作者：Ivan Vucica

很多人都认为App Store是一个巨大的金矿，并这里掀起了一股所谓的“淘金热”，同时，也越来越多开发者将目光锁定这个平台。iOS平台的简易开发工具，较低准入门槛以及应用的可移植性都是吸引更多开发者前来“淘金”的关键因素。很多开发者乐于把游戏引进iPhone平台，因为他们不用为如何向玩家收费而闹心。

我不会后悔进入iPhone游戏开发领域，当我们Hindarium团队下定决心针对iPhone平台开发《Zombie Ball》时，我就知道我们的选择是对的。这是我们的第一款游戏，如果你能够尝试这款游戏，你将会发现，它完全是针对于手机平台而制作的一款游戏。

zombie-ball(from vgamingnews.com)

我们为何选择iPhone平台？

Hindarium并不是一个注册公司，这个独立工作室只有4名成员，包揽了游戏的设计，绘画和编码等工作。而这就是为什么我们必须限制开发预算，并对任何决定再三斟酌的原因了。

事实上，先不说我们是否具备一定的能力，但是我必须强调的是，iOS是我们所确定的的唯一手机平台（我这里说的能力是指能够从游戏中谋取利益）。克罗地亚这个国家并非大型企业考虑的目标市场，而这一点也将直接影响着我们的游戏收益。Android Market和Microsoft App Hub都未在克罗地亚提供服务（尽管微软在当地拥有办事处，且谷歌也将紧随其后设立自己的办事处）。而在这点上苹果便更胜一筹了，虽然他们并未在克罗地亚设立办事处，但是凭借着iPhone遍及全球的服务网络，克罗地亚人民也能够享受到苹果所提供的游戏乐趣。

我认为我们的游戏设置较为合理，不仅满足了玩家所要求的趣味性，而且也具有我们独到的创意性，能够让玩家轻易上手。我们提供给玩家一种循序渐进的游戏体验，让他们能对游戏产生一种摸索的心理，并一步一步挖掘游戏的魅力。

所以，如果说我们选择iPhone这个平台是正确的，而且我们的游戏设置也是合理的，那么到底是哪一个环节出错了？

我们到底错在哪？

我们便是败在游戏的发布方式，或者说是市场营销策略上。如果我们有足够的成本便能够解决这些问题。但是现在我并不想细数我们到底犯了多少错误，而是想说说我们对于这些错误的想法。虽然2周的时间并不长，但是对于我们来说，让这些错误潜伏两周实在很悲哀。

首先，我们未能持续为该款游戏提供足够的曝光率。并不是因为我们只有这样才能够在预设日期内完成游戏，而是因为我们并没有更多可共享的内容，也就是说我们不能利用独家游戏内容吸引更多媒体的注意。我们不敢反复散发游戏的相关资讯，因为这是我们的第一款游戏，不希望因为这样让玩家感到厌烦，而认为我们只是一个无趣的垃圾制造器。同时，我们也没有足够的时间制作出更有趣，且与游戏设置相关的预告片。最后，因为直到游戏发行之前我们都仍致力于游戏的开发，所以并没有时间为其举办任何正式的“首映礼”。

我们没能与一些主流市场取得直接联系，这些市场包括美国，英国和德国。虽然它们并非是我们唯一关注的目标市场，但是却可以说是最大的目标市场。如果能在其中一个市场中取得较好的成绩，那么对于我们今后的发展都具有很大的帮助。

缺少预算如何进行市场营销？

如果缺少传播途径（如社交网站）以及足够的市场营销预算，那么你该如何做才能让游戏取得成功呢？如果那些大市场并不想帮你推销游戏，那么你是否会在短暂的成功后而迅速跌入谷底呢？但是我们找到了一些解决对策：在我们的祖国克罗地亚，多亏了一些游戏开发同行和Twitter上的用户，我们在游戏发行的第一天便取得了显著的收益。但是不幸的是，克罗地亚仍是一个太小的市场，如果单纯地满足于这个市场，我们将不可能取得更大的发展。

但是这却使我们不得不思考下一个问题，也就是市场营销预算问题。虽然iPhone能为你的游戏提供一个销售平台，但是这个平台却早已“人满为患”了。如果你没有任何投入，谁会心甘情愿地为你的游戏做宣传？他们不会把时间浪费在一个价值低廉且无趣的游戏上。如果你和我都认为小型的独立游戏开发者不需要在游戏评论方面投入太大的费用，那么这个问题便不再那么重要；但是如果评论者认为我们应该为了游戏推广而投入一定费用的话，那我们就必须好好思考这一问题了。

