作者：Charilaos Kalogirou

我已投身独立开发领域2个多月，现在是时候该分享几点关于App Store发行工作的经验。

背景

首先先来谈谈《Pop Corny》，这款简单而有趣的休闲游戏，主要迎合手机游戏的简短体验要求。

我独立集资、制作和发行这款游戏，游戏最终采用付费模式，定价99美分。后来，我又将其切换成免费模式，嵌入虚拟交易活动。

下面是游戏的若干技术参数：

* 开发时间：8个月

* 开发人员数量：1人

* 外包音效和美工工作

* 采用Sylphis3D游戏引擎

* 支持各种iPhone、iPod touch和iPad设备

* 源代码（游戏代码+游戏引擎代码，不包括第三方数据库）：

—————————————–
Language files blank comment code
—————————————–
Lua 52 2631 1026 10415
C/C++ Header 77 1209 1111 3718
C++ 32 731 882 2552
XML 1 1 0 788
Python 9 170 136 630
Bourne Shell 13 70 167 284
Objective C 2 14 14 25
—————————————–
SUM: 186 4826 3336 18412
—————————————–

* 游戏代码占据5983行上述LUA代码

* 总原始数据集高达0.4GB

* 生成10MB的“编译”数据集

* 原始价格99美分（游戏邦注：持续50天），后来转变成免费模式

* 2个月的总销量：约15万

* IAP转化率：约2.0%

* 评级：4.5/5（在600个评论中，70%的评论给出5颗星评级）

宣传

游戏自始至终的融资和发行工作都没得到任何援助。这可以简单理解成：没有营销预算。因此我需要尽可能地节约成本。应用存在的一个有利条件似乎就是众所周知的发行日期。

所有投身App Store的开发者都会告诉你，发行日是有效推广应用的重要渠道之一。你必须竭尽全力确保自己当天表现突出。这点完全正确。在这款游戏之前，我已在App Store推出过3款。发行日能够让你免费获得曝光度。这主要通过App Store新作品榜单。

我的方式是将此曝光机会同其他的“社交”宣传方式结合起来，尽量确保应用蹿升至榜单前列。然后也许若干游戏新闻工作者会发现游戏，对其进行评论，进而持续制造话题。在此我特别制作了一个预告视频，一礼拜前我在Facebook发起了一个“视频预告揭幕”活动。

我积极邀请自己认识的所有朋友，一礼拜后，我向大家呈现预告视频。那天我同时还在各个相关论坛发布视频。这带来一定的曝光度，但这主要集中在希腊，这是我多数Facebook好友的所在地。

发行日期设定在2月3日，我已获得苹果的批准，我在此之前已向游戏新闻工作者发送促销代码。为此，我在开发初期精心收集系列游戏评论网站和媒体人信息。我将此根据Alexa排名就评论分数和游戏类型进行排序。我送出手头全部的40个促销代码，还同其他100多个网站和媒体人联络，但没有提供代码。

在开发初期，我做出另一有关营销的重要决定。那就是同时支持OpenFeint和GameCenter。OpenFeint有自己的热门游戏、推荐游戏和新游戏榜单，这能够给新推出的不知名游戏带来额外曝光度。我觉得游戏需要获得额外曝光度，所以我同时支持两个社交游戏网络。

简而言之，游戏发行日之前我所做的工作包括：

* 制作“即将上映”的视频预告

* 给游戏制作Facebook和Twitter页面

* 在Facebook组织游戏视频揭幕活动

* 向游戏媒体人发送手头的40个促销代码（包含所有媒体包及附加内容）

* 在论坛的“新作品”版块发布文章

* 在其他应用中进行交叉推广

* 支持OpenFeint

现在我所要做的就是等待发行日期的到来及收获甜美果实。

苹果将事情搞砸

所有工作准备就绪，游戏会自动于2月3日在全球的各App Stores发布，2月2日一场噩梦降临到我身上。

我看到新西兰App Store正等待《Pop Corny》入驻平台。这令我激动不已，经过多个月的辛苦工作，游戏终于顺利问世。我此时既感到空前的欣喜，又承受史无前例的压力，但很快在深入查看后，所有喜悦之情消失殆尽。

当我发现游戏图标附近显示的发行日期是“1月31日”时，恐惧感向我席卷而来。我发疯般地切换到新作品列表寻找《Pop Corny》，但完全没有看到游戏的踪影。发生什么情况？难道游戏3天前就已发行，而我没有注意到？完全不可能，应用没有入驻其他App Store。我手动查看其他所有App Store，应用没有出现其中。

