My App Release: What am I doing wrong?

[Appvism]

I guess art and design comes down to personal tastes - i like the style from your screenshots.

It seems like you're quite well organised and sorted with regards to your release strategy and marketing! Definitely try and build up your social stuff, like tweet and blog post updates - and provide teasers such as new screenshots and short videos to build up momentum?...

Good luck, looking forward to this game!

[deemen]

I don't see any big problems with your release plan. A lot of things you will only be able to tweak post release (like whether your monetization is working as expected).

The main point of feedback I would make is that your icon is not attention-grabbing enough and a lot of people already mentioned the aliasing on the lines and the simple graphics. I agree simple is great for gameplay, but in this case a bit of work to make the colors match better would definitely help.

As for the icon, try A/B testing it on ad networks and compare it to a bunch of icons from the app store side-by-side. My opinion is that yours won't stick out compared to the competition.

[TheFootballPlaybook]

@DemonJim I actually removed the centre circle, d's at each goal box, penalty box and spot. I was matching the tactics boards you see in newspapers analysing team movement. I think if the initial release is unsuccessful I will add them back in as well as sensi style player animated players. I am doing up shop front screenshots now and feel there is enough football imagery to make it clear it is football. Also some of the art style is inspired by panini football stickers, I use to collect them as a child


@Appvism hey! Glad you like it. I am actually planning to do a walk through video of the games menu system and the first few puzzles and link to it from within the game. I wanted to say I like your website, especially how it looks on tablet. Did you make it yourself? I am looking to change my site for release.

@deemen yeah I think the aliasing is a problem I should invest time in. I like the icon but your right it is quite plain.

[Phil128]

a little tip from my side.

i just released two apps so far. both of them are priced. when i set the pricing to free for the first time i got about 5k downloads in two days. if you want to go free anyway. i would set a low price in the first month, and after this period set it to free.

there are a lot of apps and websites out there which look for price drops and will give you free reputation.

[Appvism]

Originally Posted by Phil128

a little tip from my side.

i just released two apps so far. both of them are priced. when i set the pricing to free for the first time i got about 5k downloads in two days. if you want to go free anyway. i would set a low price in the first month, and after this period set it to free.

there are a lot of apps and websites out there which look for price drops and will give you free reputation.

I've read quite a number of times this approach to drop to free in order to get picked up by relevant sites and such like. I guess this would aid exposure and help increase downloads but does it increase sales? But good tip anyway - especially if you are planning on going free anyway...

@theFootballPlaybook
Yeah, just quickly knocked up my site really fast with little testing! (I use to do frontend web dev work) I did use css media queries to present the site better on different sized screens, which is probably why it looks ok on tablet...

Cheers,

[DemonJim]

Originally Posted by Appvism

I've read quite a number of times this approach to drop to free in order to get picked up by relevant sites and such like. I guess this would aid exposure and help increase downloads but does it increase sales? But good tip anyway - especially if you are planning on going free anyway..

In my experience going free does increase sales long-term but only if you get in the order of 100k+ downloads while free - otherwise the extra userbase isn't really significant enough to get noticeable word-of-mouth exposure.

[Appvism]

Definitely a good idea to try and increase downloads for sure!

[TheFootballPlaybook]

@phil128i don't think i can do that with this game. My main competitor is free plus the pricing model I have is that you get the first level pack for free then you hit a paywall for more level packs. I could have a paid version with a few level packs already unlocked but I couldn't then make it free.

Strange thing is that my main competitor released a pro version for 69p shortly after the free version. The free version is fremium with in game currency. Any ideas why they did that?