I am indie game developer here, what about u?

Hi there I am an indie developer too. My impression of iPhone biz is it is quite tough and competitive, I think I need to put in more hardwork for my next few releases before I can succeed.

My shoe string budget make it difficult for paid ads marketing.

 

Hello,
Yeah, I released my first game Solitaire Siege about a month ago. It’s had really nice reviews from the smaller sites and everyone that plays it, seems to like it (one site even re-reviewed it again due to people complaining about the review not been good enough, so the game definitely has it fans) but our big, big mistake was that we didn’t start to promote the game before it was already out and even then I’m not really a sales man and I always like to play things down which is not the way to be when your trying to get people to look at your game.

Sales are really poor, much worse then I expected to be honest. They did pick up a bit after releasing the free version (saying that I only think the free version has been downloaded 2000+ times), but without a lot of buzz behind your game your not going to get seen in the App store. So I guess doing well on the iPhone comes down to 40% game and 60% marketing, if not more so on the marketing side.

The way I look at it is that I’ve made a really good game which people really enjoy and I had fun making and it’s been a huge learning experience for my next game. All I need to do next time is try to make people aware of my game before hand and to get people to try it.

I personally think that if your game is fun to play and doesn’t rely on just pretty gf/x then it still stands a good chance of sell for a long time, so don’t give up and keep trying to promote your game as much as you can.

With that in mind, here’s the links to various things for my game


Solitaire Siege Intro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PrALCxAeGM
Solitaire Siege Weapons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9-vydhISV0
Solitaire Siege Game Play
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dmQc97iYvw

App Store Links:
Full
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=326694249&mt=8
LITE
http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=329619033&mt=8

Thanks,
Mike Moore.
BadBumble.com
App Store Link:
Solitaire Siege Game Page
Follow me on Twitter

 

Which review sites?

 

You are definitely going to the wrong review sites with that kind of scheme.

 

Yikes! This game does look interesting, but man, you really took a brave gamble by mashing up these themes.

Cookie Bonus Solitaire had a good run, because its name invites people to click on it and find out just what the heck it is. "Solitaire Siege" sounds like an obscure solitaire variant. I suspect most of the folk clicking on Solitaire Siege are people interested in traditional card games that end up being turned off by the war theme.

 

You live and learn

@Stroffolino
Yeah, I thought about that, but I didn't want to make anything to sweet and the update will has normal playing cards in it, and to be honest, I guessed that out of the millions of iPods out there, it would still get a decent amount of downloads and then bank on word of mouth for the other sales.

It's a learning experience I guess for everyone and my last attempt to get some sales is to try throwing some money at some web adverts and see if that helps.

Thanks,
Mike Moore.
App Store Link:
Solitaire Siege Game Page
Follow me on Twitter

 

Well I'm the owner of Cascadia Games. We launched in April more or less dedicated to the iPlatform. Since then we've released five games and one developer kit. Nobody's getting rich but we're just getting warmed up.

We've launched games at $0.99, $1.99, and $2.99. And in all honesty the more expensive games make the most money, surprise surprise. Going on sale is a nice way of getting a little bit of extra attention due to all the sales-monitoring sites out there. But I wouldn't put anything on sale longer than a week personally, as the returns diminish after the first couple of days. And I tend to only do a temporary price drop if sales have really tanked for a certain app (for reasons unknown).

I agree with most folks here that time is the biggest risk. Hence why I tend to do a lot of iteration. We've got the 4 "mini chess" games running from the same basic template. Xeno Sola, our Carcassonne-style game, may also get a twin project. And I'm currently pushing hard to develop a Halloween kart racing game, built off the TGB Kart Kit, which I developed.

Honestly I don't know how to market either. I have one ad currently running. It sits on a very targeted website. Though now that I think about the banner, it doesn't do a good job telling customers what the game is! I tend to just blog, talk on forums, etc... whatever marketing is free. I don't like to pay for anything that I don't have to!

 

For me, a lot of the autoresponder emails when I sent sites my game said that they also had advertising opportunities. Some said that you'll get reviewed sooner if you pay them. None actually said that you would get a _good_ review if you paid them though. I can't dig through all my email now, but here's some of the responses.

