Overwhelmed with Apps, finally burned out...

[mws87]

You're absolutely right @mws87, that video about the Desert of Desertion was spot on, I just didn't know it would be this hard lol...

And no bud, I have no right to quit and don't plan to, I haven't even progressed half way yet in the journey, I know what I lack, and I know hitting success with apps is totally possible, I believe I have to get the launch and marketing nailed to do it...

I had to watch that video a couple times + several others. Going through changes in your mindset can be strange and sometimes even make you second guess yourself. Glad you're not quitting, looking forward to your progress, keep it up!

 

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[Roli]

try to figure out how to get a successful pre and post launch of a game. I have a long way to go, still have to complete better quality games, but I just thought maybe a little reward could motivate me if a publisher took me up, but it's back to the struggle for now...

I guess for now I'll take a break today and try to get my head screwed back on again

What has your twitter activity been like? I don't play games but I've seen some launches on Twitter that I bet were successful; for instance I've been seeing these videos, usually consisiting of someone doing a silly dance and the caption is usually along the lines of "How you feel when you get a new high score on Swagy Ninja".

Now I have no idea of that game or how big their marketing budget is, but with some clever following and retweeting, revining and so on you could probably push a campaign for not too much cash, which of course if successful you can replicate and add cash to your war chest.

I find that when I post a simple subscription message for my site on twitter it gets me between 1-5 subscribers (I'm still small fry but growing) and article links can pick up as many as 50 hits in 2 days. Games have a higher intrinsic value than the subject matter on my site and I'm sure if you really concentrated your efforts on Twitter for the next few months you'll see some palpable results.

Here are some Twitter strategies that I've used to grow to apx 4,300 followers and to generate about 75% of the 100 or so hits a day I get to my site.


FOLLOWING

Follow people like yourself, seek them out and let them follow you back - As you follow people like yourself make a note of the people who look interesting as you will come back to those later.

follow their followers - Once you find people like this, follow their followers

Follow the loyal followers - As you look for people like yourself you will sometimes come across someone who has a really good follow to follower ratio, this is to be acted upon when the figures are quite low. So for instance if someone is following 1072 people and they have 976 followers then these are loyal follow backers, follow most of their followers.

Don't buy or follow fake accounts - most fake accounts don't have a profile pic and have a very low amount of tweets.

Follow the retweeters - As you look through the people like you, look for people who get a high number of retweets, click on those tweets, then the retweeters and follow them.

As I mentioned above you see a lot of short videos and vines being used to promote games, these clips will have retweeters, follow them.

Engage with your followers, speak to them, retweet them, favourite their tweets.

This probably should have been at the top of this section as it will get you lots of follow backs, and that is as you follow people (it's impossible to do it for everyone) maybe 1 in 10 that you follow, go through their tweets and reply to their tweets IF they interest you. This will open up a dialogue and get you a follower. After following, you have retweeting and favourites, which will get you followers also but in a declining order of magnitude.

POSTING

Going back to the video clips and vines, there are 2 types, original and reposts

Original - You don't have to have a lot of money or production values to create a clip on your phone and post it on Vine (we'll come to that later) and Twitter. I've got no idea of your game, but "high score" videos, are popular and seem to get a lot of retweets. So as in the example above someone doing a silly dance, a child laughing, a cat jumping; with the caption along the lines of "How you feel when you beat the high score on MY GAME"

Reposts - Create a Vine account as there are already quadrillions (slight exaggeration) of videos out there you can repost to Twitter with your own caption, the advantage of this is twofold. First you can choose a clip that has already proved it has wide appeal by getting lots of reposts. Secondly you may find a popular or funny video that hasn't done the Twitter rounds yet and so you appear original without being original.

Make sure you post your own thoughts, this is why having conversations with your followers is important, people need to see you're not just a mindless marketing account.