我保持乐观态度，认为是这些发布系统更新缓慢，初期有可能会出现诸如此类的事情。但多数国家开始迎来自己的2月3日，相同的情况再次出现。《Pop Corny》以问世3天的状态现身各个平台。

就App Store来说，3天是段非常漫长的时间。应用丧失出现于头版页面的机会。我尝试通过支持系统联络苹果公司，但这说起来容易做起来难。

此时我突然意识到自己的渺小。我们完全无法通过这一系统（你需要在15个嵌入问题类型中进行选择，最后才获得文本框，将你的问题写下）解决这类问题。我们完全无法通过1天的来回沟通，获得和所描述问题毫无关系的录音答案解决这一问题。我随后几天反复进行尝试，以更好的方式描述自己的问题，但最终还是以失败告终。

美国时间晚上7点时，《Pop Corny》的发行日期自动在各App Store更新为2月3日。但这已为时过晚。此时有些App Store已经即将步入2月5日。但最精彩的是，此时我收到苹果的回复，称他们发现应用发行日并不存在任何问题，因为时间确实是显示2月3日。真是讽刺！

这一问题也干扰到OpenFeint的发行系统。只要应用通过审核，OpenFeint就会浏览App Store查看作品的具体发行日期。我猜这就是为什么《Pop Corny》没有出现在OpenFeint的列表之中。

一个礼拜后，我联系他们谈论这一问题，他们称系统自动跳过我的应用，他们不得不手动进行添加。他们对此无法给出合理解释，但我清楚其中原因所在。

这样我在App Store的新作榜单中没有得到任何曝光度，导致作品销量几乎接近0。这简直就是场灾难。苹果未来真的需要特别推荐游戏1、2天，以补偿我的损失。我可以慢慢进行等待。

扭转局面，持续前进

上述灾难波及各个App Store，导致《Pop Corny》在美国发行当天只售出10份。据我了解，其他同日发行的糟糕应用的销量都比这多（游戏邦注：因为它们的排名更靠前）。这是因为没有人知道这款刚出炉的游戏。

但在希腊，情况截然不同。这里主要是我的“社交范围”。大家都知道《Pop Corny》，他们满怀期待。几大主要本土iPhone博客还对其进行评论，游戏开始渐入佳境。在不到24小时里，《Pop Corny》就变成排名第一的付费应用。这是就所有应用而言，而非仅针对游戏。5颗星的评论开始出现，游戏简直就是处在天堂世界。持续几天荣登榜单之后，游戏开始出现在当地电视媒体中。

在我看来，希腊和其他国家形成的鲜明对比很好地说明宣传的重要性。你需要将游戏呈现于他人面前。这非常困难，这对小型开发者来说是最棘手的问题。若你规模很小，没有人会对你投以关注。发展壮大就像是个自我实现的预言。

在我向评论者发送的150封邮件里，我只收到10封回信。其中8位含蓄建议我付费，另2位则只是告诉我他们很忙。通过检测媒体包下载量，我发现其中只有2人下载应用。显然这里存在些许问题。如今要获得评论的唯一方式似乎是通过投入资金。

成为希腊排名第一的付费应用带来每天200份的下载量（这是个小型商店）。在苹果抽成之后，我得到的就是100欧元（137美元）。这一表现似乎还算不错，但就App Store的衰变定律来看，这还远远不够。而在其他所有App Store，应用的表现均不尽人意。

我知道自己无法扭转这一局面，所以我决定退后一步，不再极力推广应用，而是着眼于修复漏洞，执行若干新功能（游戏邦注：一直到应用转而采用免费模式）。自着手游戏的开发工作以来，免费模式就在我脑海中浮现。这款游戏起初就是锁定免费模式，转而采用付费形式是发行前几天才最终决定的。

我将此当做二次机会，旨在获得更多曝光度。但我知道转投免费模式并不容易。这是截然不同的领域。转投免费模式会让应用的销量获得显著提高，这主要归功于App Shopper之类的应用。这类应用每天会查看App Store，向用户汇报哪些应用转投免费模式，进而促进应用销量的提高。但相比免费应用，这些销量远还不够。你需要获得非常多的下载量。