I got this from iPhone Footprint. I didn't pay them, and they did, eventually, review my game (one of the 2 sites that did, actually, and I sent promo codes to about 35 sites).

I got this from AppCraver (who never reviewed my game):

 

Hi, passing this along... haven't tried their services but got an email blast from them:

Apalon Studios iPhone Marketing Program
http://www.apalon.com/iphone_marketing.html

$399 and up for a managed campaign, including key words and they seem to help with art work?

--yarri

 

No answers from me. Only theories.

Without a concerted marketing campaign, there's a short window of exposure.

That means having a great app icon and excellent screenshots (and a memorable name doesn't hurt). I think I failed on all 3 of those points upon launch

Luckily Apple allows us to change all 3.

After the initial launch, I'm thinking of raising the price and adding new features. I'm also launching a limited feature, ad supported lite version so people who don't get what the game is about in can give it a try. The reception of that will tell me if I have a dud on my hand or not.

 

Well well...

I am also an indie developer like you guys and still working on my TBA iPhone game , also one of my friend just released a few weeks ago his first game called Cubic Match.

But he had suffered from the same faith as several of you, he didnt really promote his apps before the release. And looking at what happen I think this has hurt a lot . Especially the first release was thrown in page 6 of the new release due that the release date wasnt set at the right date on time.

Then he also like you tried to get reviews, but it is not easy as several of you notice. Since they are so many new games/apps getting released each day, review site cant review all of them. They have to choose which one are worth for their readers, which I can understand, so its up to us to convince them by making an astouding apps that they cant refuse .

My friend also got those email response suggesting to pay $$$ to get reviewed. But you dont even know if by paying $100 if it will really improve sales.

Cubic Match got a very nice review on AppSmile which you can read here, and according to my friend the bump in the sales were marginal and the download too.

http://www.appsmile.com/2009/09/11/iphone-game-reviews-cubic-match-surprises-as-simple-impressive-3d-puzzler/

But what we found out was that by putting an additional sub-category (kids in this case), it has make a big visibility when the update has it the AppStore during the week-end. The game even reach several top 100 in different country for the lite version and in 2 country for the paid version.

Oh but we also got another disapointment... getting ranked #45 in kids in Ireland doesnt mean you had a lot of download. Typically most top 100 were in the single digit download for most country and even toward the 0. So dont get you hope too high when you see you are #50 in Guatemala in some sub-category. Afaik it seems only in US does high ranking mean something and sadly we didnt break into it.

 

The review sites that can make a major impact to your sales won't charge you. They have good traffic and a passion for games, and they can use that to make their money in other ways, the last thing they would want to do is shake down some poor indie developer.

 

ehm, i work as a freelance illustrator and graphic designer and i made a game with a friend and will do some other ones in the future, so i am some kind of independent dev.

but i don`t think, that we will ever earned enough money with that, so we make this as a "hobby".

it`s better this way, because we mustn`t care about what the people wants and can make the stuff, we like to. (oh, this doesn`t mean, that we don`t want any suggestions from our customers…but we didn´t make anything, just for the numbers of sales.)

if some of the projects becomes a succeess, no problem.
but this isn`t our main motivation.

so, me and the progger are some kind of independent underground punkrock devs (have a look at the other apps of the progger "chain face" and "waist of time"… not really mainstream ^^).

we just make, what we like and i think, that this is th best way.
but i`m really old and i was a punkrocker in my youth (and still hate the society ), so maybe i`m a little bit different to the other iphone devs. ^^

 

Without marketing the success depends only on luck. The problem is that most of us indie developers are very bad at marketing. We know how to make a decent game, but when it comes to promotion... our knowledge stops here

We did press releases for each game we released, but that haven't made a big impact. Also, a few reviews didn't made either. For example we got positive reviews for My Squares! Here & Now! (AppStore Link:http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=322928156&mt=8) a strategy turn based board game, but without any positive impact on the sales.

So, I would be very pleased to hear ideas for good (free) promotions.

