails I then went through my new daily round of checking for anything related to the game; the Facebook page, the Twitter feed, new App Store reviews, new Google alerts, new forum post replies. I don't have a Game Center supporting iDevice at the moment, so I'm spared the minute-by-minute tourture of checking for changes in the number of players reported on the Game Center leaderboards, and thankfully actual download / sales data only comes in from Apple once a day. An acquaintence of mine self-publishes his own books on Amazon's Kindle store and he seems to get constant live sales updates direct to his phone, which are probably distracting him to the point that he'll never be able to write another book again.

There didn't seem to be anything interesting relating to the game overnight, but I thought I'd have one last check on AppAnnie.com before my coffee, and a nice little surprise awaited me there - we're number 1 in the iPad Free Games Sports category on the Italian, Spanish and Portugese App Stores! Woohoo!!

I can't remember the last time I had a number 1 hit game, even on what are possibly among the smallest, least visible, lowest volume charts in the gaming world. Still, I was dead chuffed, so I spent ages switching countries in iTunes to grab images for this blog. I've still not had my coffee yet.

Thank you Italian, Spanish and Portugese sports game fans with iPads!

» Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint - Now Available on the App Store!

Tags: indie, publishing, coffee, europe, sports, ipad, charts

Follow up post: Are App Store ratings trustworthy?

Predecessor post: Waiting...

View the softography page for Magnetic Billiards: Blueprint »

Permalink to this post: http://zee-3.com/pickfordbros/blog/view.php?post=552

Congrats guys! Hope you get some more chart positions in other countries too.

Comment by Guest Jake Birkett, added Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:15:08 GMT

Cheers Jake.

Comment by Ste Pickford, added Sun, 31 Jul 2011 10:34:26 GMT

Totally deserved as well - hope you can manage a featured game slot on the back of the good reviews and popularity you are gaining.

Comment by Guest Stuart Riddock, added Sun, 31 Jul 2011 11:23:17 GMT

Top stuff Guys, great game. ...also, when do we get a new Plok? :)

Comment by Guest Jason McGann, added Mon, 01 Aug 2011 13:15:40 GMT

Keep going, once I buy an i-pad your game will be the first app we'll install!

Comment by Guest Ruth amp Martijn, added Sun, 14 Aug 2011 20:01:37 GMT