First of all, before I get into my question, I just want to give a heartfelt thanks to everyone behind TidBITS over the years! It has been a wonderful resource and much appreciated!!
Ok, my question: my sister has 2 sons, recent IT grads, zero jobs where they live, so over the past year they started coding iOS games. Nothing monumental, just fun little games one can play. They have a marked disdain for AI, so everything is hand-coded, artisanal is the word they like to use. They also have a marked disdain for ads, data collection, micro-transactions, and everything people find annoying. Pay your 2 bucks, and all you get is a fun little game, no distractions, and you don’t even need an internet connection to play them.
The problem is, they also have a marked disdain for social media. On the off chance I might know, they asked me what they could do to rise above the noise and get the games noticed. I have no idea, then I looked at my email and there was the TidBITS newsletter for the week, and my AHA moment.
They have 10 games and one general purpose app in the Apple iOS app store right now, but no idea how to proceed with the whole promotion part of the equation.
Anyway, I thank you in advance for thoughts and suggestions.
First, decide if developing the games is a hobby or a business.
If a hobby, I would start by giving free copies of the game to friends and family with a request that anybody who likes it posts a review or a mention on their social media pages.
If a business, I would start by figuring out who the intended audience is for my games. Formulate some profiles of “typical” customers.
Use these profiles to identify how to get these customers’ attention, create product descriptions that are appealing, and set prices.
Unfortunately, running a business often means figuring out how to balance personal feelings about something with the reality of making and selling products and services.
They may want to take a look at Paul Hudson’s Kickstart app. Free to download, more advanced features require a subscription. But even the free options would give them some ideas and guidance for marketing.
I´m interested in exactly such apps, so I hope it would be OK for you to post which apps that are (or maybe a link to their website if they have one). I will give them a spin and if they are interesting I will gladly pay 2 bucks per app.
Yeah, I do think that the hobby vs business is the key question they need to answer for themselves. The games are what would be considered “casual” games, anybody of any age could play them, so a “typical“ customer would be a bit hard to define. I do know they would like to be successful, and that will take a bit of dogged persistence, on their part, to research and figure things out.
The other thing they need to consider… when they were first setting up their developer (if that is the right word) account in the app store, they were new, just figuring everything out, and to get their games in the EU app store, there was all sorts of extra forms and paperwork that was needed, and they just did not want to deal with it then. So their games don’t show up in the EU app store, which makes me wonder what other parts of the world do or don’t show their games. Their initial thought was, the US market should be fine, right… What starts out as a simple idea can turn complicated very quickly.
Also, I did not want to turn this into blatant commercial, and get Mr. TidBITS, himself, mad at me, so I’ll privately message anyone interested in their games. Thanks again.
I was amused that this came in as I was polishing my article how to pitch apps to TidBITS.
We almost certainly wouldn’t cover little iOS games, but the advice in there might be useful for them when trying to get other coverage.
The other thought I had is that each game should try to figure out how to promote the others, preferably in a non-annoying way. Ideally, that could involve gameplay itself—you learn something from one game that makes another easier/different/more interesting. And it should encourage players to invite other players as part of the gameplay.
At the risk of sounding glib, that’s a big reason why developing products is hard, even for huge companies. But when there isn’t a vision for who launch customers are—or the market is defined as “everybody”—it is easy for a new offering to become generic, trying to be all things to all people, and to spread limited amounts of time, effort, and money too thinly. That’s why I think taking time to think through promotional strategy and tactics is a good idea before going full-bore.
Connected to the above, there is nothing wrong with starting out in a single geographic market. Also, and perhaps most importantly for a small business, selling to people involves customer service. People without retail experience often underestimate how much time they will have to spend on customer service. So waiting to go global, especially given cultural and regulatory differences between regions and countries, often is a wise move.
We used to make Take Control authors write the marketing copy for their books before they wrote the book itself, because if you don’t know what you’re trying to sell, you may not create something that can be sold effectively.
It reminds me of my first job. That company had a policy that every developer had to spend two days a month answering support phone calls. The idea being that you can’t know what customers are doing if you don’t hear first-hand what their problems are.
I think it was a great policy, and went a long way toward breaking down “ivory tower” attitudes. I’ve never seen a policy like that anywhere else, which is a shame.
When I was project manager for a small development group in the early seventies, our policy was that every developer (including me) had to handle support calls and emails for one week every N weeks where N was the number of develiopers.
OK, good points, good stuff. I’ll gather it all up and pass everything on to my nephews. They are just at the beginning of their journey, so it will be interesting to see what they decide to do.