作为一款独立的iOS游戏，我们应该如何为它争取更多有益的评论？或者你可以判断我们到底能从评论中得到什么好处？在我们为了获取评论而接触的一些平台上，我们获得了四家网站的积极评价（其中有三家网站表示愿意与我们展开合作）。我们应该感谢Paranerds，Bulletproof Pixel和Digitally Downloaded等平台，特别是帮助我们获取最大销量的AppAdvice。我认为，如果我们能够提供更多的独家资讯，或者更多游戏的相关内容，那么游戏的整体画面看来会更具有吸引力吧。而我们便是在游戏画面所体现的视觉感上大大失利了。

zombie-ball(from itunes.apple.com)

如果可能的话，你可以花费一点时间特别制作一个充满画面感，且并非针对于游戏设置的预告片，同时添加更多有趣的内容，以吸引更多玩家的注意力。或者还会因此达到一种病毒式传播效果。如果你是一个小型的独立游戏开发者，没有足够的广告预算，那么这个方法对于你来说就再实用不过了。

接下来你必须面对销售应用的一些细节性问题。显然，App Store是一个购买应用程序的好场所，我们也很喜欢这个平台。但是有一个问题是，我们在通过苹果应用审核后延迟了游戏发行时间（游戏邦注：即原定发行时间是5月19日，但他们推迟到了5月26日），但是当游戏正式发行后并出现在App Store的“新发行游戏”目录上时，我们发现该目录上显示的发行时间仍然是5月19日。这就意味着我们会被同时段新发行的游戏而覆盖。而且我们作为App Store中的新游戏出现在其它网站上的宣传时间也大大缩短了。总之，可以说我们很愚蠢地失去了一个提高游戏曝光率的机会。

你是否发现“僵尸”这个角色已经多次出现于其它游戏中了？那么是否一款游戏不包含“僵尸”就会显得比较有趣呢？如果一个游戏主题被反复使用了多次，并且已经让玩家产生了厌烦情绪，那么你再次围绕它开发“新”游戏也就不再有多大的意义了。而我们之所以会再次围绕“僵尸”开发游戏，是因为我们觉得这个主题很棒，而且这也是我们最初的游戏构想。在这款游戏中，我们的设置是用滚珠压扁僵尸而非通过射击。可以说，除了围绕“僵尸”这一主题展开，这个游戏理念本身还是很有趣的。但是，当玩家在App Store中看到我们的游戏名字时，他们常常因

为“僵尸”这个字眼而失去了对游戏的兴趣。而且当他们搜索“僵尸”时，也会同时出现无数以此为主题的游戏，因此我们的这款游戏也常常会混在这些游戏中而失去关注度。

不要以“Z”作为游戏名称首字母

说到游戏名字时，我们承认自己忽略了数据库功能，也低估了字母排序的重要性。如果以“Z”作为游戏名字的首个字母，那么我们的游戏在发行的第一天便会掉到“新发行游戏”名单的末尾。

同时，你还需要确保苹果能够把你的游戏列入“推荐”名单中。虽然我们做到了这一点，但却只局限于一些特定市场（我们很高兴在美国市场获得推荐），而且也并未出现在这些网站的首页上。但这却是帮助我们提高游戏销量的好方法。你肯定不想错过这个机会吧，所以就多尝试一些与众不同的方法，并努力去吸引注应用评论者的注意。

当然了，如果你能设计一个专属图标，那将能够帮你的游戏吸引到更多玩家。我认为使用一些较为传统的理论也是不错的选择，如“出卖色相”。如果你制作的图标只是围绕着《恐龙战队》或者《Lady Gaga》等主题（就像我们这样），那将无助于提高游戏吸引力。你必须提供给玩家高分辨率的图像（游戏邦注：因为该游戏图像都是经过了后期处理，所以分辨率只能维持在480×320）。是的，这就意味着我们的游戏不可能适用于iPad等需要高分辨率图像的设备。而我们的用户也会因游戏是否标明“Game Center”和“iPad”等图标而明确知道游戏有无其他附加价值。虽然我们的确支持Game Center功能，但却是在我们掉出“推荐”名单，推出更新版本时才添加了这一功能。

