How do you guys successfully market your apps?

Solar2D General Questions/Discussion
#1

Last week, I launched my new game on the App Store and Google Play, and have seen pretty disappointing download numbers.

I’ve acquired some help with marketing, including having my app reviewed and retweeted, etc. I found fiverr.com to be a valuable resource for not a whole lot of money. Marketing is not my forte, is the long and short of it.

I’ve gotten some publicity with the help of some people I contacted directly who were willing to do a video review of my app, as well as paying for a few gigs on fiverr.com. Still, it has been met with very little fanfare. Do you guys have any tips on how to get more people to download my game? I know there is no magic bullet, per se, but I feel like I went about this all wrong. Also, the game I’ve made is 10x better looking that any of its clones. I’ve come across a lot of sites online of people switching ad networks because they aren’t happy with their 800-1000 active sessions a day. I’d be happy to have even half of that!

If interested, here are the sites I’ve gotten to help me with some publicity so far:

http://www.cellular2all.com

http://www.gamespot.com/neonslaught/news/

https://www.facebook.com/MiscritsRewarder

https://twitter.com/FreeLifeApps/status/554708506264084482

https://twitter.com/SyncedReviews

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uD-BRd6JjA (video from Synced Reviews)

Thanks, guys

#2

The first thing I would recommend is patience. Don’t check your downloads every day. Expect that it might take weeks, even months, before the downloads pick up. That’s because as people download your app and “like” it, it appears on their friends’ list of recommendations, then they like it, etc. It takes a while to get enough users to get that ball rolling.

The second thing will come off harsh, so I apologize in advance. You have to ask yourself, how unique is your app? There are literally millions of games like this on the app stores. Marketing is not enough; to stand out, you need to deliver a product that differentiates itself from the others. Not just another candy crush / angry birds / flappy bird / memory / pong / clone. There are too many games out there of the “no instructions needed, just click/turn/move the x as fast as possible” type. The market is completely saturated and the users simply can’t find your app among the hundreds of thousands just like it.

Sorry if that wasn’t really helpful, but in addition to solving the marketing problem, I think it’s also important to manage your expectations. No matter what you do, apps like this will only get significant amounts of downloads through random happenstances of going viral, and going viral is just that - random.

#3

No offense taken at all :slight_smile: Any feedback is appreciated.

I actually did try to differentiate my game by making it look better, with nicer effects :wink: To your point, while I do agree that the flappy, simply tap-to-do-something genre is overdone, one cannot deny the success achieved by its clones like SplashyFish, Flappy’s Back, etc. Plus, from what I’ve seen on SensorTower, etc., there are probably at most a dozen decent clones of my game, but they’re all not much to look at. 

What gets to me is that the original game mine is based on shot up to the 16th spot in the App Store in less than a day. How the heck does that happen? It went from a kid’s hands to a marketing expert’s, and the latter ended up with the big payday. I must be doing something completely wrong, or need to spend more money somewhere. 

Here is the article.

#4

Viral growth generally happens in two ways

  1. Complete happenstance. One in a million. Can’t be reproduced reliably. Of course someone writes an article about that one guy who made it, but no one writes about the other 999.999 guys. The sad truth is that most of us belong with the latter category

  2. Someone illegally buys a few hundred thousand likes and 5-star ratings from a “like farm”, boosting the app to the top of the charts, e.g. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/02/pay-to-rank-gaming-the-app-store-in-the-age-of-flappy-bird/

#5

Wow… Excellent read! I always suspected there was something fishy going on with some of those games.

Thanks for sharing!

#6

The first thing I would recommend is patience. Don’t check your downloads every day. Expect that it might take weeks, even months, before the downloads pick up. That’s because as people download your app and “like” it, it appears on their friends’ list of recommendations, then they like it, etc. It takes a while to get enough users to get that ball rolling.

The second thing will come off harsh, so I apologize in advance. You have to ask yourself, how unique is your app? There are literally millions of games like this on the app stores. Marketing is not enough; to stand out, you need to deliver a product that differentiates itself from the others. Not just another candy crush / angry birds / flappy bird / memory / pong / clone. There are too many games out there of the “no instructions needed, just click/turn/move the x as fast as possible” type. The market is completely saturated and the users simply can’t find your app among the hundreds of thousands just like it.

Sorry if that wasn’t really helpful, but in addition to solving the marketing problem, I think it’s also important to manage your expectations. No matter what you do, apps like this will only get significant amounts of downloads through random happenstances of going viral, and going viral is just that - random.

#7

No offense taken at all :slight_smile: Any feedback is appreciated.

I actually did try to differentiate my game by making it look better, with nicer effects :wink: To your point, while I do agree that the flappy, simply tap-to-do-something genre is overdone, one cannot deny the success achieved by its clones like SplashyFish, Flappy’s Back, etc. Plus, from what I’ve seen on SensorTower, etc., there are probably at most a dozen decent clones of my game, but they’re all not much to look at. 

What gets to me is that the original game mine is based on shot up to the 16th spot in the App Store in less than a day. How the heck does that happen? It went from a kid’s hands to a marketing expert’s, and the latter ended up with the big payday. I must be doing something completely wrong, or need to spend more money somewhere. 

Here is the article.

#8

Viral growth generally happens in two ways

  1. Complete happenstance. One in a million. Can’t be reproduced reliably. Of course someone writes an article about that one guy who made it, but no one writes about the other 999.999 guys. The sad truth is that most of us belong with the latter category

  2. Someone illegally buys a few hundred thousand likes and 5-star ratings from a “like farm”, boosting the app to the top of the charts, e.g. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/02/pay-to-rank-gaming-the-app-store-in-the-age-of-flappy-bird/

#9

Wow… Excellent read! I always suspected there was something fishy going on with some of those games.

Thanks for sharing!