[ANN] Burn The Rope - giving away for free to indiegamer users in US and Canada Dec 20. 2010 London, Canada – Big Blue Bubble Inc. is pleased to announce the release and immediate worldwide availability of Burn the Rope, their new original game for iOS devices. Winning the hearts of users with smash hit Thumpies – game that reinvented the rhythm genre – developers are intended to do it again by brining to the App Store a unique game for all who are fascinated with flame and all kinds of fire effects. Starting today users have the freedom to set fire without any fire hazard or need for a fire extinguisher. The game involves a mix of strategic planning, thinking ahead, coordination and the ability to stay in deep focus. Users have to feed the fire and burn as much rope as they can in each level to progress. The challenge is that fire only burns upwards, leaving players to tilt and turn their iPhones to keep the flame alive. The game features 80 devilishly tricky levels with polished graphics and mesmerizing fire effects. Bugs that crawl along the rope spice things up demonstrating different reactions to the flame from level to level. Ants change the color of the flame so that users could burn different colored ropes, and the spider shoots out a web bridge providing access to the parts of the level that were beyond players’ reach before. iTunes link: http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/burn-the-rope/id408693480?mt=8 Product page link: www.burntherope.com Press kit link: www.burntherope.com/presskit.zip YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KC-M7bqzNkg
Any relation to "You have to burn the rope"? Congrats, BTW. The Youtube video looks cool. I'll see if I can pick it up in the next couple of days.
haha I thought the same thing ! Sounds like a cool game either way, slick presentation too. Congrats on launching your game!
Here is 1st report - piracy is way over 90%. We are using Tapjoy to track the installs and just about 5% of game installs are coming from iTunes. I guess 99c is just too expensive.
Here is the 2nd report: #4 best selling game in US Top5 puzzle games in more then 35 countries Piracy rate dropped to about 15%.
Congratulations, guys! The game is doing incredibly well, and it seems like you've got a handle on the rampant piracy. Looks like Big Blue Bubble is going strong!
Burn the Rope is now #2 game in US !!! As for the marketing, I spent less than $10,000, mainly on PR and TapJoy installs (I did this just 2-3 days before Christmas). Everything else is just word of mouth, good idea and nice game. Game was priced at 1.99 just for couple of hours, it will (probably) go back to this price after the new update is released (next week). This is probable close to my 100th game (either as programmer or producer) and it seems it might be the most stressful one so far.
Hmm...just a heads up, but both Avast and AVG are giving trojan warnings when trying to access the Big Blue Bubble homepage.
To celebrate the success of the game, I would like to gift the app to all users of this forum with 50+ posts. Send me the pm in next 48 hours with the email address you want to use and let me know if you want the gift in Canadian or US store. Unfortunately, I don't have any promo codes left and there is no way to gift app to other countries. And yes, please review the app.
Are you sure they are not available worldwide? Did you generated the promo code recently? If yes, they should be accessible worldwide. I think Apple changed the policy around the 8th of december. So, if you had them generated recently, I would love to get one (I'm on the French store). JC
I am not talking about promo codes. I already gave them away to reviewers. Now I can only gift the game by paying it with the credit card and it need to be for the same country credit card is registered in. I can't even use gift cart for that. Btw, do you have any idea why is game doing so poorly in France ? It is localized in french but it seems that french people don't like it. Is it some cultural issue I am not aware of (like they don't like to play with fire) ?
Nope, I don't know why it wouldn't perform as well as anywhere else. The only major cultural differences is that we like good food & we call porn art. Your game looks really cool, I'm sure it will catch up in France too. JC
Congratulations on making it into top 10! I was curious about the piracy rate drop to 15%, what do you think caused this? I find it very interesting.
Nice. I like how it involves the accelerometer too -- that may be why its caught on (fire) so well. Congratz.
I do have an idea: the French description of the game is very poorly written. Please don't take offense, I just mean to help. Perhaps you used google translator or it was translated by a non-native French speaker? Worse, I bought the game and switched my OS to French, and localization is definitely sub-par. I think you should also check with native speakers of the other languages the game was translated into (Spanish, Italian, German ?), in case they have the same issue. It's a good game, I bet you could sell many more downloads with this simple fix ! Hope this helps