发行日期勿与美国节假日撞车

不要忽视你的游戏发行日期，并将其与目标市场的当地习俗和节假日相结合。最重要的是，不要在美国的节假日期间发行游戏。因为在这期间，很多游戏开发者会降低游戏的价格。就像Gameloft和艺电会在节假日期间以0.99美分甩卖游戏，而我们如果在这时候发行新游戏，那么将会失去各种优势。我们在5月26日发行《Zombie Ball》，正好赶在美国的阵亡战士纪念日（5月30日）的前一周。可想而知这对于我们游戏的销售产生了多大的影响，要不是我们将游戏售价降至1.99美元，最后的情况可能还会更糟糕。

最后感想

总之，我想说的是，因为《Zombie Ball》是我们第一款游戏，所以我们还不懂得如何完善它的销售方案。但是我们会尽可能地尝试一些新方法：我们将尽可能地汇总资金，并将其投入游戏的广告宣传中。同时我们也将尝试着提供给玩家一些免费的游戏体验。可以说我们正在涉及之前未曾体验过的领域，我们也不会随随便便放弃。也许这篇文章会让一些玩家对我们的游戏产生兴趣也说不定呢。

但是如果《Zombie Ball》的销量始终无法提升，我们将开始制作下一款新游戏。现在我们知道导致游戏失败的原因了，我们仍将在下一款游戏中展示推荐《Zombie Ball》。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Launching an iPhone game: what we got wrong View comments

Ivan Vucica

It’s easy to think that the App Store is a gold mine. The gold rush is definitely still there, and a lot of people are still rushing to the platform. The combination of easy-to-use development tools, low entry barrier and even easy portability (native code is native code, if you know what you’re doing) is still drawing a lot of developers to the platform.

Add to that not worrying about the technicalities of how to charge your customers, and most people will be very happy to bring their game to the iPhone.

I’m definitely not sorry about coming to the platform. I think we made the right choice when we at Hindarium decided to develop Zombie Ball for the iPhone. This is our first project. If you try it, you’ll see it’s definitely a game that could not run anywhere except on a mobile phone.

Why iPhone was the right platform for us

To provide a bit of context, Hindarium is not registered as a company. We’re a small, “garage” team of four guys designing, drawing and coding. That might explain a bit about our budget constrains, and some of the decisions we made.

Realistically, iOS was the only mobile platform we had the knowledge to target, not to mention ability. When I talk about ability, I’m talking about being able to receive money for our work. Croatia is a country that hardly appears on major corporations’ radars, and that directly translates into being able to receive payments.

For example, neither Android Market nor Microsoft App Hub support sales from Croatia, despite Microsoft having a local office and Google opening one soon. Apple is rather nice in that regard, despite having no local office. So — that was it. iPhone!

I like to think we didn’t make a mistake with the gameplay. Gameplay is fun and relatively original, and people seem to pick it up quickly. We slowly unlock things for the player, so there is some sense of discovery as well.

So, if our choice of a platform is not incorrect, nor is our gameplay to blame, what did we get wrong?

Where did we go wrong?

We made mistakes in our approach to releasing the game, and even in our approach to marketing. Some of our mistakes could have been fixed if we had money to spend.

Some of our mistakes could not be predicted as our mistakes. For now, I’m not going to talk about exact numbers, but I’ll try to tell you about what we think we did wrong. Two weeks may not be much, but for us, it was enough. Sadly.

First of all, we did not work on our exposure continuously. It’s not that we could work more with the deadlines we set for ourselves. We did not have a lot of content to continuously share. That also meant we could not target the media with exclusive content. We did not dare bomb the press with constant releases, since we had no previous projects, so we did not want to be marked as annoying pests or spammers. We did not have time to produce fun, gameplay-unrelated trailers which would be interesting to the press. (You can see the trailer we did produce below). Finally, we worked on the game until the launch, so we could not give out previews.

We did not have contacts in key markets. We consider these to be United States, United Kingdom and Germany. These are not the only ones we care about, but these are some of the largest ones. Having even somewhat satisfactory performance in just one of these markets would be good for us.

How to market without a budget?

But, how can you be successful without either contacts that would spread the word about you (for example, via social networks) and without marketing budget? How can you be successful without anyone in large markets being willing to promote you enough, so you climb the charts for at least a while? And we know this helps: in our home country, Croatia, thanks to help from our fellow developers and other Twitter users, we made noticable sales on the launch day. Unfortunately, this is a too small market, and we didn’t have any further luck there.