商店还存在诸如OpenFeint“当天免费游戏”之类的服务，这能够让你在当天转投免费模式时获得足够曝光度。它们每天推荐一款游戏，通过自己的网站和iPhone应用对其进行宣传。

我和这类服务的供应者联系，他们表示非常喜欢这款游戏。我利用他们最近空缺的推荐机会，这天刚好是3月22日，星期二（这刚好是《Angry Birds Space》的发行日）。他们很有条理性，提交作品的过程非常顺利，而且颇具效率。我提交适当的广告横幅和文本，一切都准备就绪，唯有等待这一天的到来。

这天到来了，《Pop Corny》转而采用免费模式。这一促销活动的影响非常惊人。《Pop Corny》开始以惊人速度在全球各个榜单迅速蹿升。不久之后，它就在全球20个App Store排名前10，在10个App Store的同类应用中排名第一。

刚启动时，游戏会查看服务器的.plist文件，其包含些许能够向用户呈现的新闻资讯。这令我得以即时检测下载速度。游戏获得惊人的48次下载/分钟。开展促销活动几小时后，148apps.com开始推荐我的游戏，随后带来更多下载量。当天游戏持续维持这一发展势头，新闻资讯的高摄入量同Twitter提及和博客文章存在密切关系。这真是非常具有启发意义的经验。

游戏迅速出现在各大榜单，因此直接在促销日后变回付费模式非明智之举，这会导致应用丧失榜单地位，流失曝光度。而且免费版本的收益是付费版本的很多倍。所以我决定继续采用免费模式。我的决定是正确的。游戏在促销日之后的周末里获得7万次下载量，而且从用户那获得很高评价，从IAP那获得的收益也呈直线上升趋势。对此我表示非常满意。

AppStore的衰变定律

我在发行《Pop Corny》过程中发现一个普遍误区，App Store曝光度是王道。似乎所有人都觉得挤入前10榜单是提高销量的渠道，这将转变成曝光度和下载量，而且呈可持续发展状态，能够带来收益。你必须竭尽全力挤入榜单之中，以换来更多销量。如今在我看来，这是大家对于App Store存在的最大误解。

App Store有成千上万款应用，而且新应用每天层出不穷，榜单不过是个“电容器”。它们需要平衡这些高销量。目前游戏的多数销售量都来自App Store之外，而非源于其中。因在榜单上看到应用而选择进行购买的用户不足以维持应用的榜单排名（游戏邦注：更不要说是提高它们在其中的位置）。因此我们将看到所谓的“AppStore衰变定律”。应用若没有获得App Store榜单之外的支持都会呈现如下发展趋势：

无论是付费还是免费模式。唯一发生改变的是应用下载数量，免费模式在此的下滑幅度更大。衰变速度取决于竞争情况、图标和描述的吸引力及应用获得的评级。

总之，单靠榜单无法让应用获得持续发展。这前几年前也许还具有可行性，但如今情况不再如此。你不应再将榜单视作提高销量的渠道，而是只能将其当做运作情况的指示器。游戏的施展空间远不止如此。应该积极争取获得评论、推广和苹果推荐。

总结

2012年App Store将不再是能够轻松发行应用的平台。我并不指望平台的运作能够不费吹之力，因为《Pop Corny》并不是我的首款iOS作品。但我希望自己不再遭遇这一发行日漏洞问题。至少若能够同苹果进行有效沟通，我的心里会舒服很多。

但最后，我要说的是，《Pop Corny》的表现相当不错，而且会越来越好。我从中学到很多，这款游戏的收益已足以抵消开发成本，而且让我收获众多粉丝。

游戏没有任何营销预算，而且是我的首款游戏作品。所以它显然超出我的预期。这充分说明，即便没有众多营销预算，你依然可以在App Store有所作为。但其中过程非常艰难。（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）

Opinion: Launching on the App Store in the year 2012

by Charilaos Kalogirou

Today is somewhat an important day, as it is exactly 60 days since the day I can officially call myself a published indie game developer! It was February 3rd when Mr. Pop Corny rushed (actually it crawled thanks to Apple, but I will get to that below) into the App Store after an 8 month development time, and the dream came true.

So it seems now it is a good time to share some of my experiences regarding launching on the App Store. I will try to provide some insight that I wish I had from other projects prior to launching my own.

Background

Let me start with some info on Pop Corny. Pop Corny was designed to be a simple and fun casual game, covering the need for short game session experiences that mobile phone games require.

