Need some honest feedback on our API strategy please!

Discussion in 'Public Game Developers Forum' started by TapMeJared, Jan 24, 2011.

  1. TapMeJared

    TapMeJared Member

    May 6, 2010
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    Business Development / Producer
    Chicago, IL
    #1 TapMeJared, Jan 24, 2011
    Last edited: Jan 24, 2011
    Hey guys,

    I am a founder at Tap Me. We started as iPhone devs and released a couple titles. One of them was bitFLIP for iPhone which got a decent amount of press and support from Apple. We ended up having a 90% piracy rating, which turned into a little pay check from our sales.

    The best way for us to earn revenue at the would have been to add advertising, but we hated the current advertising methods. So we decided to change in-game advertising to make it match what a game developer would want. Our solution works like this: the brand sponsors a free in-game power up. The brand matches the context of the power-up making it relevant to the game and player. The player gets to choose the power up.

    The questions I have:
    1. There is currently no money being generated by advertisers, because they want us to have a million users. What would entice you (an iPhone game dev) to use our system (iComplishments.com) while there is no ad revenue?

    a) the brands are your games ( so effectively it is free advertising to the 100,000+ eyeballs we currently have in all the games with iComplishments. )
    b) we implement the api in house.
    c) we give you money to offset the development time ( about an hour for the SDK and an hour for each power up. )
    d) we purchase an internet marketing campaign for your game.
    e) we offer a free custom in-game metrics solution that allows you to see things like when and where players die, how many times they do an action.
    f) ? ? any other ideas!
     
  2. K?!

    K?! Well-Known Member

    Nov 5, 2010
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    alea iacta est
    You know Apple rejects apps all the time for having custom APIs right?
     
  3. TapMeJared

    TapMeJared Member

    May 6, 2010
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    Business Development / Producer
    Chicago, IL
    It is an SDK, since API is such a nasty word. The platform started very similar to openfeint, but it has been scaled back dramatically so we focused on our value. We have never had an app denied because of iComplishments.

    Thanks :)
     
  4. TapMeJared

    TapMeJared Member

    May 6, 2010
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    Business Development / Producer
    Chicago, IL
    No one has an opinion? I don't care if it is mean, I just need to hear it!
     
  5. Eli

    Eli ᕕ┌◕ᗜ◕┐ᕗ
    Staff Member Patreon Silver Patreon Gold

    Sent you an email.
     
  6. GregH

    GregH Well-Known Member

    Sep 12, 2009
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    My initial reaction is that it would be a significant amount of work to add a powerup to my game for this purpose. And Super Fly is built around making it easy for me to add items. Maybe I'm wrong, what specifically is involved?
     
  7. Bal Rokko

    Bal Rokko Member

    Jan 11, 2011
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    Senior Programmer
    Scotland
    Interesting idea, but the main issue i see is that the brands aren't advertised on a level playing field when you apply functionality to them, as some powerups will be better than others.

    For example, you could end up with a situation where Brand A powerup is somehow better than Brand B powerup. In the player's mind they may perceive that Brand A is better than Brand B and the developer behind Brand B may not be happy about it. When you add another 10 powerups into the mix the situation could become tricky.

    Also, who would be responsible to fix this if one (or more) of the Brand developers isn't happy? Would you apply pressure to the developer whos game has the powerups, or would it be for the developer to decide if he wanted to make adjustments?
     
  8. crazygambit

    crazygambit Well-Known Member

    Nov 15, 2010
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    I don't quite understand how it works. Maybe you could let us know which games use it (particularly free ones) so we can check it out for ourselves.
     
  9. #9 MindJuice, Jan 27, 2011
    Last edited: Jan 27, 2011
    Not sure where you got this information from, but it is wrong. There is absolutely no problem including third-party APIs in your code.

    What you can't do is call non-public APIs, which are functions that exist in Apple's code, but which they do not publicly document.

    The only third-party APIs I am aware of that caused problems for developers were ones that called non-public APIs.
     
  10. K?!

    K?! Well-Known Member

    Nov 5, 2010
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    Sorry, I got private and custom mixed up:eek:

    The OP does sound like a good idea, but I assume that there would be more advertising than just the power up, or else the user wouldn't know what company it represented. This could be a problem with more than a few advertisers.
     

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