kick starting your new app?

hey guys

how are you guys kick starting your new apps?
do you try and get sites to do reviews?
do you place ads?
do you pay sites to publish article reviews?

what are your success/fail stories?

i am struggling to get downloads for my apps.. I've tried paying for facebook/google ads, but its no help!

it's like my apps are having 0 visibility, which means 0 downloads..

Well... having a good app, screenshots and icon is probably the most important thing. Localising the app description has helped me too. But if you're getting 0 downloads in english I am not sure it'll help that much for you. Then something else probably is the issue.

Care to share your app(s)? Hard to say without seeing how you currently present them.

Buying ads will help you get a few 100 people playing. From that you can see if the app is able to hold your players. A good app can get a 30 to 50% return the following day. If you can get 75% you are off to the races. Then you have to find a way to build on that.

The big problem is that buying ads is only part of it. You have to design your ad so that a potential player understands what your app is all about. That is very hard.

I will give you an example. A number of years ago a person who got caught in a big way with with an MLM (multi Level Business) call NASA tried to recruit me. I asked him a few question and understood the business. He had invest over $100,000 building a meeting center and recruiting friends, family etc. I told him within a week I would design an ad that would attract 100s if not 1000s of people and only use 3 lines in a Toronto newspaper called the Toronto Sun. He was spending $300 an ad and could not get any traction. When he came back I had a solution for him. We ran the ad and we had over 100 people interested within 3 hours. The ad heading read NSA Product Refund and a phone number. He was trying to sell people going into the business but there were more people trying to get out of the business. We converted his center in a location where distributors could dump their product and put list it in a computer system and sell it to the highest bided, we got 20%. Sounds like ebay doesn't it but it was before the internet. His training center was a few doors away from the head office and distribution center in Canada. We put a 4 x 8 foot sign out door right was on the road to their head office. The sign read Same Product More Profit. Within a week we were on the news, had 2 page write ups on our business, the NSA head office trying to sue us and people, the news and consumer and corporate affairs supporting us. NSA was making 80,000,000 a year in Canada and we brought their business to their knees. Because they tried to put money into people pockets by getting them to over hype and sell a garage full of product to their family and friends. Soon we had MLM cookies, herbs etc coming our way. Sellers would compete for buyers so soon the product was priced at a price that people were willing to pay. You see the product was good but over priced and when that leveled off the people pushing these business were soon out of business and the people who got sucked in got some money back and real buyers ended up with a product they could use.

Long story short. Can you design an ad for your game that can say it all in a few words with a simple graphic. If you can then if that is what players want to see they will download your game.

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Last edited by 1stSPIN; 01-20-2015 at 09:39 AM.

From a gamers point of view obviously the screenshots and the app description help sell the game. If i see bad spelling in the description or hardly anything describing what the game does i stay away

Same for screenshots, they're so important as they help sell your game.

Its worth offering promo codes, see what people think about your game. Theres also the phrase 'flogging a dead horse', if the game is simply not any good theres on point wasting tons of money on marketing it and other stuff.

For your next game create a thread in the upcoming section, ask people to beta test it and see what their feedback is like. I think one problem devs get is they seem to think the games great (as its their game) but they're then surprised when the masses see it and dont like it.

I dont agree with tons of ad's or marketing with fake reviews and other stuff just to get a few more sales when in actual fact the app just isnt that good. Not saying it is with you but its worth finding some websites to review your app (free ones) and see what they think

I keep on hearing don't spend a lot of money on promoting your game. If you do the math and you spent 3 months building your game you have a cost of at least $30,000 put into your game. If you are not prepare to put a few $1,000 dollars into ads to test the response with real players then I just don't see it. The players are not going to fall out of the sky and land on your game. You got to toot your horn a bit. But first of all you need a kick a** ad. You can test a few ads with $25 to $50 per test to see if you get some action and then when you have the right ad put a bit more cash into it. Once you have a about 500 people playing you will get a bit of a feel as to what the player playing public think of your game by the repeat plays day after day. You may need to modify the game or start from scratch and get another turn at bat.

well, i just started game dev 4 months ago, so my game ideas aren't really original, its just a clone of some games that i like so i use them as motivators to kick start myself.
having to think of a game ideas and learn the tools at the same time is too much.. and if that idea doesn't come in, its basically sitting duck (at least thats me for the last few years.. no idea -> no game dev -> no game dev skills) thats why I've decided to remake existing games to master the tools, and then from there i can branch into my own sector.. this way, i am at least learning how to do things and when that idea blinks, i am ready for it.

so the games there now, just no one downloading.. which really puzzles me.. i don't think they're all that bad, its not the best, maybe not good, but it's not bad! so why 0 downloads?

With my first game (frenzy fighter [ios]), i thought ok fine, no downloads its probably a boring game, or the icon is bad, and the screenshot sucks.. so then i go and learn unity and attempt to make something more cool, which should get me some users since its a big leap forward.. i finished it to a point where its playable (not complete), made a nice looking icon, created a preview video to test if it was the bad icon/screens from the first game and what do you know... still 0 downloads.

now if i look at the games in the market, there are a lot of apps that is worst that mine (imo) and they have at least 1k downloads.. so mine having 0 just makes 0 sense to me.

so it leads me to conclude that my games have 0 downloads because it is just not visible in the search? but this leads me to the question.. how do i get visibility in the search then? I've tried using keyword tools like appannie, sensor tower, search man, mobildedevhq, copied similar app's description / keywords but its 0 help.

this really discourages me to even build apps if i can't even get 1 person to enjoy it. the last thing i want to do is spend half a year on something and the result is just me myself and i playing it.

and the worst part is, i tell my friend to download my game to play and he tells me he can't find it. so i go and pop in dragon shooter (my 2nd game name) into search and i have to scroll down all the way to position 109 to even see it the first day i publish it.

crossy heroes - https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...s.crossyheroes
dragon shooter - https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....dragonshooter

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Last edited by mrm83; 01-20-2015 at 08:30 PM.

Just looked at it using my computer. There is nothing seriously wrong with the look. Did you build the graphics from scratch? Late I will download it and give it a try.

If everything I saw is yours you are on the right road.

Yes, I made all the sprites and backgrounds.

The shooter game i bought/downloaded some assets.