That is a fascinating graph of sales versus events. Winners win, indeed.
It really blows my mind that the App Store doesn’t provide any customer data to developers besides number of downloads by region. In any business, it’s critical to build a relationship with your customers. Knowing who your customers are helps you iterate your game quickly to suit your customers’ likes, and most importantly, to up-sell your future games.
I think I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but Apple doesn't consider the customer to be your customer. They are Apple's customer. Apple deigns to grant you access to them, temporarily.
Not that I will ever build anything for this platform, but I'd be thinking "How can I build 'participate in permission marketing to enjoy this game even more' into my application?" One trivial example: a Brag To Your Friends feature (high score list, but with Facebook integration), which by necessity gets you from "anonymous Apple customer" to "verified, identifiable person who loves us interacting directly with us via a web page of our choosing." Or, alternatively, a bling widget for the customer's blog or site detailing your in-game accomplishments ("Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons!"). After you get executable code on somebody's site your options are, well, rather wide. (6 months later: "Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons! But can he handle the brain-busting epic tactical puzzlombat of (link)Dragonslaying 2: Now With More Fire(/link)?")
I have been experimenting with various iPhone marketing strategies. In the past few months, I worked with some very talented iPhone game devs and learned some more interesting marketing / promotion tricks they employed. I thought I'd summarized the ones I found most effective and share with you all.
Hopefully this would help some of iPhone game devs in marketing your next game this holiday season. I'd love to hear what you guys think as well. If you have any additional thoughts / tips you'd like to share please let me know!
Great article, I'd love to see more data about advertising/sales - especially conversions. How close of a correlation can you make with the banner placements and increase in sales. It seems like once you're in the top 100 listing, there is some natural momentum as well. Also do you know if the geared banners were direct click through to iTunes or if they used landing pages?
Judging from his current app up right now on Touch Arcade, it looks like it goes straight to iTunes (probably hits his server first to record where it came from).
Developing for the iPhone is like launching a rocket. Provided your calculations are correct (i.e. you don't do anything to get rejected), you're really trying to get escape velocity, so that your app pops onto the top lists. If you miss that, you'll have a much more difficult time.
It really blows my mind that the App Store doesn’t provide any customer data to developers besides number of downloads by region. In any business, it’s critical to build a relationship with your customers. Knowing who your customers are helps you iterate your game quickly to suit your customers’ likes, and most importantly, to up-sell your future games.
I think I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but Apple doesn't consider the customer to be your customer. They are Apple's customer. Apple deigns to grant you access to them, temporarily.
Not that I will ever build anything for this platform, but I'd be thinking "How can I build 'participate in permission marketing to enjoy this game even more' into my application?" One trivial example: a Brag To Your Friends feature (high score list, but with Facebook integration), which by necessity gets you from "anonymous Apple customer" to "verified, identifiable person who loves us interacting directly with us via a web page of our choosing." Or, alternatively, a bling widget for the customer's blog or site detailing your in-game accomplishments ("Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons!"). After you get executable code on somebody's site your options are, well, rather wide. (6 months later: "Toby the Vicious Corsair has slain 96 dragons! But can he handle the brain-busting epic tactical puzzlombat of (link)Dragonslaying 2: Now With More Fire(/link)?")