Archive for February, 2009
Meanwhile…
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
It’s been an exciting weekend, to say the least. I was checking iTunes Connect as soon as I got out of bed each morning, still bleary eyed from having just woken up. I’m not going to post any sales numbers yet, there’s not enough data yet to draw any kind of reasonable conclusion yet. However, I will post some at some point, I promise. I will say that given the fact that I hadn’t sent out any press releases or promo codes until this morning, I was pleased with the sales so far. I’m not going to be challenging the top 10 any time soon, but it feels good to have any sales at all.
I’ve been looking for a good way to track all my app sales data. The best tool I’ve found so far is AppViz. It will download your daily sales data for you and generate all kinds of pretty graphs. My biggest complaint is that the export feature doesn’t really export the data in a useful way. What I really want is a tool that will generate data that I can import into Excel or Numbers and do my own graphing and statistical analysis on. Ideally I want each country to have it’s own spreadsheet so that I can graph individual countries and then also graph total sales. I might end up building my own tool. That just seems silly, though.
As I hinted at above, I spent this morning (and this afternoon so far) sending out press releases announcing the launch of Dapple. I’ve been sending out promo codes to iPhone gaming review sites in the hopes that I’ll get a few reviews out of it.
My friend Jaysen wrote up a great review of Dapple on his site: I, Game Maker. He is a friend of mine, so I can’t say he’s completely unbiased, but I feel like he provides a pretty honest review of the game.
I’ll probably spend the rest of the day finding sites to send my press release to. Tomorrow I need to get back to my 360|iDev presentation. Time’s running out! Oh, and they just released full descriptions of all the talks at the conference on the 360|iDev site. The conference is going to be amazing. If you’re an iPhone developer, at least check out the website and see if you can make it.
Owen
Dapple Now Available!
Friday, February 13th, 2009
I’m extremely excited to announce that Dapple went live on the App Store sometime last night! I have updated the Dapple page with links directly to iTunes that allow you to purchase the game. You can also click this link:
- Dapple on the App Store – Note: Clicking this will open iTunes and take you to the Dapple page in the App Store.
It would appear that all my worrying wasn’t needed. If you count my submission date as last Saturday, then it took 4 business days for the game to appear on the App Store.
I have a lot of work to do today to get the word out, so I’m going to keep this post short. If you’ve got friends with iPhones or iPod touches, please let them know about Dapple.
Thank you to everyone who helped out with Dapple. And thank you to everyone who offered their support while I was creating this game. The last seven months have been amazing. I hope that I’m able to continue to do this for a living.
Owen
Aack!
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
I got an email from a fellow iPhone developer this afternoon. This developer has put out a few apps and wrote me because they saw my post on resubmitting my app for review. I won’t mention specifics, but this developer mentioned that most of their apps passed approval within a week. However, they had one app that they resubmitted to fix a bug take four weeks for approval! They have no idea if it was because of the resubmission, or if it was a fluke.
Here’s hoping I haven’t just applied a four week penalty to my submission by attempting to fix a bug prior to release instead of releasing a buggy app and fixing it with a patch. Because that would be stupid.
Anyway, I thought it was cool that this developer wrote me to let me know there’s a chance I might be waiting longer than I had thought. Thanks.
Owen
Pricing and Advertising and Marketing, Oh My!
Thursday, February 12th, 2009
I haven’t talked a whole lot about my strategies (ha ha ha) for game pricing, advertising, and marketing yet. This is mostly because I haven’t really figured things out. Mostly I’ve got ideas whirling around in my head and I’m not sure that any of them will work. Because I’m not sure if I can make any kind of rational post about all of this, I thought I’d just try more of a brain-dump and try to list out all the things I’m considering or thinking about…ready?
Pricing
The game is going to be released at $4.99 in Canada and the U.S. (and whatever magic number that translates to in other regions’ currencies). I struggled a lot with pricing for Dapple. The App Store “model” encourages developers to sell their products at the lowest possible price point. Many developers have talked about getting bad reviews from people because their game wasn’t priced at $0.99. I’ve got six months of work invested in Dapple and I really do feel like it’s worth the $4.99 price point. Hell, if I were selling this on PC or Mac, I’m confident I could charge $9.99-$12.99 for the same game! I built three full game modes and I think it’s a really polished game. However, only time will tell whether or not people will buy it at that price.
Many games on the App Store launch at a reduced price, then raise their rates a few weeks later. I don’t feel like this is a good strategy for Dapple. I have no rational reason, it just doesn’t feel right to me.
Many games reduce their price after a few weeks after launch to try to bump sales. Again, this isn’t something I’m that keen on, but I may change my mind. At any rate, I wouldn’t count on it happening any time soon. I’d rather give Dapple a few months to try to sell at $4.99 and see how it goes. But who knows how I’ll feel if I’m selling 3 copies a day in 2 weeks. The reason I don’t like this, though, is that your early adopters feel cheated. The people who supported you early are being penalized for their support.
Lite Version
There has been a huge flood of lite versions to the App Store since Ethan Nicholas talked about exponential growth in iShoot sales after a releasing a Lite version of his game. I do plan on releasing a Lite version of Dapple in the future, but not right away. I have to build it first! This is something I’ve planned to do from the start.
With the flood of new Lite versions to the store, there has been a mixed reaction by developers. Some are seeing their sales increase as a result, others are not. Here’s the important thing to remember about a lite version: it has to make people want to buy your game! I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I’ve seen lite versions of some awful apps. When I’ve downloaded the lite version it made me glad I didn’t pay $0.99 for the full version. This is NOT what you want. If the lite version isn’t going to make your app look great, don’t release it!