If you do post links to your game, keep them down to a minimum; don't post a ratio of more than 1 in 10 of your tweets to be a direct promo link, this will have people blocking and ignoring you if you post too many.

RETWEETING

Retweet other peoples' promos, not too many but enough to get noticed by the people you're retweeting, try and RT people who are at or around the same level as you. RTing someone with 135,000 followers will rarely have that person retweeting you back, whereas RTing someone who has a similar amount of followers to you may get them RTing you back.

Reply to high volume RTs - if you see a popular game tweet that has been RTd lots, then reply to these, it will help you pick up more followers.

Follow these steps and you should see results pretty instantly, if you don't have a Twitter account or an under used one, then you will gain a lot of followers quickly, just don't get disheartened as it slows down.

If I can think of any other good tactics I'll let you know, hang in there and good luck!!!

 

[beatgoezon]

@beatgoezon I just checked out your latest demo for Timber Chimp. I like the basic concept of it but I'm interested how you plan on monetizing it?

The problem I see with the current market for games is that they are expected to be free and they are expected to be very high quality. Most games are then monetized either by advertisements or by IAP. However, it seems to be the case that a very large percentage of your users will make you absolutely no money as they will never buy anything and monetizing through ads is incredibly difficult. So in either case you need a massive following unless you come up with a really slick monetization model.

I released my own game recently (I thought learning Unity would be fun and I had no other burning ideas) and attempted to monetize it by having the player watch a video to continue or allow for free restarts. You could alternative get 5, 10 continues packs if you purchased them.

I haven't marketing the game outside of a few blog posts and a brief feature on appadvice.com (since they contacted me). Basically I wanted to get an initial set of a hundred or so users to see if the game seemed like it could be viable enough in order to warrant me spending time and possibly money on marketing it and hopefully getting it picked up by a large group.

So I've had a couple hundred downloads (organically - not sure exactly where they came from and not sure how to figure that out - it would be extremely useful for marketing refinement) and the number of people that buy something is 0, the number of people who watch ads to continue is also extremely minimal. This may be due to the game/monetization strategy and likely if it was absolutely "cant get enough" type game things may be different but I expected better results from this.

Based on the stats I got I basically gave up on marketing the idea in favour of something more lucrative. I would have to have hundreds of thousands of users to make $1000/month. It just isn't sustainable. I don't want to be a downer but I really don't see how an independent developer can make money in this business. The more I researched even small studios with hit games barely make enough to keep making games. I think you really have to be in this business because you love it, and not necessarily because you see it as a fastlane.

Really don't mean to be a downer here, this is just what I found after a lot of research and my own launch experience.

In case you are interested my game is here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.overbytegames.NinjaGoldRush

I don't want to hijack the thread but if you're interested I can provide some other lessons learned about developing a game (I made a ton of mistakes building this ). I may at some point write my own thread about it. Frustratingly, I think I could probably start banging out games very quickly based on the libraries & skills I've acquired, but honestly I'm not sure how to turn a profit on them.

Regarding the comments about the aesthetics I agree - it's expected any game, even free, has to look great and be extremely polished (smooth animations, cool sound effects, etc) however, if you want something with a good retention rate, it needs depth and a way to hook people in. I think for an indy I think you need to have something pretty unique because you won't be able to compete with big budget productions in terms of depths, graphics, or marketing.

Apologies for the dire post. I may just be jaded, I also could be completely wrong but I'm hoping some of the above helps you / others out.

Let me know when the game is released and I'll definitely check it out though, I think it looks pretty good.

@OverByte thanks for the great insights bud, and I agree with you. These days the main issue with games isn't just making a super polished game, it's to get it marketed right as well.

As for what you said about retention value of a game, that's where the monetization is all about. You're totally right, this game I've made doesn't have high retention value, but I will try to push it as far as I can, perhaps it can have a sticking effect for users...

