Advanced FPS Counter Level 11 FREE postmortem

Hey guys!

I’m totally late to the party, but I promised few people to make a blog post on my Level 11 FREE experience, so here is it.
I’ll try to be short.

My Advanced FPS Counter was selected for the September’15 Level 11 and got to the FREE section.
I’ve asked for Level 11 free in the sales sign up form, so it’s was my initiative to go for the Level 11 FREE, I just wished to try it, to see how it will affect my sales, etc.

And here are my observations now, after 2.5 months since my participation start.

My normal average sales of the AFPSCounter are ~26 copies per month.
Level 11 FREE involvement guarantees some compensation from the Unity side. They say it’s an average of your last 3 months or $250 minimum.
I’ve been paid $340,00 USD, which is really nice, since I often make less than this from this plugin.

So, you’re not going to giveaway your plugin in Level 11 FREE and get no money for this, you’re actually paid by the Unity Technologies directly.

In september, I had 3315 copies downloaded by the Level 11 customers (people with pro license or paid subscription) and 41 copies sold to the people who has no access to the Level 11!

To sum up, I’ve got $340 from Unity and $287 from regular sells, very good results.

Level 11 FREE helped my plugin to show up on main page and to top the own category charts, leading to even more visibility.
It lead to the new reviews, new customers, new ratings.

October brought 36 more downloads somehow and 36 sold copies, still higher than my average.

November so far goes more likely as usual, 12 copies sold at the moment when I write this (which extrapolates to the average of 24 to the end of the month).
My participation in Level 11 FREE with one of my plugins didn’t seem to affect both of my other plugins, at least I can’t see it in sale numbers.

Conclusion
Level 11 FREE allows you to get maximum visibility and lots of new customers. Most of them will download your asset just to keep it in their arsenal though.
Some of them will try your product and leave reviews, bug reports and other feedback, which is also very important.
You’ll not lose anything from the Level 11 FREE participation, but you’ll get much – maximum visibility, extra sells to the non-Level 11 people, extra money from Unity Technologies, new reviews, ratings, new feedback and lots of potential customers.

Level 11 FREE is a best option for the new assets, it’s a quick rocket launch for them.
But don’t expect much from it if you have mature asset with good reputation and lots of existing customers.

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Unity Asset Store and Madness Sale: my experience

Warning: this post contains full earnings details, all financial part uncovered, lot of spoilers! >:}
(feel free to skip the boring part and jump straight to the sum up numbers at the end of this post)

As you already might know, my Anti-Cheat Toolkit plugin was selected for the Asset Store May Madness Sale, which has started at May 5 and was rocking until May 16.
Before revealing any Madness Sale numbers and achievements, I’d like to make an overall retrospective of this plugin.
Please, note, all earnings will be posted in gross, net (what I get) is 70% of gross.
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Advanced DoSWF encryption? Challenge accepted!

Greetings!
As I previously wrote about flash files unpacking, you can achieve that using static unpacking or dumping swf file from memory usually. There are some exceptions however, and I’ll tell you about one such exception in this article.

Developer of the DoSWF protector (made in China) used few simple yet interesting tricks to prevent revealing of the original SWF, I like something harder than clicking one button)
I guess many poor “hackers” (as they like to name themselves) have no idea why dumped files are not working, and can’t do anything about it.

Let me show you an example how to unpack SWF encrypted with DoSWF (many pictures ahead!)… Continue reading

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AIR vs. Unity3D. Who’s faster? (Update 1)

Update 1: uploaded some sources (look at the end of article).

Hey there!
Yeah, it’s been a while blahblahblah.. To the point! =)

Sometimes I’ll highlight actual files from the archive, attached at the page bottom.

Sometimes I see Flash developers interested in the Unity3D lately, and I – one of them actually)
I work with Unity for a while already and all I can say – it’s fantastic experience! So cool to learn C# language (I hope other Flash devs make wise decision to code in C# as well), to learn new community and people, to meet a lot of new challenges and to look at 3D world from a new point at all!

Many Flash developers are still uncertain they should try Unity and spend their time learning this brand new world though.. And in some cases it’s built on top of the AIR and Unity3D performance differences obscurity. So I’ll unveil portion of this differences in this article to help those Flash developers make a choice (whatever what they choose)!

All examples I’ll compile with AIR 3.6 and Unity3D 4.1 and I’ll try to keep similar functionality and look of these examples to let them compete.
I’ll test builds on the pretty slow Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and make some tests on the desktop as well.

Intro

Okay, let’s start from comparing empty builds.
To measure FPS in unity3D I’ll use hand-made FPSmeter working with GUIText.
In AIR builds I’ll use different FPSmeters, usually in-built to the frameworks I’ll use.
Well, let’s see to the built apks (I built Captive Runtime in AIR and usual release build in Unity3D):
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Packed SWF. How to unpack?

Hey, friends!
In this post I’d like to explain you what is a packed SWF, how it looks and show you some methods of dynamic and static unpacking.
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