StickWars was featured on Apple’s list of best games of 2009 and the list of best selling apps of 2009. Each of the lists features 30 apps each and are very well promoted within iTunes. I have no idea why they would chose to feature it twice on somewhat similar lists, but I can imagine it has to do something with the ~3 month delay getting my last update approved. While this is nothing but a guess, if true then it’s fantastic of Apple to take that into account. Or maybe they just really like playing StickWars…

Between the new visibility from being featured as well as what I imagine to be  a lot of word of mouth promotion during the holiday season as people open their new iPod Touches, sales have jumped up and StickWars has risen up the lists. It is now the top 40 paid app in the US, and it is actually back on the top grossing list at 99. For anybody who doesn’t know, the spike in sales of apps during Christmas holiday is like a big fat Christmas bonus to iPhone developers, and it’s a great feeling getting this final push before headed into the new year.

I meant to make a long post detailing my frustrating experience trying to get version 1.7 of StickWars approved for over 3 months, but I’ll sum it up by saying Apple had some unexpected technical problems with their approval process, they worked on it for a while, fixed the issues, and called me personally to help StickWars through the approval process once the issues were fixed. While it was very frustrating to develop a big release (including all those new challenge mini-games available as an in-app purchase) and then have to sit on it as StickWars slipped down the charts for 3 months, Apple has done what they can to make the process quicker and less painful, and being featured prominently twice by them is a unexpected gift that really helps me let go of my anger over the previous delay .

Slime Ball has completed its first cycle of rising up and then falling back down the charts. Both the free and the paid version are now of the top 100 lists, although we have some fun updates planned that will hopefully breath some life back into them. It’s time to go hit up the keyboard and get back to work…