There's been talks that being in a cross promotion type of group like app treasure helps with sales of your game. I'm sure most devs had wanted to join app treasure at one point but probably did not since app treasure is pretty close. So I've been thinking of a type of developer service, it basically hosts an iPhone friendly web page that devs can easily embed into an uiwebview. so if you have 2 apps it would show them on that page. That's one part of it, but the other important part is it also allows devs to create their own group so basically devs within their group can create their own version of "apptreasure". Is anyone interested in such a service? It would be free to use .
Interesting ideas, Dunno if this could get some developer jump in, from what I see I think several developer probably prefer to make alliance with people they know and/or have similar product. And other people might prefer implement OpenFeint or other similar API that give you visibility with other games. Also I started a similar ideas, but for Facebook specifically, where people could add each other pages in their "Pages favorites" so someone visiting your fan pages could then see other game/developer pages and go take a look. Here is the thread : http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=585750&postcount=3
I'd tend to agree with Intruder_qcc's thoughts. If you're going to have a promotional "group alliance", it'll tend to be between yourself and a few developers with a similar game audience and roughly equal level of quality. No one wants to be associated with poor quality games or developers that have, shall we say, less ethical business practices... The concept of creating an iPhone friendly web page of allied apps for display in your own app is not bad though. I'd probably want to serve that up from my own web-server though to be sure no other misc apps or ads were inserted without my consent or knowledge.
Indeed what CommanderData is saying is quite true, which probably the guys at AppTreasure have band together as they know each other previously, have similar quality apps. To be link with totally unknown quality products or even worst someone with some really bad ethical business, might make you look like a supporter of this indirectly . But we definitely need a way to gain more visibility as indie developer as its difficult to have the financial to raise a big marketing campaign like bigger studios can do. And to hope Apple pick you in those special location in the AppStore aren't that high, since they have so many games available and plenty to choose but very few spaces and time.
@CommanderData & @Intruder_qcc, I think both of you brought up very valid points. I think the create group would give the creator ability to invite other devs to join, so it does not allow any other dev to just go to the page and join automatically and have their apps show up in the groups page. So sort of a moderating feature, you can invite devs, or devs can apply to express interest to join your group. As for the web page, it would basically pull information and screenshots from the appstore, but you also get the option to insert youtube videos, twitter/twitter stream. I can only think of these now, but feel free to suggest any other features on that page. Here's what ours looks like now