I totally see that hitting Fastlane with mobile games is possible if you nail the 3 major things I've seen in top games :
Art/Theme
Gameplay/retention
Marketing/promotion

As for nailing them, you're absolutely right man, I think hitting these 3 marks is extremely challenging, from what I've seen, you're either a huge success in the store or completely invisible.

I'd love to hear what you think is the best way to approach the game market, seeing how the goal is to eventually take it Fastlane. I saw your game @OverByte I think it was pretty cool

What do you think is the right approach to hitting success in the app stores these days? Do you have any sort of strategies for your future games? Are you going to continue with mobile games or do you plan on a new course of action?

I'd love to hear your feedback, I'm sure there's a lot I could learn from your experiences, thanks again for the insights you've provided here!

 

[beatgoezon]

My strategy for all projects I'm working on, including games: Hook the product right into something popular, and watch it ride off into the sunset.

Ideas are just passengers. They need something to ride, if you want them to travel.

In other words, stop making games YOU think are cool. Find a viable market to serve (big, but targetable), and make something awesome for them.

A lot of successful games certainly don't do that, but that's where I see opportunity.

That's a good strategy James, do you mean like make a game based on a current trending theme? Like how "Let it Goat" did during the release of Frozen? Lol, because I really think that's what pushed that game's success.

 

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[beatgoezon]

What has your twitter activity been like? I don't play games but I've seen some launches on Twitter that I bet were successful; for instance I've been seeing these videos, usually consisiting of someone doing a silly dance and the caption is usually along the lines of "How you feel when you get a new high score on Swagy Ninja".

Now I have no idea of that game or how big their marketing budget is, but with some clever following and retweeting, revining and so on you could probably push a campaign for not too much cash, which of course if successful you can replicate and add cash to your war chest.

I find that when I post a simple subscription message for my site on twitter it gets me between 1-5 subscribers (I'm still small fry but growing) and article links can pick up as many as 50 hits in 2 days. Games have a higher intrinsic value than the subject matter on my site and I'm sure if you really concentrated your efforts on Twitter for the next few months you'll see some palpable results.

Here are some Twitter strategies that I've used to grow to apx 4,300 followers and to generate about 75% of the 100 or so hits a day I get to my site.


FOLLOWING

Follow people like yourself, seek them out and let them follow you back - As you follow people like yourself make a note of the people who look interesting as you will come back to those later.

follow their followers - Once you find people like this, follow their followers

Follow the loyal followers - As you look for people like yourself you will sometimes come across someone who has a really good follow to follower ratio, this is to be acted upon when the figures are quite low. So for instance if someone is following 1072 people and they have 976 followers then these are loyal follow backers, follow most of their followers.

Don't buy or follow fake accounts - most fake accounts don't have a profile pic and have a very low amount of tweets.

Follow the retweeters - As you look through the people like you, look for people who get a high number of retweets, click on those tweets, then the retweeters and follow them.

As I mentioned above you see a lot of short videos and vines being used to promote games, these clips will have retweeters, follow them.

Engage with your followers, speak to them, retweet them, favourite their tweets.

This probably should have been at the top of this section as it will get you lots of follow backs, and that is as you follow people (it's impossible to do it for everyone) maybe 1 in 10 that you follow, go through their tweets and reply to their tweets IF they interest you. This will open up a dialogue and get you a follower. After following, you have retweeting and favourites, which will get you followers also but in a declining order of magnitude.

POSTING

Going back to the video clips and vines, there are 2 types, original and reposts

Original - You don't have to have a lot of money or production values to create a clip on your phone and post it on Vine (we'll come to that later) and Twitter. I've got no idea of your game, but "high score" videos, are popular and seem to get a lot of retweets. So as in the example above someone doing a silly dance, a child laughing, a cat jumping; with the caption along the lines of "How you feel when you beat the high score on MY GAME"

Reposts - Create a Vine account as there are already quadrillions (slight exaggeration) of videos out there you can repost to Twitter with your own caption, the advantage of this is twofold. First you can choose a clip that has already proved it has wide appeal by getting lots of reposts. Secondly you may find a popular or funny video that hasn't done the Twitter rounds yet and so you appear original without being original.