That brings us to the next thing: we did not have marketing budget. iPhone may offer you a place to sell, but this place to sell is overcrowded. How can you just get the word out if you don’t have anything to stimulate the people to talk about you? How can they justify spending their time on you, when just around the corner there is someone financially more interesting? It doesn’t matter if you and I don’t think a small, indie developer should be paying for reviews; if the reviewers think we should pay for advertising and reviews, that’s it.

The trouble with getting reviews for an indie iOS game

You can conclude how successful our efforts to get reviewed were: out of several dozen sites we contacted for review, we got a total of four reviews (with three being a result of requests coming to us). I’d like to thank Paranerds, Bulletproof Pixel, Digitally Downloaded, and finally the one that brought most sales: AppAdvice. We think we may have had to provide more exclusive, that we should have provided more content, and perhaps the game itself should have looked more impressive on screenshots. As it is played, it’s rather nice. Maybe we lost some reviews due to being visually non-impressive.

If you can, spend a month and create custom art, non-gameplay trailers and more interesting things that can draw eyeballs, and perhaps go viral. It will be worth it.

You may not have advertising budget, but if you’re a small “garage” indie developer, it might be worth it.

It’s the little things that hurt you

Next, you must count on glitches in the sale software. In our case, this is the App Store. It’s overall a beautiful place to buy apps. We like it a lot. But, we have delayed our launch after approval. We got approved on May 19th, but we decided we really want to launch on May 26th. For good part of our launch day, we were listed on the “New Releases” list as if we launched on May 19th. That is — we were not noticable at all. Many sites that perform screenscraping on the App Store also did not pick us up for a while. Again, we lost exposure in an extremely silly way.

Remember the time when zombies were present in games just like any other topic? Remember when it didn’t matter much if the game contained zombies — if anything, it could, perhaps, be more interesting? You must have noticed that those times have passed. So it doesn’t make much sense to develop a game with a topic that is so overused that everyone is sick of it. We began working on this game because we felt the title is cool, and that this is an original idea. Squish the zombie instead of shooting it. Squish it with a rolling ball. Idea itself has turned out nice… except the “zombie” part. Now, when a person sees the title of our game on the App Store, they see just the “Zombie”, and skip it. When they search for “zombie”, there’s so many titles that there is almost no chance they will pick us randomly.

Never pick a name beginning with Z

Speaking of the title, we did not count on a small feature of databases. We forgot to mind the alphabetical order. Launching the game with a Z would make us rank lower in the “New Releases” list even on launch day.

You should make sure Apple has a reason to feature your game in the New & Noteworthy. We did get featured; unfortunately, that was only in some stores (luckily, the US store!) and not on the homepage. Still, this was the only thing that kept some sales around, apparently. You don’t want to miss this. Be distinctive in some way, and catch that app reviewer’s eye!

Oh, and design your icon to be catchy. Personally, I think one can still ensure reasonable sales by making use of the old, mystical wisdom: “Sex sells.” If your icon is just between “Power Rangers” and “Lady Gaga” games, just like we were, it definitely wouldn’t hurt, would it?You’ll want to always have hi-res graphics around. We don’t have any graphics around except for 480×320, since the graphics has been postprocessed after rendering. Yes — that means no iPad version and no

crisp retina display support. And that brings us to users not feeling they have added value which they can identify by seeing “Game Center” and “iPad” icons when buying the game. We did add “Game Center” support, but only in the update, when we dropped from the “New & Noteworthy” list.

Indies: don’t launch an iOS game on a US holiday

Never forget the social aspect of your launch date; remember the local customs and holidays! Most of all, try not to launch on US holidays. Those days, too many developers will be dropping the price. Competing with Gameloft and EA titles at $0.99, plus competing with the fact that those titles are on sale: that’s rather difficult. We launched on May 26th. That’s Thursday. If you take a careful look on the calendar, you’ll see that next Monday, May 30th, was Memorial Day. So we launched just before the Memorial Weekend. You can guess how that reflected on our sales. And it would probably be even worse if we didn’t drop the price from $1.99.

Where next?

To wrap this up, I’d like to point out that this being our first project, we don’t really know how to fix the sales. We’ll try various things: we’ll scrap together some cash for advertising, we’ll try running giveaways. We’re really charting what’s for us unknown territory, and we won’t easily give up. Who knows?

Maybe this blog post will interest someone in our game.

But if the sales don’t go up? We’ll move on to the next project. Now we know what doesn’t work. And “Zombie Ball” could still get exposure through our next project.（source:gamesbrief）