Flight Control soars to 2 million sales

Less than a year ago, on 5 March 2009, we launched Flight Control on the App Store. Three months later, we had sold 1 million copies. Today we’re proud to announce that after 324 days, on 23 January 2010, Flight Control sold the 2 millionth download – that’s over 6,000 sales per day on average! We had particularly big days on 28 and 29 March 2009 when Flight Control suddenly exploded up the charts, with over 30,000 copies sold each day. Even 9 months after release, Christmas Day 2009 was also a great day with over 20,000 copies sold – many probably going to happy new owners of an iPhone or iPod touch!
We have seen a general increase in sales just before and since Christmas, which we attribute to Flight Control appearing on many “best of 2009″ lists, as well as an increase in the number of devices out there and iTunes cards being given as gifts.
Flight Control has been a fixture on the Top 100 paid apps charts around the world, and has held the top spot in at least 20 countries including USA, UK, Australia, Germany, France, Canada and Japan. We want to say “thank you” to everyone around the world who has embraced Flight Control, and we hope that you will find the data below interesting, and perhaps even useful!

Sales by Country

When looking at the source of our sales, the top 15 countries accounted for about 96% of sales, with the United States contributing 46% (over 930,000 Flight Controllers in the US alone):

56 other countries accounted for less than 1% each (total 4% or 84,938 sales).

Sales by Week

The graph below shows weekly sales from the week commencing 23 March 2009 to the week commencing 18 January 2010, for the three top selling countries (United States, Great Britain and Australia):

After the initial strong peak, the second peak occurred with the release of two new maps (Beach and Carrier). A much smaller peak in September coincided with Thanksgiving and the Black Friday sales (although we didn’t do any special promotion of Flight Control). A fourth peak can clearly be seen over Christmas. Other updates including online high scores, bluetooth multiplayer and a fourth map (Outback) do not coincide with a noticeable increase in sales.