Lines! Or how to market iOS apps and influcence people

Hi Folks,
We here at That Wonderful Lemon Co are gearing up to launch our first iOS title (I'm this weird ball of nervous / excited)!

I am curious though - what have you folks done to push your games? What worked? What is a waste of time? We are trying a three pronged thingy - Twitter, Facebook and press contacts. I have no idea if this will work at all, but I will let you know!

There seems to be an awful lot of legwork involved in it - any advice would be super appreciated.

In the mean time, take a look at our shots and please give our Facebook at like!

Take me too the Screenshots...

Take care

Andrew M.

Chief Coffee Maker
http://thatwonderfullemon.co

 

Couple things:

1st, your game appears gear towards younger folks. That said, your website has numerous uses of crude language, not to mention you avoidance of 'poor quality porn', which of course is instantly anti-younger folks. Might want to align your message one way or the other…

2nd, as you can already tell, Facebook is a waste of your time. 80 likes in 11 Months? And of those, maybe 25-40% will receive any newsfeed updates on their walls from your updates unless they specifically subscribe …which is not usual in a drive-by like session. Anyway, please don't waste your money on paid advertising there - it's egregious. Even a paid push for claimed 30k newsfeed will net you 1% conversion if lucky.

3rd, Twitter….same as above

4th, Press? Best of luck to send blast emails to the top 80-120 sites/blogs/contacts. There are lists floating around here and elsewhere you can combine and hope to find a bite. Make sure to send codes or test versions or whatever works. Include press packet, junket, etc…don't' leave anything out. Oh and if you make it too formish, then you might as well skip it, since there are at least 50 other form emails from other hopefuls sending in their submission of the day.

5th, Recommend you change your background to have green tubes, and make your main character more of a bird…maybe the type that 'flaps'. Also rename your game…maybe color flappy or lemon flap….something like that.

6th, Take game back off store after collecting cash...

 

Hey there,
Thanks for the pointers - especially the point on Facebook. Have you tried other ad services? Better results?

Ok, I'm off to rename and add tubes.

Andrew M.

 

I'd like to give you nice words of lucky, but sadly the real truth of this market is, very few people agree to pay some bucks for any game. In fact the game by itself has completely lost its value. Everyday around new 250 games go in the app store as new games. With lucky you've got 48 hours to get a complete success or die in the deep of the hell. We've released 13 games more or less. Only one in Unity several weeks ago. It was launched for MacApp Store by the way. We're finishing iOS performance issues, and it will be released also for Windows Metro, Windows Phone, and Android. After many months of exploring and analyzing this market, we can conclude the only valid method to avoid be ignored completely 48 hours after you release the game is offer the game free.

Offering the game free has some direct benefits. The first one is downloads. At first time your app or game needs downloads to keep position and be available for new users, and in this way get visibility. As much visibility you get more chances of success you will got.

App stores are not Websites. You can not do SEO on there. You can not do anything to promote your app with any technical improvement. The best improvement to get visibility is people downloading your app everyday.

Our game, Furious Driving, we agree is not the best game of racing, in fact we're completely aware the physics are not excelent, but that's because we target our game as an arcade game, and I will tell you why a little bit later. This game after 3 weeks of released in the Mac App Store, is still number one in Games category in many countries, and is number one in racing category, and looks as important games in the top of the category.

But the best part of this is, we developed this game in 2 months and a half. Our goal with this game was reach number one, because we analyzed the Mac App Store to know the maximum levels of quality and what people usually likes.

The first goal was reached, and we're number one in many countries. Being number one, today, we know more or less the maximum downloads a game in first position can achieve everyday.

As SouthernCoder69 says if you reach 1% of conversion you're lucky. And now I'm going back to the argument of why we didn't make the physics of our game really hard and we consider better an arcade game.

When you develop games you can follow two ways depending of your main goal in the project. You want to be recognized by gamers as the great developer of a fantastic game, or you want to get money with your work. Sometimes, very hard, both ways could be joined in some lucky world.

So if you want to create an startup or your own company as indie developers, I can tell you that this market is going to be very hard. Well, very very very hard. The correct word I think is frustration.

Why frustration?
Because you will look how your games doesn't reach to the people. I'm pretty sure your games are good. As many others people here does. But them what happens? Well, there is no real time to know them. They dissapear faster than users can download it. Even you, as developer, won't be able to find your own game by its own title. Really sad.

So why arcade game? Well, we consider the user behind this mobile devices, are called 'soft casual' gamers. Most of them don't use those devices as a great gaming platform. In fact many of them usually doesn't play. So it's going to be impossible incredible conversiones of money, because the user probably will close the game before be a little bit addict to it.

So what to do? Try to "steal" a cent from the very first moment.
How?
Only two ways.
-> A game where Freemium model applies very well. If not applies well , forget it.
-> Banners built-in the app.

As game developer I can tell you none of them makes justice to you and your game, and the effort a game needs. But this is the market.

The best Freemium model, usually applies to those games where progress in the game takes time. To progress faster you can purchase several items to grown faster. That freemium model is the only one that really get some interesting conversion.
Those kind of games got heavy logic, and they're really long to develop. Usually are not games with very incredible graphics. Not amazing action. But the send a message to the user that he's working well with the game and he's progressing right and its own world inside the game is growing thanks his choices and actions.

Second one, banners. It could surprise you. As far as we think, many users are very comfortable seeing banners, because they usually see them in websites and others related contents often. If the game is a little bit interesting, the user won't run out the game if he has to accept to see several banners.
He can live with it.

Although you can enable an In App Purchase in your app to remove the ads, which is very welcome for users that really likes the app.

Finally, it's pretty sure, the user should be your friend, but not more than that. I mean, the 98% of users won't give you what you want. Which is money.
So if you consider enabling banners in your game, is not good for the user, thinks that most of them won't play your game even they don't show any banner.

Please take in care this is a very particular vision of our business decisions after a lot of analysis of the market and the users.

We're working focused in games since 9 months ago. Just couple weeks ago we started to make some money.
The decision we took to change this was:

"Let's go to offer all games free with ads"


You can not compete with big companies. Flappy bird happens once in million.
Unless people think Angry Birds, had 100$ million of advertising investment.
Unless people know Candy Crush spent 400$ million in advertising around the world.

There is no lucky of that kind. That lucky is really paid. Good marketing campaigns makes you belive, it is social networks who has put in the sky those games. But not, the very artist of that was the money.

Something similar happens with Call Of Duty and many others. Big and great advertising campaigns with a business plan of launching worldwide.

So, if after reading this post you still has enough energy to continue developing games, then, welcome to the real world Welcome to Matrix.

Be constructive, if you want to make money, analyze a little bit the market, think in soft casual gamers, think in easy games, games for all. Don't try to do very complicated things, probably you won't reach the target behind this platforms. Don't be agressive with the user, but don't give them your last breath of air, because they don't give you back the same, so if you decide they have to suffer a little bit, do it.

It is my advice.

Cheers.

 

Latas! What an awesome amount of info!

Thank you very much kind fellow. Your thoughts on free games are interesting and are certainly something to consider. I had not really thought about the ad route to market - so it is something I shall be investigating further.

The thing for me is certainly the unknown of the business side of games development. I have been making things on salary for large companies for years - which does hone you in certain areas, but keeps you fantastically ignorant in others.

For now I think the best thing to do is to get Lines out there and then look at the data.

Thanks again, lots of food for thought!