How to get in BEST NEW GAME in this week of App Store?

Don't worry about it.

Really. The chances of you, as a new developer, getting the "BEST NEW GAME" slot are small enough that you might as well play the lottery. What you should concentrate on, instead, is building the best games you can - and to do that, design a very small project, *finish* it, ship it, and then keep doing that again and again. As you build up a portfolio of experience, you'll learn to reach out to Apple, start working with them in small ways, build up a relationship with the reps there, and with the player base. As you build up a reputation for creating interesting/compelling games, then you'll start to attract attention, and one day, may end up in that slot.

But it has *nothing* to do with when you release your game.

Don't be concerned with how to promote your games at the start. It's a skill you will have to learn, but you have to learn it *only after* you've learned to build something compelling.

 

That's some great advice, Wonderspark. Might I ask though, how DO you establish a relationship with Apple reps? I'm assuming they come to you once you're showing some degree of success?

 

Thinkerton - yeah, to some extent. I'm sure it's really different now, but back in '09, when we released Taxiball, they asked us for some art assets, and additional conversations struck up from there. We also "knew people who knew people", which led to other conversations. All in all, though, we didn't have a very "tight" relationship with Apple, probably to some degree because our big game was a Casino game, and they just don't feature those that much. With Wonderspark, I think to some extent we're starting from scratch again, but part of figuring this all out again is seeing if we've got friends who can help us figure it out.

I think one big thing that a lot of indies overlook is that people WANT to help you out if you're making cool stuff. If you've got something neat, and you show it to someone, and they put you in touch with someone from Apple, that's not "cheating", that's how it happens. There's *so much stuff* on the App Store that expecting that an Apple rep will cherrypick your thing based on its quality and nothing else - yeah, it happens, but just speaking statistically, it's incredibly unlikely. Much more likely is that some person knows some other person and they showed them their thing and captured their interest. Let me be clear - I'm NOT suggesting there's some secret cabal of "in-crowd" folks that scheme together to dominate the charts. I'm saying that it's run by people. And that means it's not a robotic, "formulaic" thing.

 

Thanks, good info. It's very tough out there on the App store, I struggled to get any press at all for my first game. Definitely lessons learned though, the current marketplace seems to gravitate towards specific archetypes of games, the key is to find that special twist to make people stand up and take notice.