You are indie developer and launched a great game. Then sent out tons of press releases, got a lot of promo code requests, were happy to give codes to journalists and instead of buzz you got... silence... The first reviews can be published even in few weeks after release. How those developers that have reviews in the day of release do that??? Are journalists and bloggers lying when they say they like the game and want to queue it? It's so confusing to me and to lots of other guys...
unfortunately you will find marketing is at least 1/3 of the work required in making a successful game and is something that needs proper planning if you want to be truly successful unless you have a compelling product that can spread purely virally, in which case find those 100 fans and get them to talk about your product!
it is a lottery... there are many, many quality titles out there... from a game dev perspective, I make the games that are interesting to me and hope the best. Do you know what happened to Schubert? Great composer, he made a ton of great music ... for his drawer. And even Mozart was buried in a mass grave for the poor. So keep on working, if you don't get rich try to find a day job and work during the night. Perseverance wins!
Well, most big devs send out ad-hoc builds to review sites so that they can have their reviews ready before the game is released in the appstore. Thats how the reviews for most big games are up within a day or two of it`s release.
But what about small indie devs? They work hard on a game, sending promo codes to millions of review sites, they waited looooong but only to find out the codes were wasted. No one cares about the game at all. Im assuming that it makes some sense if the game is lame itself to some extent, but what if it's not? I mean who determines its good or bad, to the reviewer's own taste or the current hype? Like the Doodle Jump is recently drawing alot of eyeballs so many follow-ups like......and......(just to name a few) and games with art style a lot like Doodle Jump are the hot cakes in the market?
Even though most indie devs can't get the attention of big sites for adhoc distribution, what's wrong with finding smaller, but growing websites and sending them a build of your upcoming game? A lot of the smaller sites are more than happy to get an exclusive preview of your game! Of course, getting reviewed by TouchArcade is top on my marketing list, but that isn't always possible. Always strive for the best, but make sure that you have a pan B
