Need some help with a survey (App Related)

Hey all, as some of you know I am in the planning stages of starting my application development business. My wife and I are working on it together and she is also using it as a topic for a research project she is doing at school. As part of this we are conducting a survey to get feedback in regards to downloading applications and games and your experiences with them.

If you have a few minutes please feel free to take the survey, it is relatively short (around 11 questions or so, multiple choice) and it would help us greatly. We are trying to get as many responses as we can in the next few weeks and your participation would be greatly appreciated as the community here has some pretty deep experience in regards to downloadable applications and games.

We are using Survey Monkey to host the survey as our site is not public yet. You can find the link below and again I am thankful for any who choose to participate, it will help me greatly in the planning of my business.

surveymonkey.com/s/appsurvey_waymire

Hey, great idea, i wish you all the best with the application development business.

I've completed the survey, so you got my data! Do you plan release the result of the survey when you're done with data-analysis?

Cheers!

I am not sure if I will post the full detailed results, but will definitely give a summary of what we find. For instance right now paid games with no ads are beating free games with ads by a 2 to 1 ratio which surprises me.

Biggest negative experience so far for many folks seems to be games that have difficult or non-responsive controls.

This is of course with only a small sample of respondents so far as the survey is only a few hours old. Over the next couple of weeks I will share the progress. Please feel free to encourage anyone to take the survey, I feel it will be of great use in planning projects.

Survey completed. Good luck with your buisness.

...right now paid games with no ads are beating free games with ads by a 2 to 1 ratio which surprises me.

It's kind of story of my life ;)

I have my samsung galaxy s3 for about 5 months now and I have only downloaded 4 maybe 5 free games... On the first week only. Never more.

Rate of ads, popups and alerts was unbearable, annoying and frustrating. Now I only downloads apps I paid for and if I'm 100% sure that I will never have to watch none of that sh*t, ever.

Ads in app are fine, I can understand that. They are usually small and do not interfere in gameplay.

So yeah. Paid aps with no ads.

Actually there's a third type, free games with micro transactions.

I have yet to actually pay into anything like that on mobile, but as with all things its can be done in both good and bad ways.

I guess you could also consider the limited free to play model.

Where you get a few teaser levels to try out the app.

I think with that you really have to have a superior product, as that's the main selling point....pretty much what Ash, and Tom are doing.

Right, so far my initial strategy is to offer a free and paid version of the games with the free version containing ads. I am also going to give the benefit of additional content updates free as part of the paid version. So extra levels, etc... will be released as updates for the paid version. Both versions will get bug fixes, etc...

As for the in app/micro transactions I haven't fully vetted my strategy on them but my thoughts so far are to only offer things that add to the game via in app purchase as opposed to making folks pay for items that are necessary in order to enjoy or beat the game which seems like a very shallow practice to me. So my in app purchases will be for extra characters, levels, etc... basically purchasing additions to the game as opposed to leaving out core functions like some games seem to do.

I just don't like games that purposefully remove features or block progress unless you use their in app purchases.

I would have liked to have seen another option under "What it is the most important factor in your decision to download a game?" That is, "Game Mechanic." Maybe that's covered under "genre," but I wasn't sure.

For example, I'll probably never download a platformer to my phone. I'll never download a Pacman-like or Space Invaders-like, nor probably an asteroids-like. So, game mechanic is important in my selection.

I also generally prefer to download a free version to sample before buying a full copy. If a game is buy-only with no preview/pre-test, I generally try to find something else.

The last game I downloaded was "Bad Piggies," which is such a great game idea. I think the "design/build your own" to accomplish an objective is a great mechanic. :-)

Yeah, that makes sense. we were trying to keep it as simple as we could as non-gamers or those not as familiar with different types of games could still fill it out as well.

Most likely as we get further in the process of launching our company we will have more detailed questionnaires targeted at a more tech/game savvy audience.

Completed. Good luck man!

Thanks! If there are any questions you feel should be added or topics I may have missed let me know and I may put them in a future survey.

Completed...Good luck with Your endeavour.

Thanks much! It is providing us with a lot of good info. I may have to start doing this a couple times a year with updated questions based on how trends in the app/game world evolve.

Completed survey!

Completed.

completed - good luck