Hey guys, if I've missed a thread already containing this kind of thing could I be put in the right direction. As a newbie to this I'd love to hear/read all about some success stories TA members have had with their apps. Too much to ask for a little postmortem action on how y'all went? Cheers, M@
success Well Adam Atomics canabalt did pretty well. Game evil which comes here once and a while always does well too. Touch foo is another indie that has a hot game out. So there are several developers doing well. Most successful developers dont really chat with other developer too much because there is too much negativity.
Ground Effect was relatively successful depending on how you look at it. On one hand it took a year and, looking at the money it bought in, was the worst year (financially) I've had in the last two decades. On the other hand, 75%+ of that work was on my library, meaning that the game arguably only took 3 months, which would make it pretty successful. The library went on to be used for the Tilestorm games, has been ported to several platforms (if Ground Effect had charted as high on iPhone as it did on Palm Pre I'd be rich!) and helped me land a pretty decent job making iPhone tech for a big developer. Sadly this job has been too time consuming to let me do much of my own iPhone stuff and it kind of sucks to be working on cool, unique iOS tech and not able to talk about it yet.
We dabbled in the app arena with one release, Frog Checkers. As the game itself didn't have to be defined, just the new angle, it only took about 2 months to create. I don't know any longer what success is. We launched and had modest sales for about a week and were then picked up on New and Noteworthy games and our sales took off ... we did a large amount of PR and handed out codes, etc. Got a couple of reviews out if it (and one still pending), but as soon as we came off N&N, sales sagged. I think the trick would be to continue to roll out games every few months and cross-promote as well as continually run "free weekends". We're happy with the successes we had, but disappointed in how hard it is to really get momentum on one game. We are planning a "free weekend" coming up, so we'll see how that goes. Melia
Just curious Melia, did you guys get any coverage before you were featured by Apple? Or did they discover you organically? Who covered you guys? What was your approach for your PR pitch? Did you write a personalized e-mail, or send them a press release?
Nope, N&N was our first coverage. We didn't even know we were there until a friend called and told us. I have no idea how it happened, but it was fabulous. I am actually the wife of one of the developers, and in marketing and PR as a trade, so I took on much of the marketing side of things. I wrote the PR and then sent individual emails to each site. Some of the sites have key items they want answered in an email and some don't. The email was personalized for each site and then the PR was also attached. In addition, I did a follow up round once we hit New and Noteworthy. My PR pitch varied a bit, but mostly came down to a quick narration about the developers who have some serious game company chops and then a segway into their interest in making a great game that they could play with their kids. That seemed to hit a chord. We got a review on app-critic and portable gamer and Lunchbox (a kid's app site) has one pending. I think you need to be picked up by the big sites to really see any results, but who knows. HTH
I think also the TrainYard guy (Matt Rix) hangs out here if i'm not mistaken, and that game has done pretty well in the App Store.
I did think that would have been the case, shame really, would be great to get insight from them. Coming from an industry that was not competitive and was prepared to work together (when we had time), everyone had great success. @GlennX, @CodeCritical As far as downloads, what sort of numbers did you achieve? Did either of you use any paid advertising or promo codes or comps? M@ Anyone else?
Well, I think the IOS dev community is extremely open and does share a lot. I move to the ISO platform in September and everytime I was stuck, I just needed to google or post my problem on a forum. This is probably one of the most sharing community. Anyway, what kind of information do you need from the succesfull one? Simply look at what they are doing and you will already learn a lot. JC
