As the title states, my game (Game of Loot) is not returned in the results when searched for in Google Play Things: 1)It has been published since the 30th of July. 2)If you search gameofloot it will work 3)If you search with the quotes "Game of Loot" it will work. 4)However, using only the games name it will return a single game with loot in the title and then Clash of Clans and others all the way to the last (200th) result. (Really Google. Clash of Clans. Really! It's the 'of'? But I digress.) 5)iOS has about 25x more downloads... I'm guessing due to this. If discovery wasn't enough, now you have to convey the idea of using quotes to find it? Is there anything I can do to fix this? Cheers,
Something else further alarming is that googling the game title with the platform (Game of Loot Android) on my PC, it does not link me to the game on Play store. I know this might sound strange but I tend to find new apps via my PC and I install them to my device like that.
I had similar experiences. At first, even entering exact name (one word though) returned my game somewhere at the bottom of search results, but that quickly resolved itself. But when searching for related phrases, it was a total mess. Google would put games that do not contain any similar word in the title nor in description, before mine, which had title similar to the phrase and contained the exact phrase in the description. I tried refining my app description, but to no avail. It remained pretty much undiscoverable unless you use exact title. Nowadays, searching for related phrases will not show my game in the search at all, but it will happily show me stuff that is not related. I kinda have the feeling this is a penalty for not updating it with new version of Vungle SDK yet. I received notification that I use older version of Vungle that has some issues and that I should update. But I was way too busy with another project to actually do that. So I think this might have something to do with my recent discoverability issues.
It comes up if you search the name in quotes. I had the same issue when I released Cubix Challenge on Android. First it took a couple of days to populate the stores, but Google will always place games with higher downloads that contain the same keywords that are in your game. The name Game of Loot contains super popular keywords for a lot of big games so you're going to get pushed down the search results there. To me it still seems silly, it's amazing how low I was initially on the results when searching for Cubix Challenge which contains the word 'Cubix'! Hopefully you'll soon be added to the 'top new free' list for one of the categories, though those one's are a bit trickier to rank in than the 'top new paid'. Good luck, regardless!
Huummm... Maybe the next game I make will include some made up name? Like Verizon did in the phone business. Maybe that is a good strategy. The annoying part is that it doesn't show up at all. Not at all. Sucks.
This is a good strategy - ish Game of loot, once it has installs, will start showing up in other searches. Like Loot. Or Game of Thrones. Or Matching Game. You'll get visibility in some edge case searches. Coming up with a unique name is a) hard, unless you're going for a delicious pun like I did with Pickpawcket, and b) it doesn't show up accidentally for anything which could hurt visibility in the long run. Recap: Short term gains: Unique Name. Long Term play: Common Name (as long as you get some marketing muscle behind you)
Just to follow up for anyone in the future that has this issue... I guess the title 'Game of Loot' was a bit common for apps. It eventually ranked high enough to make it's way into the search results...after 5 weeks. This was especially painful as any buzz created was mitigated by the fact that a potential player couldn't search for it on google play and subsequently download it. Since then I have noticed many devs have experienced this issues... Keep it in mind if you're making ad spends. iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id1016781837 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.superultrahyper.gameofloot
