iCombat

I came across an interesting post on “How to use Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to market your mobile games” and it reinforced what I have noticed since readying to launch iCombat – there are too many channels to manage when it comes to reaching the end user!  This may sound like a high class problem to all of the game and content developers that have faced the gatekeepers of distribution over the years but the sudden blossoming of dozens of channels to reach users has created its own set of problems.  Now the burden of brand management and marketing has fallen into the lap of the developers, where they must become “marketers” of their product if they hope to get noticed.

The rise of the fractured, multichannel market has created dozens of sites that developers now need to visit to build goodwill and help gain exposure, something that is fundamentally different from what they probably want to be doing. In my case this translates into 18-20 hours a day since launch to manage the marketing effort and frankly it is still more than I can handle. While I have enlisted friends and an intern to help, most developers don’t have the luxury of dedicating all of their own time to managing their launch.

I have compiled a list of some of the tools and sites I think necessary to use today:

Top Down channels – kissing the ring

1. Bloggers – what some refer to as the “digital influencers” – sites with major traffic like Gizmodo, Techcrunch, GigaOM
2. Targeted review sites – Touch Arcade, 148Apps, Pocket Gamer, etc. – I have counted 60+ serious ones in all

Bottom Up channels – connecting with your users

1. Facebook – both personal status and group page
2. Twitter
3. MySpace
4. App/ Development/ Gaming Forums - Touch Arcade, maybe iPhonedevSDK, etc.
5. Product website & blog – here you need to have a demo, maybe a news section and your blog
6. YouTube – a great way to communicate with avid gamers
7. iTunes App store summary

Analytics Tools – monitoring usage, downloads, buzz

1. User downloads – iTunes Connect – Heartbeat App or AppViz (super easy to use but less flexible than Heartbeat)
2. Usage behavior – Pinch Media – gives you uniques, geo data, version & device stats, as well as unique data by action in your App (very cool)
3. App ranking – AppRanking by Michael Dorn or Mobclix
4. Web traffic - Google Analytics or Wordpress Stats
5. Affiliate data – Linkshare – here if you are an Apple affiliate you can earn back 5% of your 30% cut that goes to Apple – and monitor clickthrough conversion data from your site
6. Brand management – ScoutLabs or Google Alerts – Scout doesn’t really seem to work for small apps or early on in a campaign as it is, for these smaller apps Google Alerts is a great basic filter

While this list is not comprehensive this is basically everything I am using for the marketing of iCombat. I didn’t realize just how many channels and tools this involved until trying to post an urgent piece of news.  When iCombat was reviewed in Gizmodo’s weekly roundup of iPhone apps I quickly wanted to update every channel I was using. Read more…

There has been quite a bit of negative press about the App store in recent weeks where fears are being stoked about downward pricing pressure and poor user engagement rates after download.  I think all of this negative press is missing the point and serves as little more than fodder for bloggers and journalist eager to write anything other than the old news of App store success.  While the data in terms of averages may point to weak trends, this is because most pundits do not back out the effect of the gimmicky and one off free apps on the App store.  The reality is that in the Games market and especially in the niche application space (like productivity or medical) applications are selling well for over $5 and some for as much as $100.  I came across an e-mail to investors by the CEO of Tapulous Bart Decrem (posted in Techcrunch in January of this year) that summarizes why the opportunity is still so great.  While dated slightly in terms of the stats, the answer is that it is not all about the App store but also about riding the incredible growth in iPhones and the iPod Touch: Read more…

I decided this weekend that I would get one last round of user feedback before we begin our final phase of development and debugging in the coming weeks. This was the first close to fully baked test I had done and I even prepared a list of survey questions for everyone that tested the game. In it I had questions regarding the user’s usage patterns (average number of applications downloaded a month, average amount of time playing games a week, how much spent in the last month on apps, etc) but I focused primarily on which aspects of the game they liked and disliked (best aspect, worst aspect, what would you add/ remove, any confusion, etc). Here I found the range of user opinion to be huge, so much so that I wonder how useful the entire exercise was. Here are some of the general observations I noticed in my small game test experiment: Read more…

As we get set to launch our first iPhone application in the coming weeks I have started to see some discussion around the piracy issue in the App store.  The release of Crackulous has caused concern because of the supposed ease with which it makes sharing a cracked app easy – removing all of the complexity that keeps most people from engaging in app piracy in the first place.

iPhoneSavior wrote a post recently about how Imaginuity New Media’s new game Rocky Artue had been cracked and was being downloaded online hundreds of times for free.  Perhaps most interesting was the fact that they discovered that the game had been cracked through the use of Pinch Media’s user analytic tools.  While Pinch Media markets their mobile analytics solutions more for usage behavior (as seen in their AppStore Secrets presentation so widelyin the press over the last week) their ability to audit App store data by comparing actual downloads to App store downloads may become increasingly relevant to developers.

Quoting an e-mail to Imaginuity founder Allen Restrepo from Pinch Media’s Jesse Rowland (from the iPhoneSavior post):

“Unfortunately I have bad news for you that you might not want to hear. We typically see these large discrepancies between our numbers and Apple’s for paid applications that have been pirated.  I did a quick search for cracked versions of your application in the wild, and like most, it’s definitely available for people to steal. Your case is actually one of the largest cases of piracy we’ve seen where typically we see paid applications receiving around 5x more users from piracy then from legitimate downloads.” Read more…

As I think about a price for my new app the question I keep struggling with is just how exactly does pricing affect user buying patterns.  Apple’s frictionless purchasing process, where the vast majority of app store users already have a credit card on file, allows for painless one quick purchasing and has quickly made $1 dollar the new free.  The question becomes though, where is it that the user begins to think twice?  $2, $3 or maybe $5?  From my point of view there seem to be 5 major types of application in the App store right now that make embody the current pricing trends:

1. “Crapware” – cheap to make in terms of time and resources.  Targeted by both experienced and inexperienced developers.  Business model is either ad supported or sell for $0.99.
2. Full fledged apps by amateur developers – more elaborate design and execution by part time developers.  Attempting to create a full game experience with iShoot and Trism being good examples.  Business model is pay model with prices between the $1 and $5 range.
3. Full apps by funded start-ups – professional developers focused on higher quality games.  Here we have iBowl by the Social Gaming Network for example.  Quality of applications is high, business model is anything under the sun (to see one of the more creative examples check out Toy Bot’s $10k giveaway marketing strategy)
4. Professionally produced games – major studios like Sega or EA using teams of developers to leverage the iPhone platform.  Business model is selling games for $5+, probably closer to $10.  A good example is Spore. Read more…