If anyone interested, we at Rapid Turtle Games have created a platform for advertising iPhone games and apps for FREE. The ads are selected and displayed at random. It's free for every developer to create an account and to submit games or apps. Statistics for impressions and clicks are viewable. This is an additional chance for developers to increase the visibility of their games and apps.

Please submit your game or app here: http://www.rapidturtlegames.com/rapidadserve/

 

My wife and I have recently started doing stuff, starting with our comic series Chibi Chaingun. Sales were slow despite our efforts to pimp it out to sites from iPhone sites to comic book sites, a custom iPhone mobile site w/ Twitter and Facebook links. We released a variety of just small apps to see how they sold. We've submitted our first game for the Halloween/Fall season, should be up soon. We recently had 2 apps approved in one week. We are still currently trying to see what sells the best for small apps. BTW - in-game advertising is a joke w/ admob. Just a joke. We had a free app that was at one point getting downloaded 250 times in a day, and we had like 2 clicks on the ad support link that day which is like... 10 cents. lol

Anyways, we've made enough to recoup the cost of our initial investment of a Mac, SDK, and iPhones. Luckily this is just a side gig for now. I actually work at a game studio full-time... which is now starting to focus on iPhone games as well, hehe. It's a pretty exciting little platform to dev on.

 

That's interesting, BlackHive, thanks for sharing your experiences.

I've personally wondered about ad-supported apps. The thing is, I believe iPod touch owners are are rarely connected to the internet, and so the ad-supported system, basically, becomes useless.

I think there was a time when iPhone devs were trying to outbid each other for customers and trying to do 99 cent apps, free apps, advertising apps, new business models etc., but now the store is so saturated, I think the customers are more willing to pay for the quality app, or the quality game.

 

I'm also an Indie Developer. My game Leaf Bound was featured by Apple after a week being in the app store.

Being featured is the key or else you won't get much exposure. I had over a thousand sales in one day when it was featured. I also had a lite version that was released a few days after that had just as much downloads.

I had posted up some video previews of my game during development and a forum member on Touch Arcade saw it and posted a thread on it. I started following up on it and it had chatter.

When the lite version was out we had front page coverage on touch arcade "lites to try".

So I think Apple pays attention to whats going on on this site and picks who should be featured.

Other than that it is hard to get a lot of sales.

With review sites they all contact you when you are featured. It is hard to get a review the other way around.

It has been since July and i'm still getting sales from it.

I'm working on my next title which is a 3D game.

 

To be honest I was starting to think about the ad-supported game idea myself, but every time I’ve downloaded an app that does this, it just annoyed me and I would end up either deleting the app or if I really liked the game, I would buy the full version, which would be rare as most of the times the ads would put me off the game so I would just go for the straight lite / free version. I have never clicked on an advert in a game ever. I get enough sale phone calls when I’m at home nagging me to buy stuff I don’t want, I don’t want them in my games as well.
I’m currently looking at the web banner adverts to see if that will help sales. The TA ones didn’t really do that much for me (excellent service and the amount of traffic that has seen my banner is HUGE), but I think that’s more down to picking the right style of site for your app as I’m guessing the majority of people who come to this site are not into card games (I could be totally wrong about this, but the click through was averaging about 400-500 views to 1 click and then it was around 150-200 clicks to a sale).
It could also be that I’m not selling my game in the right way as the people that have bought my game (Solitaire Siege) seem to rave about it. I’ve also noticed that the Americans are a lot more likely to post iTune reviews about your game, which I think really helps the sales, (thank you so much if you did post a review).
I’m now spreading my adverts across a lot of the smaller sites to see if that will help any as the way I see it, with it been my first game I’ve published by myself, it’s all a learning experience for me.
One other thing I did notice was that on the second day, I raised the price from $1 to $2 and it didn’t effect the sales at all, so I’m going to assume that the people that where interested in my game were willing to pay above $1 mark. I changed back down to $1 and it didn’t make any difference to the number of sales.

@designxtek
Wasn’t Leaf Bound build using Unity? How do you rate it? I’ve got it myself, but I really need to learn Java first before I can real use it. Currently using iTGB and it really sucks and the support you get from them is next to nothing (good job the people on the forums are so helpful).

Mike Moore
Solitaire Siege
Twitter