Howling Moon Software

First of all, I’ve got great news! Our iPhone application, Crayon Ball was just featured as a Staff Pick on the App Store!

At this point, you’re probably wondering what’s up with Crayon Ball, and why it looks suspiciously like ScribBall. Basically, Crayon Ball was our marketing experiment. We took ScribBall, redid the graphics with a new crayon look, added a new icon, and set it out into the world with nary a peep.

Much to our surprise, it actually outperformed ScribBall. (The one bump in ScribBall sales there was from a rather significant update, adding themes)

We aren’t really sure why Crayon Ball fared better than ScribBall. We didn’t promote Crayon Ball, get it reviewed, or even advertise it. I think it does have a more attractive icon, and the title screen is brighter. Messing around with the application’s categories didn’t seem to account for the difference. Crayon Ball might be more fun of a name, and it’s definitely easier for people to pronounce and remember. 

In any case, we’re going to continue to support existing users of both applications, and we’re very excited to be featured by Apple! If anyone wants to weigh in on the differences between Crayon Ball and ScribBall, we’d be happy to hear your comments.

EDIT: Regarding prices. We do weekly sales on both ScribBall and Crayon Ball. We do see bumps in units sold on these days, but higher revenue from Crayon Ball far exceeds the sales bumps we get from the one day sales. We’re going to keep Crayon Ball at 99 cents for a while longer than usual, since we’re a Staff Pick.

EDIT 2: We also used this opportunity to experiment with the somewhat tacky strategy of naming lots of search terms in your description. It doesn’t really work, since there’s some popularity based filtering going on. Good to know.