Hey all. My buddy and I just submitted our first app last Tuesday (sept 22) and are awaiting approval. I am the designer and my buddy us the coder but neither of us is much of a marketer which I think is often the case for indie devs. We think we have a unique game concept so we pretty much kept it under wraps during development. Now I am hearing that a better strategy may be to try and get a following of interested people as early as possible prior to release. What are your thoughts? How do you go about doing that? I made a YouTube video and keep a little blog. We haven't done facebook or Twitter yet, I guess we should. I posted in the upcoming games section here and a few other review sites. What else can you do? Any thoughts or shared experience appreciated.
Nice concept, though it's hard for me to figure out exactly how gameplay works from the video alone. As far as marketing, I imagine you can probably find a lot of good advice around the forums. I think there's probably more room for creative marketing post-release, but obviously submitting to review sites like you've done, and any other way to generate interest; try to find player advocates by giving away promo codes and asking people to spread the word. Otherwise, I just posted a list of iPhone blogs on my site and I added yours as well. Good luck.
Thanks for linking up my blog. Our app is now live! We weren't really expecting it so soon, but I guess now I need to figure out how to market a live app which seems equally baffling to me. I did get some good advice to create a press release though. The website suggested to me was www.prMac.com. Hope this is helpful to some.
The best way for developers to market for me (here on toucharcade) is to communicate actively with the fans and people who are considering buying the game in your respective thread. I love developers who are active here and it makes me want to buy the game so I can reccomend things to the developer directly and get any issues I have addressed
Indeed like other people mentioned you have to start marketing your product before its sent to Apple and/or its live on the AppStore. That why I have been on the forums, twitter for now months... building contacts/friends a long the way. And now I am starting to slowly ramp up the business side by creating another twitter account, a business facebook page a youtube channel and working on setting up a web/blog as I am writing this. Though you have to be careful/decide what you want the public to know to interest them. But maybe also don't give it everything away which sometime can be used by competitors to come out before you and/or also if its too early you might loose interest from your potential customer (thinking its vaporware never to come out, etc...). The twitter + facebook + youtube are quite easy to setup and can be quite useful to spread word around rapidly without too much effort or cost. As most indie like you and me wont have the $$$ to spend on big advertising campaign that developer such as EA, GameLoft can afford. You seems to already have a youtube channel so its a start ;-). I subscribe to your channel from both my personal account and business account too! Quite a nice trailer and its sure does look like an interesting take on golf ;-). Wish you luck!
personally [as well as other on TA] LOVE when a dev takes the time to speak to ppl on forums, shows devotion that ur actually a dedicated dev who is willing to make the game great as possible
I agree that the dev needs to be active and aware of what their customers are saying. I am not the best at being active in forums I'll admit which is obvious by my junior status despite being a member for quite awhile. I guess it's not really my personality which I think is a challenge as well to indies, in that they have to be their own marketers whether or not it suits them. Another tip I got today that I thought was important, is just be prepared with all your promotion resources for when you app hits and have ALL your marketing hit together that same day as well. (promotions, twitter/blog/facebook updates, etc..) Well now I know. Our app went live a little earlier than expected.
Hi! I would only show it early if it was something innovative, and not easy to copy. That's the danger of telling the world too soon. You want to be first with your idea, but not announce it too soon so that someone can copy it and release it before you do. If you announce it too soon and it's not impressive at that point, people will only be like "meh, looks boring, I'll pass". If you announce it early, you may get multiple press coverages, which is good. The caveat is that if news sites get sick of your nagging, they might not even cover it when it actually comes out. It's a fine balance. Getting into the top #100 and getting featured is the best you can do, in any way possible. The exposure you get is better than anything you can afford. Dropping your price to $0.99 will most likely not help getting you into the top #100 btw. Regarding the trailer I would normally not watch the whole video. It's too long and if you don't catch my attention within 10-20 seconds I'll move on. It's well done, but it's a bad trailer. Get a proper website. Customers care about a proper site a lot. Atleast buy a domain name, they are very cheap and yes you may want to reserve your company name. Be active on forums and on Twitter -- it's free. Good luck!
I agree that the trailer drags the intro out too long to hold people's attention, you make a good point. There are other things that I would like to change in the trailer as well. Does anyone know how to overwrite a video uploaded to youtube? I would prefer to just replace the existing one with changes to preserve all the links I've left all over the place. Anyway, this is our first game and it was a learning curve to learn everything, which is why we picked a pretty simple concept. We feared people copying it before it came out. Anders, while I don't think that your next game will be simple to clone there is a bit of intrigue as I look at that "new game soon" in your sig. You guys have such great brand recognition imho that I think that sort of anticipation/mystery is working for you. Thanks for your feedback. Getting into the top lists would be awesome, I agree that dropping the price is not the way to do it. You guys are known for sticking to your guns on pricing which I think is good for the app store. I just grabbed our domain name. Can't wait to see what you guys have up your sleeve!
Just my personal comments, there is no right or wrong Good you grabbed the domain name, they don't cost much nowadays, so it would be silly not to grab it. Hope things work out great! And if not, don't give up. Have fun. Eventually anything that you're passionate about will generate money sooner or later.
You can see how many peoples use cracked version of your app, and then try to release it in Cydia, for free or paid. We made this for Sea Battle Classic when working on Global Multiplayer version, its give us positive feedback.
