Tips for Beating the App Store Blackbox

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)?")

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!