Hi guys, I need validation (and traction) for an idea that would help all the indie game developers to market at very low costs and compete with big players. The idea is simple, you integrate our framework in your game. Whenever your game gets launched, it will register on our servers. But this simple idea unlocks a huge thing: an alternate to App Store for getting noticed. Initially, were maintaining these lists: What others are playing where well show games whose sessions well receive in realtime so everyone gets atleast SOME exposure Most Played as the name says, the more your game gets played, the higher it will climb. Favourites this section right now is the best window for an indie guy. Were ranking on the basis of number of sessions per person here. So games with a million users and game with just a hundred are both equals. It all depends on how much do you engage your users. I designed it so that indies will be able to compete with the Big Fishes. Everything is already ready, the developer portal, framework, the front-end. All I need is a bunch of games to bootstrap this idea. I have almost a 100 subscribers already and I am looking for more people to join in. The more games we have, the sooner we can take off. If you're interested, you can sign up for the service here If you got any questions, you can always ask me here or PM me.
Hi guys, Just an update, we've got a few developers to integrate their games with and we are now recording 35k sessions daily. You can see the real-time popularity charts for them here: www.apppulp.com/preview Would love to have your thoughts =)
Definitely looks interesting! I've asked my partner to look into it (he's the tech side of our team). I'd be curious to know how you plan to support this, ie will you be charging for ads/placement down the road?
Great. Let me know if you guys need any help. They definitely are an option but I haven't made up my mind about it yet =)
Hey Mark, hmm .. ok. Let me try to state it all a bit differently. What are you trying to do? Help quality games get noticed. I know .. but HOW? By creating charts like this: www.apppulp.com/preview where games are sorted according to their quality (the Favourites section). These charts will be displayed on my blog and will be available via public APIs to anyone who wishes to integrate it on their site. Umm .. How do you define 'quality'? For me, quality is linked highly with user engagement. Higher engagement, better quality. And how does this work technically? How do you know about the 'engagement'? You create an account at: developer.apppulp.com I give you a framework and ask you to integrate it in your game. Once you do that, everytime your game is launched, a request will be sent to Apppulp's servers. Based on that, we'll be able to compute your engagement and usage stats and place your game on those charts. OK .. and how do I integrate the framework? Its a single line of code that you add in your AppDelegate. You can follow the step by step instructions here: developer.apppulp.com/index.php/developer/how_to_integrate/ Hopefully, this ^^ will explain things better =)
My feedback is that this is probably not particularly effective. Downloads from links on websites are marginal, and these aren't even actual reviews. Downloads come from: - App store placement, esp top of charts - Personal recommendations from friends - Ads in other apps / games, ads in Facebook feed. - Facebook shares (though I think these are difficult to do well). Even PR & reviews are marginal. Most games companies see PR as a way to get Apple to notice them, in hopes of getting app store placement. PR is (surprisingly) not very good for reaching customers. Perhaps for paid games press is slightly more helpful?
Hey Mark, Thanks for the detailed feedback. Really appreciate it You're right about the download sources that the major bulk of them comes from AppStore top charts and word of mouth. But PR and press coverage do help in the longer run when the game has sunk deep down in the charts. Also, I've seen people say things like this here on the forums: "I'll wait for someone to post their impressions before buying it." If a system like this can be implemented, it will be a direct reflection of any game's performance in the store rather than a reviewer's perception of it. So maybe, it can be of help to people like these? Since the data will be available via APIs, any reviewer can include it in his article and the stats will define the game's awesomeness? Plus, you can use these stats on your own site as an assurance factor for probable gamers who are just checking it out by showing them that xxxx number of players are already playing this game and are actively engaged. Can be of some help, right?
Hey Tea, Its not live yet. We were experimenting with a couple of things and are still in the process of collecting enough games to provide meaningful results. Right now we have got around 20 live ones. 30 more to go before we can go live! Also, you can view the charts here: apppulp.com/preview