Marketing 101 I'm no marketing expert so take these suggestions with a grain of salt I'm more of marketing intern really Heres a short list of typical marketing endeavors: -setting up a website/blog -tapping into social networks with a facebook and twitter profile -pushing adverts on facebook/dig mobile/whatever you can afford -participating in forums such as this TA forum or setting up your own forum -cross promotion -setting up a team of marketing/testing/QA/social media marketing interns -getting press/blog coverage -running social media and advert campaigns -code promos, contests and give-a-ways -price bait and switch (drop it to free then raise the price when you hit the top 10 if you hit the top ten) which is lame -video distribution youtube vids gamplay vids game trailers ect In terms of what the content should be...... I always find that developer commentaries, walkthrus, dev dairies ect are extremely fascinating to me rather then directly come out and telling me hey this game has this this and this feature i would rather hear the story about how you actually came up with all the ideas behind the features and what challenges you faced and overcame when developing the game but thats just me It seems like your gameplay depends alot on beautiful artistic still images what you can do in the short term is have a community challenge or sm marketing campaign and push for user generated content LIKE CRAZY have contests with prizes and whatnot and if you dont have much participation or as much as you would have liked make it look like you did and fake it as much as possible and try again another thing use artists and painters with marketing campaigns like for instance do a press release saying that this this and this insanely popular and skilled artist is now composing images for our game have votes and discussion about new features or votes on the best new images to include in the next update or what not and thats all i can come up with from the top of my head hope this helps D
Having followed this thread I thought it was pretty cool to see Invisible Links featured in the app store today. Congrats!
Thanks! We were surprised and excited to see it on there yesterday! Wordfall sounds great by the way. I will watch for it. @Cubytes. Great Marketing ideas. I will keep this list as a great reference. I would love to get an artwork contest for new levels going. Any suggestions on how to carry out the specifics of that? Better yet has any one noticed a successful contest that devs could reference as a good model? Now that we got featured what are some ways to ride that visibility? I think announcing an update is a great idea (which we have Halloween levels coming) also maybe new videos showing more gameplay. I don't necessarily buy in to the whole $.99 sale at least in our case. Not to start a huge pricing discussion, but I agree with what illusion labs has done by building a reputation for sticking to their prices no matter what. It builds trust with customers to know that they may as well buy now cause you're not going to screw them the next day with a price drop. We are also working on a light version to try and take advantage of the visibility as well. This thread starting by talking about preparing BEFORE release which I think is the main point. We'd be much better off if we had all this already to go prior to release. I hope this discussion helps devs preparing their app before release to think about these things. edit: we did in fact try the $.99 sale the weekend that golf was announced as returning to the olympics. We had to be convinced by a "marketing guy" to do it. We'll see how it goes. I often feel like I'm just guessing when it comes to marketing.
A question I wanted to ask... When trying to create buzz for my game by making videos and making a dev thread in TA, I feel that it doesn't create that much buzz for me, even though I have a dev blog talking about updates to my game. My concept good, and I even try to have TA people help me out on what to update it with, but I'm unsure how to market it more.
@Johannvonstranovic my bad i forgot all about this thread until i saw the game in the new and noteworthy section on the appstore congrats on that by the way as far as promotion and contests goes --theres a facebook app that we used in the past i dont remember the name of it right now but it was super easy to organize and deploy promotions and contests across facebook however we didnt get much play from the promotion for our site in the way we used it maybe you might have more luck.... the Halloween idea is awesome i can really see episodic content especially themed content packs definitely working for this game a la pocket god working down the road just thinking ahead it might be a good idea to open up in app purchases for the episodic content and if your feeling really creative and it takes off as in hits the top ten and the promotion or contest takes off it would be awesome to have some way like say if i was an artist to draw some crazy golfed up images and sell them in your app (if i was an artist that is) and share the take 70/30 with you golfed up ads? as in games music products and services..... golf up the mona lisa just golf it up really.....
ahh ha i found it -- http://www.wildfireapp.com/ but like i said we didn't get much play from it but the idea that you can make up some sketches and they might make it in the game and if they do you get cash prizes plus the fact that thousands and thousands (hopefully) of ppl will be playing your sketch in the game would really be more appealing then the way we used it basically we just said sign up on our site and win blah hope this helps D
Featured List I've submitted my first game recently and was wondering how is it going to get noticed in the thousands of apps already in there. Is getting in the featured lists the only way to get noticed? Is the app store saturated? Thanks for all the great marketing concepts posted here.. I implemented few of those, now can only hope
Thanks for finding that link. I will check it out when I get a chance. @rohitvats it looks like a great new puzzle game. That's probably the most important part, is to make a great game that people like to play and are excited to share with others. The pre-release marketing advice I would give on that one is to beta test your game early on. Just a couple of friends or so at least. From what I can see, it looks like a great idea though The puzzle genre is very saturated as is the app store in general. Marketing is a difficult often thankless task. The big names seem to be dominating the review sites more and more unfortunately, but the point is that the app store still is a place where we have the chance to compete side by side with the biggest game makers in the world and in the rare case, beat them at their own game Good luck! Stick with it. If not this game then maybe the next, it looks great though!
I think one thing underestimated by developers, in marketing terms, is the importance of images. These review websites that have to filter through hundreds of submissions each week, the best way to stand out is a good-looking, sexy image. If your game isn't especially a graphical game, commission an artist to make promotional artwork that inspires the idea of the game and be sure to include it with all PR material. They say you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but it's what makes people at least pick up the book.
