A word of advice, please.
- I have a paid game on the App Store that had good reviews, but did not have a ton of downloads.
- Then the new iOS came out which busted my game, so I pulled it off the storefront (did not delete it, just hid it) to avoid getting terrible ratings. It has been down for a few months.
Okay, so now we have overhauled the game, rewrote it from scratch, and it is much better. The plan is to republish it, only now it is free with IAP, but previous customers who had bought it will automatically have everything unlocked. My fear is that if I simply republish the one that was hidden with this update and then make it go from paid to free, it will be a total fail because it won't get any "new app" exposure from the store and it will be further hosed by having been pulled from the storefront all those months--e.g. won't show up in search, won't have any love from App Store algorithms, etc.
The alternative plan is to ship the update of the paid version (to server previous customers) and then also ship a seperate free version as a new game. The games will be close to identical except that the freebie uses IAP to unlock content as the customer sees fit, while the up-front paid one has no IAP and just unlocks everything for the up-front fee. My dev doesn't like that idea because it means maintaining two games; however, from my perspective, a ton of energy went into this overhaul and that will all be for nothing if store visibility is poor.
Which would you do? Because the games are close to identical, maintaining both should be reasonable. But would Apple not like such a scheme? It seems similar to the classic free/premium dual app model of pre-IAP days, so I expect I could get the new freebie version through. But am I gaining that much? If I used the single game plan, would I still get a bump from the store for dropping a $8.99 app to free?
I guess this boils down to: "For discovery, what's better a price drop or a new app?"
Thanks,
Sam
