Ow My Balls! The game

The second ball drops. Ow My Balls! Lite is now available! If you’ve been waiting for another sale, this is it. If you’ve got a funny bone, especially below the belt, than this is a must-download app. Enjoy.

Get your copy now! FREE!

We were so impressed by the results of our first sale that we decided to put a LITE version out. Ow My Balls LITE will be available for FREE starting tomorrow September 15th. The LITE version includes the full game (only Easy mode) along with 3 achievements and 1 leaderboard. So if you’ve ever wanted to try the game but just couldn’t pony up the 99 cents, here’s your chance. And to the pirates out there, no more excuses.

For existing players, 1.5 just went live! It is mostly bug fixes but there is one meaningful change – you only need 100k points to unlock Freestyle now. Scores continue forward from 1.4 so if you already broke 100k you should see Freestyle mode now available. Thanks again to all the hardcore players for your continued support. Your scores are friggin nuts…

If you have a funny bone anywhere in your body, especially the lower portion, you need to go grab Ow My Balls NOW!

Amazing… three days of Free Balls, and over 20,000 new Ballers playing the game! Thanks everyone for an unbelievable sale – it was a pleasure watching the game climb the charts and seeing everyone’s high scores go wild. We can’t believe some of the scores the new players are getting. Keep at it!

You’ve inspired us to make a Lite version… more on this soon.

Woohoo! The 1.4 update has just been approved and is now live in the App Store. We really hope this addresses most or all of the gameplay concerns and issues in the 1.3 release. Please let us know what you think – we’re anxious to hear everyone’s feedback!

To celebrate, we are making OW MY BALLS FREE for this weekend only! That’s right, My Balls, both of them, are FREE this weekend! So tell your friends, your mom, your kids, that they can get this hilarious game and still have 99 cents left to get a Coke.

FREE BALLS!

Great news – we just submitted the 1.4 update for review! We have added four gameplay modes to ensure the game is fun for everyone.

The gameplay style from 1.3 is now called “hard mode” which is a pretty good description of it.

We’ve added “easy mode”, which is easier than the game has ever been, and medium which is closest to the gameplay style from 1.2.

We’ve also brought back unlimited farts as “freestyle mode” which can be unlocked by scoring 250,000 points.

Hopefully this new update of My Balls will be in your hands within 2 weeks. Fingers crossed.

Holy balls! We got a lot of feedback about the 1.3 update and are rushing out a 1.4 update this weekend to address it. Clearly the game is now way too hard and we’ve got to do something about it. We really wanted to make the gameplay challenging, but looks like we went overboard.

We were experimenting with different gameplay modes before the release but decided to hold off till the next update. We’re going to crank 1.4 out, along with unlimited farts, as fast as we can.

Thanks for the feedback – we really appreciate it!

This update is the result of a heroic multi-month effort to completely redesign the game and take it to the next level. We’ve always been convinced that this game is a sleeper hit, but we also knew it needed some real improvement to get there. Almost 90% of the code was re-written for this update to ensure a high performance crash-free experience.

The 1.3 update includes a wide range of features, too many for me to list here, but I’ll highlight just a few:

• Completely redesigned controls
• Reworked scoring system with on-line scores
• Endless gameplay – there is no limit to how long you can play!
• Integrated OpenFeint with global Leaderboards and Achievements
• Unlock and watch VIDEOS of EPIC nutshots
• Landscape mode
• New sounds

We put a ton of work into this update, more than the original game itself, so we really hope you all like it. Thanks for hanging in there.

It’s time to Upgrade Your Balls! Ow My Balls v1.2 is now available in the App Store. If you already own a copy then you should recieve a free update on your phone. If not, what are you waiting for? The latest version is great!

• All new scoring and leveling system with high score
• Earn unlimited farts with 150,000 points!
• More targets all over the map
• Lots of bug fixes (sorry, no volume control fix yet)
• Smaller memory footprint
• Improved game performance

We busted our BALLS again on 1.2 and hope you appreciate the improvements!

And as always, please let us know if you experience any issues with the game, or if you have suggestions for how to improve it. We always appreciate feedback on My Balls.

Let’s celebrate with a double nutshot!

I’m excited to announce that we just submitted version 1.2 of Ow My Balls! for review. We’ve made substantial improvements in this version that we hope you all will appreciate. The highlights…

• More targets and redesigned playfield
• All new scoring/leveling system
• Earn unlimited farts!

We can’t wait to get this out there. Hopefully it’ll be up within a week or two. We’ll keep you posted.

Some people e-mailed me asking for more information about the piracy situation. I can’t share our exact numbers, but here’s the overall message.

In the first week piracy outpaced sales almost 3 to 1. For every copy sold in the app store, just about 3 were downloaded for free from one of a number of pirate app sites.

By the end of the week piracy was starting to slow down while sales held steady, so in the long term I’m guessing this will level out. But at least for now this is a disturbing trend that deserves some analysis.

Suspected Pirates

Is the iPhone piracy problem really that bad?

When I first looked at these numbers I was sure something was wrong with them. There is no way to get an exact count of sales vs. pirates – it’s an interpreted number. However looking at download counts on popular app pirate sites validated what our internal numbers are showing. Pirates apparently like My Balls.

Thinking about it, it actually makes a lot of sense. I’ve heard from many sources that free apps outpace paid apps by almost 10-1. Given the pirate marketplace is free, you’d expect a big multiplier here. In addition, the pirate download sites are a more level playing field; unlike the App Store where the highlighted apps are either hand-picked by Apple or have extraordinary sales, on the pirate sites every app is at the same level.

So is this good or bad for the game?

Remember that the goal of the game was to make people laugh. Whether you’re a pirate or a scallywag you’re still probably going to laugh when you see Joe get kicked in the balls. So in the grand scheme of things, with humor as the goal, this doesn’t really matter.

But let’s be frank, sales are important. To continue developing out this game we need revenue. However I don’t think that piracy really hurts there either. The people stealing the game probably wouldn’t have paid for it in the first place, but maybe they’ll show it to a friend who will pay for it.

On some metaphoric level, there is something really bad about this. Imagine if a farmer brought 1000lbs of nuts to a local supermarket for sale. The farmer comes back to collect his income a week later and the store says “Hey, here’s the money for 250lbs of nuts. We’re sorry but people stole the other 750lbs.” This would never fly. But this is software, not nut farming, and the dynamics just aren’t the same.

So in summation, it’s probably not a bad thing that all this theft is happening. I’m more bitter about the fact that I had to spend an extraordinary amount of time dealing with the Apple code signing system which is designed in part to prevent piracy. For the days of time I spent dealing with code signing issues, this comes back as a big kick in the balls.

So lets serve one back up to the app pirates of the world… this is in thanks for your support of independent developers. ARRR PIRATE NUTS!



For more insight on iPhone piracy and how to prevent it, check out this article.