Hey, a few months ago I read a post by Andy Moore about the value of music in games where he did some stats recording on games to discover how often audio was muted, etc. I decided to do something similar for Dynamite Jack.

The following are the results I got from the paid iOS version:

95% of players don’t change ANY settings.
2% of players quieted or silenced the audio.
2% of players change the controls to Virtual Stick only.
0.5% of players change the controls to Line Drawing only.
2% of players change the Touch Button Location / Virtual Joystick options.
1% of players change the HUD options.

1.7% of the users completed the campaign, which means they probably played the game for over 3 hours.

Of the users who completed the campaign:

34% of users changed options.
19% of users quieted or silenced the audio.
17% of users changed the controls to Virtual Stick only.
5% of users changed the controls to Line Drawing only.
10% of users changed the HUD options.
12% of users changed the Touch Button Location / Virtual Joystick options.

The piracy rate could be as high as 74%. Here are factors that make that number questionable:

– Each purchase can represent several devices
– Each purchase can represent several GameCenter accounts
– Each purchase can represent multiple IP addresses

Concluding interesting facts:

– Long term players are over 10x more likely to change options.
– I used royalty free music from shockwave-sound.com and only had 2% of users turn off the audio.
– I spent probably over 20 hours scouring through the tracks on that site to find the exact ones I wanted for my game.

Cheers!
-Phil