Hi all! What are your top suggestions for letting people find out about your game? iPad in particular, if it makes much of a difference. Let's just say that you really believe in the idea of the game and think it's fun, so you believe that if more people knew about it, it could be good. For what it's worth, and I'm new to the whole App Store thing, here are things I tried: - write to many review blogs, or general tech blogs who might be interested - write to friends & family and blog about it - write to certain newspapers, magazines, TV shows or web shows who might be interested But then again, I guess that's what everyone else does, too, so I'm curious to hear more.
Hi, Marketing especially startups, start out in small groups. I actually opened up a page so that I can help out the smaller startups and the just launched games, still haven't got much people there yet, but I know it takes time to build a client base, then it will be viral after that. Some people might say luck that Apple features their games, but I think it's about quality and persistence, keep trying, don't give up. Before you even design a game, research on demographics, what OTHERS are paying for and emulate that effect, I'm not talking about being a copy-cat, but something that hold the structure of the popular games that causes people to talk about it and get addicted to. well, that's just my 2 cents , hope that helps!
there's a lot you need to research in this matter. If you are serious about getting into the business, know this: you will need to spend more time marketing your efforts, than actually putting together your app, if you want to give it the best chance of being successful. The novelty is worn off and new apps by no-name devs just don't attract much attention anymore (unless there's some really hi-tech stuff going on there, or a particularly remarkable gimmick). You definitely need to spend a lot of time building up a strong social network, at the very least. Post regularly on TA and get visibility on other hi-profile gaming sites wherever possible. Create and maintain active blogs/twitter/facebook. Engage the community and give them reason to recognize your brand and talk about you. Partner with other developers to cross-promote. Try to design something viral which will spread the word for you. Run promotions, become incredibly social wherever and however you can, and work it - typing a couple tweets here and blog updates there is tantamount to doing nothing. If you have money it is the fastest way to accelerate things (you can pay people with know-how to do all this stuff for you) but of course that can start to cost you serious money, and you need to do thoughtful and careful research in just what's the best agent to partner with. iPhone app development is not merely about joining this big club and making games and having fun, it's a ridiculously saturated market with thousands of hopeful candidates scrapping and clawing over one another for eyeballs. Watch carefully and humbly, and exercise some clever creativity and you may just find your niche as well
Very interesting stuff so far, I got a question... How would you go about finding such an agent to partner with? And very roughly how much money would one need to invest?
Again, you need to do work to research it. A few people have brought it up in this forum, and so searching/asking will land you a few answers. Googling will definitely get you started as well. TA is great with the developer community, lots of people are often willing to share info and help one another out, you just need to know how to ask and be a little patient How much could it cost? This all depends on a lot of things. It's really down to how much money you think your app potentially can make, again based on research - and then, how much cash you are willing to spend. It does sound silly, but you see billboards on the sides of buildings and buses, you can only imagine how much $$ that will run you - that's probably where you need to be at this point to actually stick out from the countless apps on the store at this point!!! I'm half-joking, but still, for a serious dedicated effort, you could be spending thousands of dollars per day just for online advertising, depending on who you are using. You can of course scale that down to a couple hundred total for much lower impact, and get some banner ads up on some sites here and there, but I'd say it's honestly not worth doing that level these days, based on what I've heard. Be prepared to spend money on something. I'll say this much, I've spent over a thousand bucks doing advertising/promotion on my own, and still not earned it back.