Make sure you post your own thoughts, this is why having conversations with your followers is important, people need to see you're not just a mindless marketing account.

If you do post links to your game, keep them down to a minimum; don't post a ratio of more than 1 in 10 of your tweets to be a direct promo link, this will have people blocking and ignoring you if you post too many.

RETWEETING

Retweet other peoples' promos, not too many but enough to get noticed by the people you're retweeting, try and RT people who are at or around the same level as you. RTing someone with 135,000 followers will rarely have that person retweeting you back, whereas RTing someone who has a similar amount of followers to you may get them RTing you back.

Reply to high volume RTs - if you see a popular game tweet that has been RTd lots, then reply to these, it will help you pick up more followers.

Follow these steps and you should see results pretty instantly, if you don't have a Twitter account or an under used one, then you will gain a lot of followers quickly, just don't get disheartened as it slows down.

If I can think of any other good tactics I'll let you know, hang in there and good luck!!!

@Roli, wow thanks a lot for the epic Twitter tactics man! I actually don't use Twitter at all sadly, but have opened my old account and began learning it along with other things that I think could be great for marketing (hence, the burnout).

I can't believe you'd mention Swaggy Ninja here, because I know the developers behind it and we're part of the same developer community! And yea you're actually right about the "highscore" tweets, because I've noticed that's exactly how they promote their games mostly!

I'll work on the tactics you've laid down here Roli, they're very complicated to me right now, but I'll figure them out, thanks again for the help bud, it means a lot!

 

[EdKirby]

That's a good strategy James, do you mean like make a game based on a current trending theme? Like how "Let it Goat" did during the release of Frozen? Lol, because I really think that's what pushed that game's success.

I think if you try to "time the market" you'll get fleeced. I mean if it's already trending you're too late. In regards to Frozen, you would have to been in development while the movie was in development and timed the release of the game to coincide with the movie release. I don't know if that's what they did but that's what I would have done. I have a couple of ideas for games that would do that in fact.

But, if you take common themes that are trending up over a long period of time then, I think, you can make a reasonable assumption that it will continue to trend up.

 

[Roli]

@Roli, wow thanks a lot for the epic Twitter tactics man! I actually don't use Twitter at all sadly, but have opened my old account and began learning it along with other things that I think could be great for marketing (hence, the burnout).

I can't believe you'd mention Swaggy Ninja here, because I know the developers behind it and we're part of the same developer community! And yea you're actually right about the "highscore" tweets, because I've noticed that's exactly how they promote their games mostly!

I'll work on the tactics you've laid down here Roli, they're very complicated to me right now, but I'll figure them out, thanks again for the help bud, it means a lot!

No problem man! It feel's genuinely great to pass on the little knowledge I've accrued. That's great about the Swaggy Ninja! I've been wondering to myself how well that campaign is going. You really need to talk to them again and pick their brains and if you can find out the figures behind it. It looks to me like they're paying accounts with high numbers of confirmed followers to retweet their promos.

I didn't mention that earlier because that along with other high cost strategies, you didn't sound like you needed to hear that right now, plus by implementing the stuff I mentioned before you can find out what works and then be more targeted with your marketing budget.

Seriously though, don't be daunted by Twitter, it's easy; I was just like you last September, not really getting Twitter or how it could help me and I'm still learning and developing new tactics. There are lots of parts to it, but just break it down and take it one at a time.

Start with the simple follow tactics first. The fact that you're part of a dev community is great because a lot of those guys will be on Twitter as demonstrated by Swaggy Ninja, so start off by finding them and following them and crucially following their followers. This is the equivalent to owning a computer company and then going into an Apple store and handing out cards saying you do similar computers!