I have absolutely no data to back this up, but my guess is that apps that are priced higher benefit more from a lite version. If your game is $0.99 and you release a lite version, to me, there seems like less of a point. It’s when I’m going to spend $5 or $10 on a game that I really want a “try before I buy” option. At $0.99 I’ll probably make up my mind about whether or not I want to play it based on the screenshots, reviews, and (ideally) a gameplay video. If I download a lite version of a $0.99 app, I probably won’t buy the full version. I don’t know why…that’s just me, but I’m assuming there are a few other people like that in the market.
Marketing
This is where things get even less clear for me. As far as I can tell, marketing is all about who you know. It’s about making contacts with the right people at the right places. That’s hard to do. It’s even harder to do it in a meaningful way. I don’t want to be that fake Mr. Marketing Guy “Hey guy! How’s it going?! Good to see you!!! Want to hit a strip club? Here have some free stuff!!!”
My “strategy” thus far has been to send out some press releases when important milestones happen. I’ve sent them out to iPhone blogs, gaming blogs, iPhone and gaming news sites, and I’ve even sent them out to the local papers in Toronto. The best response I’ve had so far is from my hometown newspaper and radio station. I’m from a small town, so I got some great press from them because I’m from there and I’m trying to do something interesting.
I’ve got a Facebook page for the company and I’ll launch a page for the game when it launches. I have no idea how much traffic I’ll be able to get there, but it’s free, so it’s worth a shot.
I’m on Twitter, which has helped me mostly to connect with other amazing developers. My original intention with Twitter (if I’m being honest) was to use it as a marketing tool, but I’m using it much more as a community tool to connect with other developers. I’ve met some amazing people on there and that’s been the real reward of using it.
Finally, I started writing up iPhone development tutorials. This started because a lot of other developers have helped me in various ways and I wanted to give back to the community. However, it also drove traffic on my site up 200%, so that’s never a bad thing.
Advertising
This is the biggest area of confusion for me. There are so many options and there’s no way of knowing which (if any) will help drive sales: Google AdWords, banner ads on iPhone review sites, ads in other places on the net, buying physical ad space on transit in Toronto, buying ad space in iPhone/gaming magazines, buying ad space on bigger gaming web sites, ads on TV (ha ha).
The biggest problem with advertising is that it costs money. Most of the options cost a lot of money. This means that any ad campaign I do run would have to start after the release of the game so that I could use revenue from the game to buy ads to drive more revenue.
The other problem with these forms of advertising is that it’s incredibly difficult to track how the ad affects your sales. With AdWords I can track click throughs to the site and what percentage of the users click on my “buy from the app store” button, but any kind of physical advertising is impossible to track.
Conclusions?
Well, unfortunately, I don’t really have any. I’m still trying to figure all this out. I’m hoping that it will get easier with each game. The problem for me right now is that this is my first game, so I don’t have any data about what to expect. I also don’t know how much traffic I can expect from advertising.
I’m sorry this post doesn’t really answer any questions, but rather asks a lot of them. This is what I’m thinking about now, though, so I thought I should share. This is one of those posts that I’m writing because I had promised to be open and honest about things, but makes me wonder if I should really be wondering all this aloud…
Owen
The Waiting is the Hard Part
Wednesday, February 11th, 2009
I had assumed that getting the game to run on the iPhone, or maybe debugging memory stomps would be the hardest part of releasing a game on the iPhone. Or perhaps the marketing that needed to be done, as that’s something I’m new to. But what I’m realising is that waiting may be the hard part.
I submitted to Apple on Friday afternoon (then pulled my app and resubmitted with a bug fix on Saturday morning). Basically, 4 days into the wait and I’m going crazy. I’m not sleeping well, and it’s pretty much all I think about. I’ve even started reloading the iTunes Connect page hoping for some glimpse into the process that’s going on in some secret underground testing facility in the middle of the Arizona desert, no doubt…even though I know it won’t actually tell me anything new.
I’m supposed to be working on marketing stuff and my 360|iDev presentation, but I’ve been too nervous. Ok, that’s not entirely true—I did write up a press release that’s ready to go out as soon as Dapple is released—but I haven’t been able to do much else, marketing-wise.
So yesterday I decided to give myself a task that would distract me, and I decided to install a forum system on the site. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time, but I just never had the time to figure out how to set it up. You’ll notice that the navigation bar at the top of the screen now has a link to the forums. I didn’t have the week or two I’d need to fully skin it to look like the rest of the site, but it’s good enough for now. I really wanted the forums in place by the time the game launched so that players would have some place to come and talk about their experiences with it.
I decided to use phpBB, as it seems like the most commonly used forum system out there and it had a sophisticated installation process. It was incredibly easy to set up (given the complexity of the system that was installed). It took me most of the day, but I managed to get it running with a rough re-skin in about 6 hours.
Today I am really going to work on my 360|iDev talk. I’m not too concerned about that, though, as I really enjoy public speaking and 3 weeks should be more than enough to prepare a good talk and rehearse it.
Oh, one final thing: my father sent me a link to a talk that Will Wright and Brian Eno did together on generative systems. It’s about an hour and 40 minutes long, and there’s 20-30 minutes in the middle where Will Wright demos Spore (it was done before Spore was released) that isn’t that interesting, but the rest is absolutely fascinating. If you’re at all interested in game design, and especially simulation game design, you have to listen to it. I found it inspirational. After listening to it I immediately wanted to write about 10 new games.
Note: this links directly to an MP3 file, as this was pulled from a podcast XML file:
Owen