Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

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I'm co-founder of MinoMonsters. We launched our game on iOS but spent a lot of time prototyping on the Android market. Our android prototype has 250k+ downloads and 2k+ reviews. Here's some steps you can take today to try to move the needle.

* Test your screenshots! Assume that 50% of the people in the market will never read your description. Right now, your screenshots communicate "Samurai game". Try a different direction, maybe one more Sudoku focused.[1] Test lots.

* Test your app icon. Test lots.

* You should have a purchase already. Review your monetization strategy. Most developers err on the side of under-monetizing their game, in the hopes that they won't "make players mad" or some other nonsense. Spoiler alert: you're wrong. Start your re-education here: http://www.edery.org/2012/08/your-first-f2p-game-where-you-w...

* Doing games is hard and a lot of what works in games is non-obvious. Be very skeptical of advice you get from anyone that hasn't done games.

* There is only one "tried and true" marketing channel - getting featured on the platform. Outside of that, you need to hustle hard to get your app featured in other places. You've reached out to "a few" sites and forums. Expand your reach to 10x as many sites and forums. Point to your past reviews as social proof for potential future reviews. No one site is going to bring in all the downloads - it's about building buzz and the snowball effect.

That's all I can think off the top of my head.

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[1] - No one can tell you what's going to work best. The only way to know is to test.

I shall repeat: It is very very very hard. We were featured on CNET, AllThingsD, Kotoku, 148Apps and even reviewed on TV. Result: You get a nice bump in downloads for a couple of days then it drops back down.

The best thing I have learnt is your budget should be at LEAST 50/50 between marketing and development. If you spent 3 months making the game with 2 developers then your marketing budget should be in the tens of thousands if you really plan on getting anywhere.

Simply having and spending the money won't get you good results though. It needs to be spent really wisely with a lot of thought placed into metrics and analytics. You need to have them in the game. You need to test screenshots/icons/descriptions. Simple change of screenshots helped us get 25%+ more downloads a day. There is a lot of info out there but it is a huge uphill battle right now. If you take a look at some app review web sites you'll notice every single day there are well over 20 very well polished games being released on iOS and Android. That is every single day. Most don't get anywhere.

I've had some modest success with my own iOS apps but I think that's mainly because they're targeted at a more specific niche (music making) and I've been able to do my own grassroots marketing on forums etc where I know the audience really well and there's far less competition overall.

Games are such a big, saturated market that I wouldn't even consider trying to tackle them as an indie unless I could find a similarly specialized sub-niche.

I believe the apps market, especially games, is and will become even more like the chart music industry. It will settle into major 'labels' who will pick games on criteria they think will make it a success, and then apply their big guns on promoting it using ever evolving methods. Sometimes an indie production will slip through but as the methods mature so will the independent successes be increasingly niche bound.

One quick question here - I notice that you don't mention that press in your app description or homepage?

As a marketing type, any time we get press my first instinct is to say "quick, stick their logo on the homepage! Social proof!". But I'm not a games guy - is there a reason that doesn't work in games?

Regarding getting featured, this is another thing one can aim for. The Android team has written about how to be in the running for getting featured, as have others.

For example - Android introduces new features with new OS releases. In Gingerbread, Android introduced NFC. A well-designed app implementing NFC in an interesting way back when it was introduced had a very good chance of being featured, as well as a chance of getting publicity, and also usage by people who wanted to test their phones NFC capability. Of course, you want to be viable even if you are not featured, but some apps have a better chance of being featured than others, and being featured helps a lot, especially for a paid app.

Being featured can be called the "Holly Grail" on both ios and android.

But I always wondered how the review team of android pick the app that get featured? I am asking this because there is no any review process and wondering what are the opportunities a developer got to get his creation in front of the android review team.

is there any way to test your icon other than to change it once per week and see if downloads change (meanwhile hoping nothing else changes to confuse the data)?

I've heard of people doing mobile banner ad campaigns (like iAd or whatever), only changing the icon between ads, and comparing click-through rates.

That sounds like an excellent approach that should work well - similar to how Tim Ferriss named "Four Hour Work Week". (Not a games guy here, but I am an ad/marketing guy in one of my hats)

Do run your ads to statistical significance, though!

Just make a dozen variations, break into groups of three, put each set on it's webpage with a header question "Which sudoko game would you rather play?" Install click tracking via your tool of choice GA/Optimizely/VWO/CrazyEgg/Clicktale. Then head on over to either mechanical turk, usertesting, gorillatesting, or one of the other many services out there. Target your expected demographic and pay for a 5-20 individuals (or whatever volume of people will make you comfortable) to go through each set clicking the one they'd want to play. Take the winner from each set, create a new page with the three winners, select a new group of testers. Take the winner and make it the first one you go with. Then over time you can try switching some in and out of the actual app store. But increase the chances that your first one is your best!

I agree with what's said here, and that it's tough. I have an iphone time tracking app and here are my sales http://seriouslackofdirection.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-app-st...

I also suggest:

-changing the price (price reductions shows up on app tracker apps and twitter feeds).

-get good reviews from your friends.

-you might look into app store keyword optimization also.

Will look into that.

Interesting. So you chose to target Android first because the quick turnaround time of the Play store enabled rapid prototyping?

I wonder if that's going to become more and more of a differentiator vs Apple as the Play store catches up in overall app quality.

The OP here. I think this is becoming a big incentive for developers. We also have the IOS version almost ready, but we chose to launch it on android first to be able to do quick iterations. For example, we already pushed more than 4 version in 3 weeks to adjust to users requests.

Exactly.

The highest order bit is cash flowing to developers, unfortunately. If Android matched iOS in credit card coverage and user's propensity to pay the platforms would be way more competitive than they are currently.

Android definitely has a lot of catching up to do there.

But it also seems to me that the entire app market is shifting more to apps that aren't revenue sources in themselves but free apps that are part of some larger business strategy and in that world overall user reach is what counts. And there Android has all the momentum.

I think we're going to hit an inflection point later this year when 4.x breaks 50% market share and more developers start feeling comfortable ignoring the 2.3 laggards.

Tell Josh that Sam says hi!

Besides that, great points. Marketing takes a lot of A/B testing. I have to say, I like the graphics and whole idea behind Empire of Sudoku. The screenshot does indeed scream samurai more than sudoku, as mentioned by teej.

DO you think that plays against us? The idea was to make sudoku FUN once again, by having challenges, "fight with friend". You see... making it different and enjoyable with everyone, even those who don't usually play it.

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