Hi. I'm the developer of Pinch. Our game has been out for a while now, and I've been trying to get in touch with the creators of the site since then. I've been sending emails to [email protected], sending promocodes, offers to preview unreleased updates etc. with no reply. Meanwhile I see plenty of more recently released games get reviews very quickly. I understand that they can't review every game they recieve, but I was just wondering if there's anything else I can to do to at least get a response, if not a review? Thanks.
They only pick something up if they think it is interesting & fun to TA readers. Try getting someone to do a user review.
I wish I knew, the key seems to start early and getting your maketing/things together before release, releasing beta's before hand maybe? pinch seems like a fun game though I'd buy a copy today but I'm seriously broke (to the point of overdrafting :/ ) but I put buying it on my todo list for friday though you may also want to make a different video, the changing scenes in the other post makes it really hard to understand.. also for a user review a friend of mine is really into puzzle games on her ipod, if you still have any promo codes left I can send it to her and see if she'd be into writing up a review
I'll have a look at TouchArcade's advertising opportunities, though we recently spent 400 quid on an advert elsewhere that made virtually no impact to our sales. That's not to say we won't do any more advertising, but we're going to be a lot more careful in future. A user review sounds like a good idea. AnthonyL, who's your friend? btw, we made several videos. Which one were you referring to, Anthony? Thanks for your feedback so far folks.
the video here, http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=54759 my friends not a real TA user, but is a great writer! edit: also I only really checked the top video .. it turns out theres many more! sorry about that I'm at work right now can't gawk to long at game videos
Not true. "Dave" was featured 3 weeks after release once one of their writers had a look at it. I didn't advertise and I didn't even solicit him to look, although I had contacted the site several times before. Dave was one of the top games before TA even noticed it so it's never too late either. TA has a ton of requests so even if your game would interest them it is possible they have simply overlooked it.
Yeah, the original poster was pretty cynical. For another bit of evidence, no one at TA has ever responed to any of my many requests for reviews and I also did have a banner ad for Super Juicy for a while. I chalk it up to the number of requests they get. Another site (TouchGen) liked the game so much it got mentioned as a best of 2009 and Apple has featured the game for almost 8 weeks straight on ipad now.
Hey Wroth, Yeah, we're bad about responding to emails. Sorry about that. For what it's worth, I think you did a good job letting us know about your game. I saw the video that you sent early. I thought the video was interesting/promising, but not necessarily enough to write a preview about it, but I flagged it as a game I would check out when it came out. I played through most of it when it came out. I thought it was good, nice multi-touch game concept. A bit easy through much of it. Thought it would be a better game on the iPad due to the amount of panning. But I liked it enough, and meant to write it up either as a short piece or in a group with others, but it just slipped through the cracks at the time. Ads don't have any influence in whether or not games get reviewed. We'll get something up on Pinch still. arn
I'm interested in your game, honestly this post on the dev forum has clued me into it's existence (you'd be surprised how often that happens!) I looked at your video and it went by so quickly that I had no idea what was happening, what the game was about. When you make a launch vid, make sure you try to always keep it in the perspective of someone who'd never seen or read anything about the game before, as most folks will see it under those circumstances. A good way to do this is to test it a lot (show it to people on twitter, in a forum, etc) and ask for feedback from first-time viewers. Good luck!
Thanks very much Arn! We've been addressing the ease/length issue with updates so far. 1.1 was approved last week, containing 12 extra levels, and we just submitted 1.2 on sunday, containing another 12. If you'd like, we can send you an adhoc build to preview before it's approved/released. We're working on a zooming function for the game for 1.3, aswell as preparing an iPad version (we have some interesting ideas for that). The first video on the page isn't really a trailer. It was just something quick we knocked up to celebrate the game's release. The other videos below it go into a lot more detail.
Also, I believe that having a big thread like LASW did helped, with forum members clamoring for a front page mention.
If you've got an awesome preview to show them or your thread gets some serious traction you'll get up there. I've noticed that TA generally talks about games that are great - which for that same reason gives them the reputation that they have. Hopefully one of the games we work on will get to that level
