Any serious review site buys all their own games. Seems kind of weird to be critiquing games you got for free otherwise. The only promo codes that are useful to us are pre-release codes.
I really enjoy promo code contests because it's an opportunity for me to interact with TA users. We try to conduct promo code contests that are fun and creative. Many TA users are quite gifted artists and writers. It's amazing to see what they can produce! For one of our current contests, I decided to have MidianGTX come up with the concept and host the contest. Midian's super creative (more so than I am) and he came up with a really fun idea. http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=41283 I paired up with Midian based on his response to one of our earlier promo code contests, which was to guess the story/plotline of our current game, The Horrible Vikings. A lot of people in that contest wrote amazingly funny and creative answers. Did the promo contest lead to increased sales of The Horrible Vikings? I have no quantitative data that could answer such a question definitively. Did the promo code contests bring attention to the game? Absolutely. There are many wonderful TA users who strongly support indie developers and will spread news of your game. If you need creative inspiration, perhaps you can PM MidianGTX and see if he has any good ideas that will inspire you. Also, the rules regarding promo codes, are posted here - http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=3726
I don't think promo codes are a very useful tool, as Eli pointed out its a bit hard to trust a review where the player got it for free. In my experience, customers who are excited about our games/apps will write about them, make videos, and generally give us free, honest publicity with no effort on my part. Further, a lite version is way more likely to get people off the fence and try your game than the paltry amount of word-of-mouth generated by contests and giveaways. I've given out very few promo codes for either of our games, mostly because its like a full-time job figuring out who's legit and who's not. It's crazy how many requests I get, some of which from tiny sites I've never heard of, or kids looking for free games. The most offensive e-mails I get are from people who are impersonating legitimate sites - one was claiming to be Arn from this site, but using some bogus hotmail account (clever). After that experience I just decided any e-mail with the phrase "promo code" gets filtered to my spam folder. My policy is to give them to people or establishments I know and recognize, but in general I've never seen any review or press coverage give a meaningful increase in sales. Giving them out to random people is pretty fruitless.
