I'd love to hear of some late successes. It's hard for a new, non-featured app to land a spot on a top list. It's almost impossible for an older app to do so.
No offense to anyone out there.... Just speaking my mind as I always have done. Haven't read any posts apart from ur title & this one by eev. The animation IS indeed funny... I did check Vid. again for their expressions I'll be as polite as I can, its a totally new kind of game as per my knowledge, Not intriguing PpL, its like a game I can live without playing. No Zombies, No BloodShed, there is nothing related to Ninja in the game, you are just sorting chickens... thts it! PpL love games where there is a storyline, has bloodshed, felonies to achieve like GTA, Pro Zombie Soccer, Stair dismount, Pocket God, Zombie wonderland, Doodle Army & a Gazillion othr such games. If you noticed, PpL have put Zombie Wonderland in Top 10 (if I am not wrong) in less than 3 weeks? Its always good to go through a publisher for 1st few games till the Devs get the exposure IMO
The game looks fine, but the 2 man-years+ that went into it is crazy. I don't know what's going on there, but in general it's really hard to get that many people involved in a small, fast project without them stepping all over each other. My guess would be that you need smaller teams or tighter organization. And realistic expectations.
If You release anothr game without enough promotion, tht cost will add to the burden. EDIT: A Free promotion Helps! Don' believe me? read along: Check this link about Major Warhead When Games from Big players like EA's titles such as NFS Undercover & Shift have sold for 99 cents, how can you expect the economy to Spare you?
Free promotion *can* help - doesn't mean it always does, or that it even does half the time. I got over 340,000 downloads of Pollywog when it was free for a few days. A week later I was getting less than 20 downloads a day (at 99ยข) now I rarely see over 5 downloads a day. The only thing a free promotion is pretty much guaranteed to do is get you a 2 star rating. Though hopefully that'll lessen now that rate-on-delete is gone from iOS 4. Best way to approach a free promo is to definitely go through one of the big free giveaway sites as others have already suggested, but also have a way to monetize the free app - e.g. with ads, or in app purchase, etc. In the OP's case it's still early and there's still a chance Apple might feature the game. The first 2 weeks on the App Store can be rocky and it feels like an eternity. I can definitely sympathize however, and sometimes you gotta cut your losses and just try again. A perception was built up in the early days that the app store was easy money and 2 years later there's still this gold rush mentality. Reality suggests the rush has been over for a while - now, unless you have something truly outstanding it's mostly marketing and/or just dumb luck.
Plushed was with one of those websites, naeh? Also BlackSmith Games were the pioneers with the idea of such a site... Remember last december & their website? The Best example I totally forgot to Mention is Donut Games! They are not connected to ANY such websites, they make gr8 pick up & play games. It is obvious tht if you do not make quality games, it won't sell. Apart from a quality game, one needs promotion, thts where publisher comes in. I always had a complain with Apple that there is no index thingy, they can learn from Arn on how he handles appshoppr, infact tht was my siggy for sometime
Yes I do remember, and yes Plushed was with one of those sites - the biggest one - FreeAppADay. Which happens to be the exact same site my game Pollywog was on. Not sure what point you're trying to make here... Look, I'm just offering realistic advice based on my personal experience. I've had a game in the top 100 paid list with zero promotion and I've had a game that's never been anywhere near that list despite being in the top 20 free list for 3 days with hundreds of thousands of downloads. Yes, other people have had different experiences, but to insinuate that setting an app free is a magic bullet is silly.
You need to make your app description more legible. Get somebody who's native language is English to write the description because the app-description to me is a major turn off.
thansk everyone,if anyone what to help with the description, please pm me,I will send you the code, you can try and write,then your name will be in speical thanks
Pig Rush is one. It lingered in the gutter of the App Store for its first four months after its release with only a handful of downloads. We knew it was a fun game and couldn't understand why it got no attention. Then, we gave it a big marketing push. We made it free for one week between Christmas and New Years. We did not use any paid advertising, but we made videos, created a web site, set up Twitter/Facebook accounts, replied to EVERY email users sent us, listened to user feedback, focused on releasing regular updates with user requested features, etc. Gradually, it got noticed. 7 months later(!!), Pig Rush was featured in the US and many other countries as "New and Noteworthy", and two months after that in "Highly Addictive Games". So it is possible!