Do this for a week or two or three, however long it takes to feel comfortable doing that and then move onto some of the other strategies. Remember though you must keep posting as accounts who just follow and don't post tend to be fake.

So I would say the first steps in your Twitter mission are;

START POSTING - if you can't think of something to say find stuff you are interested in via the search bar at the top and hit the retweet button when you find something

FOLLOW - Speak to your dev community guys, find out their twitter accounts and follow them AND follow their followers

RESEARCH - Speak to the Swaggy guys and pump for information, hoover that shit up, it'll come in soooo handy.

Above all remember the words of the ghost in Field Of Dreams - "If you build it, they will come" .

 

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[James Thornton]

That's a good strategy James, do you mean like make a game based on a current trending theme? Like how "Let it Goat" did during the release of Frozen? Lol, because I really think that's what pushed that game's success.

You can piggyback onto a brand, if you can make a pitch and reach a win win agreement with that brand. The benefit of this is getting to piggyback onto their marketing efforts to their customer base.

Or you can find something popular that doesn't have any really great games made for it yet, and make one. Just be sure it's specific enough to target with ads, since you will be 100% responsible for marketing. And remember, you want to be the best one. Don't try to compete in a market that already has awesome games, but mediocre game interest may give you some validation.

In both cases, you want a targetable market with of over 1 million. (Use google trends, Facebook ad metrics, Google Adwords search stats) Bigger the better, although don't expect to land a deal with huge brands as an indie.

If you think of something branded, make a presentation with screen shot mock ups, good descriptions of gameplay, and a monetization and marketing strategy. Before any coding.

Note: I am not a successful indie dev, just starting out. So take the advice with a grain of salt. These are just the tactics I'm using for art licensing for printed products, carried over. However, it's working for licensing, and I see no reason why it wouldn't apply.

 

[luniac]

I think the best form of marketing is word of mouth, I've had the android version of my zombie game out for over a month now but i told all my friends to not spread it until i get the iphone version out because i know people will be asking why there's no iphone version. It's been a nightmare with XCODE bugs, but somehow i just keep making progress one agonizing hour at a time. A bug in the actual submission to apple hindered me in my last session lol.......

I showed the game to all my coworkers who all pretty much liked it(even my damn boss installed it, to play on the shitter). One of my "cooler" coworkers rented a shorehouse with his friends for huge weekend parties, and is going to tell all the girls to play it drunk lol.

I know another high school kid from the park where i play sports occasionally who says he can spread the game in his entire high school. Will it happen? i don't know, but it can.

My other coworker/artist for my game who knows some sorta important individuals from the music industry is gonna promote this game and im actually gonna split any profits from the game with him 50/50, because i want him to be fully invested in this and help make it go viral, its a win win.

And of course im gonna tell all my friends to post on facebook and tell people to share, i got my company facebook and twitter pages set up already.

I don't know how big an impact all these things will have but I SURE AM CURIOUS TO FIND OUT! if i had no game i wouldn't even had any of this happening in the first place!



Anyway dude it's waaaay to early to make drastic decisions. Just keep doing what you're doing, make more apps.

I've only made 2 games so far, and the first was just some stupid quiz game. I'm gonna keep making apps because regardless whether or not i make money it would be awesome to open up my company account on the appstore and see like 20 games on it, my 20 games, MY PRODUCTS OWNED BY ME.

Opportunities present themselves if you're out there.


P.S.
It's OK to have some R&R time for yourself if you're getting shit done. Exercise and working out REALLY DO WORK. I play my favorite sport handball at a semi professional level, i find the time for it and life feels perfect while im playing it, all troubles are forgotten. It's simple and cheap, unlike my food budget lol.....

 

[Brewmacker]

@beatgoezon

Hey mate, I have just read through you entire story and my eyes hurt I also learned a lot of good ideas from you and your discussions. So thanks for all that you shared and for generating such interesting conversations.

Just writing to see how it is going for you three years further down the line? I am wishing the best!

 

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