Why Indie Games are Getting Pushed Out and How to Stay Alive

I don't have any problem at all discovering good apps on the App Store. For the most part, the stuff on the top of the store is great, and when I want something a bit quirkier (i.e. a Hokkien-teaching app) I search for it. What kinds of apps do you feel are difficult to discover?

To me, the implication here is that you can no longer bank everything on one title. Your first title may need to be a loss leader for a second and third title, to follow shortly thereafter. Hopefully you build a fanbase with the first title, and you try to convert those fans to the subsequent games. This is not cheap, by any means, and for true garage-style indies, it will mean either raising some capital, partnering with others who have it, or being incredibly savvy with PR and guerrilla marketing. Or it may mean a really long, slow strategy, building up a loyal following over the course of a few years. (That's the way a lot of fledgling studios had to do it in the early console days, and it may be similar in the future.)

The niche strategy is the other option. I've seen certain niches that have really loyal, under-served fanbases with deep pockets and a high willingness to pay for quality. Take the RPG segment, for instance. Square-Enix (an 800lb gorilla, sure, but still) recently released an RPG for a whopping $30 on the iOS App Store, and by all accounts, it seems to be very successful. I'm sure you can measure the number of people who paid for it in the hundreds of thousands, and probably not the millions, but still, that's a successful launch. A small, hyper-loyal niche without much price sensitivity can be the basis of a very lucrative strategy.

Windows Store for Windows Phone 7 was largely a flop since it was impossible to do native code with it (games had to be in C# with XNA, or in other words a new title entirely and harder to port).

Android grew faster in games with 2.3 introduced the best NDK support (C/C++ rather than Java) (NDK initially was limited in 2.2).

Windows Phone 8 allows native support, this will be a land rush soon if there are decent phone sales. The only pain point of going to Windows then will be the DirectX portion compared to OpenGL (they really should have gone OpenGL ES on mobile for port reasons, it won on embedded already).

Platforms like Unity and others will be setup for it so it opens it up for many more devs = more games.

Kindle Fire might also become a good platform to focus on -- also Android users outside of the United States...

This is generally good advice, and it's well articulated. But respectfully, I don't think it's a fair critique of the article. First, because marketing and product development are not dichotomous operations. Both seem to be necessary to break out of the increasingly crowded app marketplace, and a "build it and they will come" strategy is not sufficient. There are plenty of beautiful, elegant, astoundingly creative games that are languishing in the App Store for lack of discovery (driven by insufficient or inattentive marketing).

I did not find that the author was advocating marketing tactics to the exclusion of development efforts, or to the exclusion of product differentiation. You say that his tactics, "in isolation," are not effective -- but the author wasn't claiming that they should be used in isolation. He happened to be focusing on them in this article, because this article was specifically about launch tactics. It was covering one small area of a broad spectrum of efforts required in app development. That doesn't imply a suggestion that this is the only area.

While it's true that a developer should focus first and foremost on making an amazing product (and on making himself amazing), he shouldn't ignore the tactics offered by this article and others like it. There will come a time when his app is built, and when he's getting ready to launch. When that time comes, he would be well served to have a launch strategy, and some tactics he can draw upon to execute that strategy.

Building a magnificent app, then simply tossing it into the wind and hoping for the best, is doing disservice to the effort you put in to build that app.

Very well said.

Articles like this reduce games to some grey, by the numbers marketing exercise. The reason so many games on the app store sink like a rock is because they just plain aren't enjoyable experiences and treat their players very cynically. It's totally disappointing that micro transactions, sneaky psychological tricks and nagging the player at every stage is so actively encouraged in the mobile space.

Gameplay and designing experiences for the player is seen as some sort of afterthought.

Games can be such a wonderful immersive medium, but it's hard to get lost in another world while there's a bright bouncing icon asking for your credit card or facebook details every three seconds. Mobile games really could be so much better than this.

I for one would love to see more focus on building great things and less on monetization. Long live the indies and hats off to people like yourself who are out there pushing things forward.