Hey guys, We recently did a big promotion were we gifted 1,000 copies of Harbor Master. There was lots of interest from other devs on how that would pan out, so we summarized our experience here. In a nutshell: - Gifting does NOT affect rank. - Giving that many gifts is definitely a time investment. - It's a good way to create attention around your game for promotion. - It's nice to have an alternative distribution method other than 50 promo codes. - It got us a lot of good will from the player community.
yeah, i actually read the blog post and see that now. for some reason, i'm always interested in these kind of evaluations, and i have no reason why!
Thanks for the feedback! That was a really useful & interesting experiment & hopefully you still get your 70% back (?). Regardless of whether that's the case or not, I would think it's money well-spent and well-targeted to have connected with so many customers who'll hopefully go on to be big Imangi fans.
Thanks! Never even considered that we wouldn't get our 70% back. I'm sure it just counts like a regular purchase as far as royalties are concerned. Yes, we definitely think it's money well spent. We've flat out thrown money away on marketing before, so definitely happy about this spend.
Thanks for the feedback! I think it's really great that you were able to get so many signups for your newsletter, definitely a great tool for promoting your games.
Good to know, thanks for the assessment. At least shadier devs can't buy their way into a feature list, and it does provide an alternative to promo codes for the purposes of promotion, albeit a slow and slightly costly one depending on how many gifts you wanna give away.
I have a question for you natty, was the account used to buy the gifted apps tied to a developer account? I'm wondering if Apple is making sure devs can't game the system or if it's all gifting that is not ranked.
That's a very good question. It would seem a little weird if gifting customer-to-customer didn't affect the rankings.
The account used to buy the gifts was different from the developer account. I think they really do exclude ALL gifts from the ranking algorithm. Given how easy it is to create new iTunes accounts, filtering out dev accounts wouldn't help much. And if you think about it, unless the devs are trying some kind of promotion, gifts would generally be a tiny percentage of total purchases, so simply excluding them is the easiest thing to do.
Thanks for sharing your results. I guess the coming appocalypse is put off for a little while longer.
