4 month's hard work,only 40 sales for 4 days :(

I agree with all the theme change iDeas, and you definetely need to work on hooking people.. Even your signature which says a little fun game IMHO would be 99% more attractive if you said a fun little game.. Small changes in wording and adjective use make a huge difference.. And I agree it is necessary to recreate the game.. and while zombies are a good theme idea.. They are overused something original would do much better.. Also don't do something to ruin it for the 40 people who bought your game. I have allot of suggestions but typing on my iPod is to tedious maybe tomorrow..

 

In addition to what everyone said, try changing your description by putting the reader "inside the action". Make it in a way as if the reader "experiences" your game just by reading your description. Of course, this takes a lot of effort and time but it works for most apps--just look at the descriptions of Doodle Jump, Skee-ball and other top sellers.

 

muxinzi, you can try pm:ing again. I cleared some space.

 

For the record, I LOVE Timo's "Master Chef" idea. If you made them all foods and vegetables and you had to chop the vegetables into the pan and then if you succeeded doing all the vegetables, and it showed the finished dish, that would be awesome!

You could even add a sally's salon type progression, where the background changes as you level up; so you might start in your kitchen at home, then you get promoted to a cook in a dirty café, slowly reaching higher for the "MASTER CHEF" position at the most expensive restaurant in the city!

 

For the master chef idea it would make sense that each dish had a order that the ingredients had to be added so you had to chop them up within a time limit and in the right order to get the dish made correctly.

Also, for a zombie cutting game you could have the character with his back to you at the bottom and zombies come straight at you at different heights and speeds and you had to cut off the heads with a swipe before they got to you. The longer you survive the better. To really keep a game like that interesting would need a lot of variety of tools to use to cut off heads with a good amount of variations of animations for what happens when they get cut off so you don't get bored looking at it. The "wow I can't wait to see what happens when I unlock weapon xxx" factor could carry that game.

 

There are some great reskinning ideas put forwad in this thread, but I have a more fundamental question: The developer is disapointed in 40 sales in four days. How many sales were they expecting and what were those expectations based on? What would constitute "good enough" sales?

 

40 sales and 8 reviews? not bad.

 

Yeah, I mean, when I bought Fumbers I was NorEagle's second customer. I don't know if things have improved since.

 

I suggest that, apart from considering the suggested improvements to your game & game description, you should also spend more time on marketing.

It doesn't look as though you've spent too much time on that part of the business (apart from that cool video). Please correct me if I'm wrong on that one but I couldn't find too much about your game when I searched online.

It's been said on this forum time & time again - effective marketing is half the battle & arguably as time-consuming as the initial development. That means getting your game reviewed on different sites, sending out press releases, keeping your forum thread current with news etc, organising promo code giveaway, paying for advertising etc etc... Even with all of that, there's no guarantee of success but at least you'll know you tried your best.

I personally would hold off going free until you've really tried the 'traditional' methods. Two reasons - first, some sites might not be interested without a strong track record of consumer interest. Second, unless you have DLC, want to test the market's response to your game, have a great game that has languished in obscurity for ages or have an update on the way, I can't really see the point.

And I wouldn't hold my breath for an Apple feature if I were you as they're not necessarily the magic bullet that they used to be - (Case in point is Starpagga, currently featured under What We're Playing under Games in iTunes but not setting the world alight by any means).

Overall though - 40 sales in 4 days with no discernible (by me) marketing effort strikes me as pretty good going. Don't be too disheartened - one of the upsides to the App Store is that it's a huge market & the number of consumers is increasing rapidly & so there's always scope for another bite of the cherry.

Good luck

 

The easiest marketing is making an official TA and related forums thread and putting some promo codes up (I recommend you make them PM obtainable only - lurkers aren't good reviewers, but lots of TAers are). This is a good place to start, I freaking love this site.
Guessing someones already mentioned this though.

 

Rule #1, you don't EVER send promo codes to a site unless they express interest. You just wasted 30 promo codes.

Forget ads, they do not work. Only buy ads if you are a Top 100 game and remain consistent for at least a month. Ads are wasting money.

AdMob is a joke unless you have a bajillion copies out there.

PR is too late. You should have started PR before the game launched. By now, you game is not featured under NEW. You have an extremely narrow window of opportunity, and waiting until the 4th day to ask for suggestions is way too late. This is a hard lesson to learn, and I am sorry.

I don't want to be entirely discouraging, but there are only tiny things you can do at this point. It is doubtful that you will get featured, but I have seen several games pull this off and get featured 2 months after launch.

Use the promo codes that you have to raise awareness about your game. If you happen to have a Twitter account, use that to raise awareness of your game and give out promo codes. I was able to gather about 100 people within a couple days by giving out codes. Previous to that, I created several contests to give out codes. DO NOT post codes publicly. For every code you give out, you should immediately receive something else in return- either a review (a real written review), or a couple of Twitter followers or SOMETHING.

 

one way is to release the game under new name, updated graphics?
ofc you need your marketing prior release this time/
just my 2c

 

Frankly, no, I might have reached 40 copies since the release though.

 

Flickitty you give the best dev advice ever lol.

 

A million times this. You only get 50 promo codes and throwing them out into nowhere and getting nothing in return is kind of a bust, you'd be better off giving them away to friends.

Our first released app, How Am I Feeling, I went this route and ended up having 50 redeemed codes and not a single review - which was very discouraging. Now I know that promo codes are a commodity, and some people WILL work for them - you have to utilize these people to make it worth both your while.

Great advice, Flickitty!

 

Flickitty's advice is good re promo codes. I had a good time giving away 25 promo codes for SteamPunk Hockey (SPH), and a few winners kindly posted reviews.

About half were taken by unknown parties, and pirated copies sprang up the next day. So a more direct PM-style contest might work better for you.

SPH was featured in a free app a day promotion, which led to reviews, exposure, some charting and material for a press release. I think these helped sales also.

Very best luck to you!

 

I am Shocked to see this