Monday, July 1, 2013

How NOT to Launch a Game

Our game launched last year. Well... launched?
It's more like it was vomited on the App Store and died there.

What did we do? What was the result? Why was this stupid?

Launch day!

We launched our flag ship game MakeMeBlue in 2012.
We did no marketing whatsoever. Well, we told some friends about it but that's all. We hoped to launch soft and to grow our sales gradually as persons would download the game, play it and tell their friends about it.

We did not have a website
We did not write to game review sites
We did not have a youtube channel / facebook fan page / twitter account
We did not have an advertisement campaign

Why this is Bad?

This strategy stinks.

Even if people would love the game, they need to find it before they can love it. You can't tell your friends about games you don't know.

There are thousands and thousands of games on the App Store.Most gamers don't go through lists for hours and hours to find your game. Why would they? They just look at the top 10 or 100 and download something that looks nice. Or their friends did and told them about it.

This strategy is a certain path to take if you want to fail. And fail we did, just look at these wonderful statistics...

The Results

The first week reaped most downloads, with days ranging in the 20 downloads. We also had one day with about 60 downloads when testing out facebook integration.

Stats

Total downloads last half year: 336
Total in-app purchases after one year: € 3.01
Total iAd income after one year: € 3.05
Total admob income after one year: $6.35 (17.382 ad requests)

Lesson Learned

Actually it's pretty amazing that more than 300 persons were able to find our app and downloaded it. Wonder how they found it!?

The main lesson I learned is that marketing is vital to the success of any app. Thus with version 2.0 of our game we decided to relaunch it and spend more time on marketing.

We now have a website
We now wrote to game review sites
We now have a youtube channel / facebook fan page / twitter account
We now launched an advertisement campaign

The result of this?
We'll find out soon and let you know.

Do you have any stories or advice to share?
Please post it so we can all learn.

Success & Keep Koding!
Freek Sanders.

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