This is a great thread, with a lot of good advices. I'll put my 2 cents here. Think twice, if you want to send the review requests to all the blog/review sites, BEFORE you get some user feedback. I did that mistake. My game got two not-so-good reviews, with some v1.0 issues pointed out. Now, after few amends my game is free from those flaws, BUT google doesn't know this... So, my advice would be to give away some promo codes, listen to users, make any necessary corrections and then go to review sites with your polished v1.1 game Good luck!
This is a good advice. 3 weeks ago we released the first Soccer Stealers, After that, we listened to user's feedback and update the game, now the 2nd update is out and we are very happy to see what we have now. We don't get much feedback when send the first version to review sites, but if we do it now, maybe the result will be different.
Sounds like wishful thinking. Most people (and review sites) only care about recently released games. And TA's experiments with frontpage "noteworthy updates" pretty much only focused on games that they'd already reviewed. You have a great point, though. But generally speaking, your time would be better spent leveraging feedback from beta testers than trying to salvage a botched game release with updates.
That's a good example. And I admire your kitchen sink approach to trying to get more attention for Pig Rush. A I right in assuming that all the hard work you put into promotion had no effect on your bottom line until Apple featured the game? I suspect that the free promotion, videos, website, twitter/facebook stuff did not directly influence Apple's decision to feature Pig Rush. Any submitted update, on the other hand, does have a chance to catch an apple reviewer's eye. As a data point, Apple featured Hurdler after a major update had been submitted, which added paralax scrolling backgrounds and 60 new levels. My understanding (mostly speculation) of the way their process works is that much of it is ground up. Individual reviewers get assigned to look at games coming off the queue of updates/new releases. If the game is interesting to that person (which will depend in part on their tastes), he/she can nominate it for additional scrutinty by folk with decision making powers.
I've got to disagree... We have had 3 of our games featured. All the feature slots appeared after we got reviews and exposure on eurogamer, touch arcade, or as the result of a free promotion... Apple I'm sure keep a keen eye on what is getting noticed on major sites... Now we also updated one of our games (The Glowing Void) directally in response to user feedback/ reviews... The game was the featured in "What Were Playing" for an addittional week after being featured in New and Noteworthy and "Whats Hot" (so 3 weeks in total). But I believe this to be as we were promoting it and getting good reviews on a number of promenant sites initially... And the addittional feature exposure I expect was as we were activley updating in response to user requests...
It's possible, but the feature happened over a month after our latest update had been released. Like AssyriaGameStudio noted, I think that Apple keeps an eye on several review sites, listens to word of mouth, Twitter, FB, etc. and I'm sure if they start hearing some buzz about a certain app/game, they'll take a closer look. Of course, being reminded of that app's existence by seeing it in the 'update queue' probably doesn't hurt.
While I wouldn't rule it out, I really don't think Apple needs to rely on 3rd party review sites to decide what they think is worth featuring. They have full time employees for this purpose, all with their own strong opinions. And there are tons of games being submitted every day. It isn't hard to find things that are feature-worthy. Of course it "can't hurt" (other than your own time) to do whatever you can to promote your app(s) outside the AppStore but there are plenty of examples of apps that Apple has featured that have never gotten attention from mainstream review sites until after Apple had already featured them. It would seem (to me) far more likely that AssyriaGameStudio's games were simply really good or novel to the point where both Apple and TA happened to both like them. As for your one month delay, that's typical. In many cases, decisions get made over what to schedule for a feature slot well in advance of the actual promotion. In my case, I got an email notice with: "We love your app, Hurdler, here at Apple and would like to potentially do some marketing around it." It wasn't until a month later that it showed up in "What we're Playing." I'd still love to hear an answer to my other question, if possible - what was the impact of the marketing you did prior to being featured by Apple vs. the benefit of actually being featured by Apple?
Yeah, I'm interested in this also. From what I've read, Apple magically selecting your App to feature or any of the other Apple promotions really makes a difference in sales. Even being featured in an article, having good reviews, or other promotion...doesn't come anywhere close to the exposure Apple does for you. Well that's what I've read and I'd be interested to see if someone has a case that is different than this...well minus the case that you had $50,000 to market/promote your app and it was a big success because of that ;-)
I think it's also worth noting, the guy in charge of App Store feature slots former position was at IGN... I should have mentioned this before really, but it slipped my mind... But yeah basically coming from a review background, I expect review sites likely have a greater impact as a result.
