作者：Ezone

登上美国游戏排行榜前200名对iOS应用的成功至关重要，所有告诉你排行榜不重要的人可能都不在排行榜之内。如果你没有出现在排行榜上，我猜测应该有90%的应用购买群体无法看到你的产品。除了iTune推荐功能外，排行榜是能够将应用曝光度转变成销量的惟一方法。被游戏评论站点提及或许会给你短暂的辉煌，但是最终能够帮助你获得长期成功的是排行榜带来的曝光度。当然，你可以靠未登上排行榜的高价应用维持生计，但我们应当承认，所有人都希望自己的产品成为轰动市场的巨作！我们都想要成为创造出下个《割绳子》、《水果忍者》或《愤怒的小鸟》的开发者。

Top Sports paid software(from iphone.ezone)

以下是某些或许能帮助你创作下款市场巨作的技巧：

1、制作有着大量内容的绝佳游戏

2、定价0.99美元

3、发布4种版本

4、保持更新

制作有着大量内容的绝佳游戏

游戏让你可以进入最大的市场，因为每个拥有苹果设备的人都是潜在用户。看看美国应用榜单前10名，其中有9个是游戏。所以如果你想要让应用的销售量达到最大化，那么就开发游戏。

我觉得《涂鸦跳跃》在App Store中取得的成就是其他单关卡/模式游戏所无法超越的。我知道有人辩解称你应当避免关卡化的制作，但不幸的是App Store用户就是很喜欢关卡，而且越多越好。人们想要获得金钱的价值（或者认为金钱就是衡量价值的标准），所以你需要确保运用游戏内容的数量吸引他们的注意力。如果你的游戏有30个关卡，确保玩家可以在一开始便看到所有的锁定关卡。《愤怒的小鸟》和《割绳子》在这个方面确实做得很好。

定价0.99美元

决定游戏排名的是销量。你可以根据偏好进行多种定价，但是定价0.99美元的游戏将会取得最高的销量。这是事实。现在，如果你发现因某种原因导致游戏的排名不理想（游戏邦注：即便是定价于0.99美元），那么要通过各种方法来找到可以将盈利最大化的价格。《Chopper 2》的Dave Frampton写过一篇有关应用定价的优秀文章。

发布4种版本

在之前的文章中，我们曾简要地提到了在iOS系统中每款应用可以计划发布4种版本：

1、iPhone付费版（含IAP）

2、iPhone精简版（含广告的免费版本）

3、iPad（或高清）付费版（含IAP）

4、iPad（或高清）精简版（含广告的免费版本）

你可能会产生疑问，为何需要4种版本呢？这似乎需要额外的大量工作。而且，让用户觉得他们必须购买多个版本，难道不会让他们感到愤怒吗？为何不只发布一个单纯的免费通用版，含有可以升级至完全版本的IAP呢？答案很简单：为了排名。

如果你想要提升游戏的排名，那么发布单个含有可升级至完全版的IAP免费版本是错误的选择。这会降低你在排行榜上的排名。发布免费游戏还存在另一个问题，就是免费游戏在排行榜上待的时间不如付费游戏长。比如，前10名付费游戏待在排行榜上的平均天数为299.6，而前10大免费游戏的平均天数只有29.1。免费游戏的下载速度令人称奇。当我们在圣诞节前夕将《Crazy Snowboard》转变成免费时，每天可以获得25万次的下载量（游戏邦注：游戏升至排行榜第2名）。在这种速度之下，无需很长时间便可以占领市场。

如果我们当初没有将《Crazy Snowboard》设为通用版本就好了。如果我们有个iPhone版本和iPad高清版本，我想这两个应用的总体销售量将会更高，我们在iPhone和iPad上的排名也会更加靠前。

保持更新

用户总是喜欢新鲜的东西。更新是重新吸引用户并让他们再次宣传应用的绝妙机会。玩游戏的人越多，其他人越有可能看到你的游戏，形成口头营销。到目前为止，我们最为成功的应用《Crazy Snowboard》自发布之日起已经更新了逾16次。《愤怒的小鸟》有13次更新，《涂鸦跳跃》有37次更新，《水果忍者》有10次更新（游戏邦注：这是2011年1月份数据）。更新或许无法产生早期的那种影响力，但仍然是提升排名的绝妙方法。

希望上述技巧能够帮助你获得成功，我们也将会将这些技术运用于下次发布的游戏中。

（注：《Crazy Snowboard》有段时间不位于游戏排行榜前200名之列，但归该榜单并位居第168位后，销量提升了30%。）

游戏邦注：本文发稿于2011年1月17日，所涉时间、事件和数据均以此为准。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，拒绝任何不保留版权的转载，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

4 Tips to Get in the App Store Top 200

by Ezone

Ranking on the US Top 200 charts is critical to the success of an iOS app – and anyone that tells you charts don’t matter probably isn’t in the charts. If you aren’t charting, my guess is that you are invisible to 90% of the app buying public. Apart from an iTunes feature, the charts are the ONLY way to get visibility for your app that translates to meaningful sales. Getting mentioned on review sites may give you a momentary blip, but in the end it is visiblity in the charts that is going to give you long term success. Sure, you can eke out a living with a non-charting high priced niche app, but if we are honest with ourselves no one is in the App Store to just make enough to scrape by – we are all here because we want to hit a home run! We want to be the developer that creates the next Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja or Angry Birds (had to get my mandatory idevblogaday Angry Birds reference in there!).

Here are a few tips to help you create the next big hit app:

Make a great game with heaps of content

Price it at US$0.99

Release four versions

Keep updating

Make a great game with heaps of content

Games let you reach the biggest market because anyone that owns an iDevice is a potential customer. Have a look at the US overall Top 10, 9 of those apps are games. So if you want to sell a lot of apps, make a game.

I don’t think we’ll see another single level/mode game do as well as Doodle Jump in the App Store. I know people argue that you should avoid creating levels – Steambids: Survival: Goodbye Handcrafted Levels – but unfortunately customers in the App Store love levels, and the more levels the better. People want value for money (or at least perceived value for money), and you need to make sure that you impress them with how much content your game has. If you have 30 levels, make sure players can see all the locked levels from the start. This is something Angry Birds and Cut the Rope do really well.

Price it at US$0.99

Ranking is determined based on volume of sales. You can play around as much as you like with pricing, but in the end you will sell the most copies at US$0.99. That is a fact. Now, if you find that for whatever reason your game doesn’t chart well (even at US$0.99), then by all means play around with price to find what price point maximizes your revenue. Dave Frampton of Chopper 2 fame has a good article on App Pricing.

Release Four Versions

In last week’s post about designing for multiple platforms we briefly mentioned for iOS we plan to release four versions of each app:

iPhone Paid (with IAP)

iPhone Lite (free with ads)

iPad (or HD) Paid (with IAP)

iPad (or HD) Lite (free with ads)

Why four versions you say? Seems like a lot of extra work. Plus won’t it anger customers that they have to purchase multiple versions? Why not just release a single free Universal version with an IAP to upgrade to the full version? The answer is simple: ranking.

If you want to increase your rank it is a mistake to have a single free version with IAP to upgrade to a full version. This will actually lower your chart ranking. Another problem with releasing a free game is that free games don’t stay in the charts as long as paid ones. e.g. The average number of days the Top 10 paid games have been in the charts is 299.6, the average for the Top 10 Free games is 39.1. Free games are downloaded at an amazing rate. When we made Crazy Snowboard free just before xmas we were doing 250,000 downloads a day (and that was at the #2 spot). At that rate it doesn’t take long to saturate the market.

In hindsight I wish we hadn’t made Crazy Snowboard a Universal game. If we had an iPhone version and an HD iPad version I predict that our combined sales of both apps would be higher, and our rankings on both the iPhone and iPad charts would be higher.

(Another thing to watch is that once you make an app Universal, you can’t limit updates to just iPhone or iPad. This is a good policy as you can’t predict which device a customer purchased the Universal version for.)

Keep Updating

Customers love a freebie. Updates are an excellent opportunity to re-engage with your customer and let them re-discover your app. And the more people playing your game, the more likely someone else will see them playing and generate a word-of-mouth sale. Our most successful app to date, Crazy Snowboard has had over 16 updates since it was released. Angry Birds 13 updates, Doodle Jump 37 updates, Fruit Ninja 10 updates. Updates may not have the same impact as in the early days when an update changed your release date, but they are still a good way to boost your ranking.

Hopefully some of these tips will help you find success, I know we will be applying these techniques to our next release.

(Note: Crazy Snowboard was out of the Top 200 Games chart for a while and managed to claw its way back in last week. It is currently #168 in the US Top 200 games chart, and since being back in the charts sales are up 30%) (Source: ezone.com)