I self-funded, developed, published and initially launched the game as a paid application at the $0.99 tier. Later on, it switched to free and monetizing with in-app purchases, but bear with me for the details of this decision.

Below are some more technical details of the game:

* Development time: 8 months

* Number of developers: 1

* Outside contractors for sound and most graphics

* Build using a fork of Sylphis3D Game Engine

* Support of all iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad devices

* Source code (game code + game engine code excluding third-party libraries):
—————————————–
Language files blank comment code
—————————————–
Lua 52 2631 1026 10415
C/C++ Header 77 1209 1111 3718
C++ 32 731 882 2552
XML 1 1 0 788
Python 9 170 136 630
Bourne Shell 13 70 167 284
Objective C 2 14 14 25
—————————————–
SUM: 186 4826 3336 18412
—————————————–
* Game code accounted for 5983 lines of the above LUA code

* The total source dataset reached up to 0.4 GB

* Resulting “compiled” dataset at 10MB

* Initial price $0.99 (50 days) then dropped to free

* Total sales in two months: ~150000

* IAP conversion rate: ~2.0%

* Ratings: 4.5/5 (from 600 ratings, 70% of which are 5 star)

Promotion

As I said, the game was funded and published without any help from the outside. This easily translates to: no money for marketing. Therefore I had to find ways to make the best I could on the cheap. One of the major aids on that seemed to be the famous launch day.

Everyone developing on the App Store will tell you that the launch day is one of the most important events in effectively publishing your game. You must do the best in your powers not to fail that day. And this is true. I had published three more applications on the App Store prior to this game, and the launch day will give you eye balls costing thousands of dollars for free. This is through the App Store’s new releases list.

My approach was to combine that visibility with all the “social” publicity I could harvest, doing my best to leap as high as I could on the charts. Then possibly some game journalists would notice and write about it, thus keeping the fire burning. To do that I created a trailer video for the game, and one week earlier I created an event on Facebook for the “unveiling of the video trailer.”

I invited everyone I could, and one week later (on January 31th) I presented the video. That day I also posted the video on every related forum I could. This caused some fuzz but mostly in Greece, where most of my Facebook friends live in.

The release day was set on February 3rd. I already had approval from Apple, and I was already sending out promo codes to game journalists before that. For this, I was carefully compiling a list of game review websites and journalists from early on the development cycle. I had these ordered by Alexa ranking by review scores and game types. When I got the game approved by Apple, I sent out all 40 promo codes I had available, and contacted 100 more without a promo code.

Early on in the development cycle, I made another big decision based on marketing. That was to support OpenFeint in addition to GameCenter. OpenFeint has its own top games, featured games, and new releases, which can give some extra exposure to your new and unknown game. I decided that I needed that extra eyeballs, so I supported both social gaming networks.

In short, what I did prior to the release day were these:

* Created a “coming soon” video trailer

* Created Facebook page and Twitter page for the game

* Organized a Facebook event for the unveiling of the game video

* Send out all 40 promo codes to game journalists (with all media packs, bells and whistles)

* Wrote posts in “new releases” parts of forums

* Prepared a cross promotion among my other apps

* Supported OpenFeint

Then all I had to do was wait for the launch day and the sweet success… or not…

Apple spilling the milk

With everything set and the game automatically scheduled to launch in the world’s App Stores on February 3rd, an unexpected nightmare started for me on February 2nd (since we live in a globe and in New Zealand it was already “tomorrow”).

Of course I was viewing the New Zealand’s App Store waiting for Pop Corny to appear, and it did. Oh! The Joy! After all these months of hard work it was there… taking its chance! Couldn’t be happier and more stressed at the same time… however the moments of joy ended shortly after I looked closer.

Fear filled my heart when I noticed next to my game’s icon a release day of “Jan 31th”. I rushed to the new releases list like a maniac looking for Pop Corny, which was nowhere to be found. What happened? Had the app gone live three days ago and I didn’t notice? Hardly… the app was not live on any other App Store. I manually checked every other App Store… not released…

I was optimistic, these distributed systems are slow to update and initially things like that might happen. However, Feb 3rd started to dawn in more countries, and the same story was repeating. Pop Corny was appearing as a three-days-old app.

Three days when you launch on the App Store is an eternity. I was out of the front page before I even got the time to get on it. I tried to contact Apple through the support system, but that is easier said than done.

It was then I realized how small and expendable I was. There is absolutely no way to solve a situation like this with a system that works by choosing among 15 nested problem categories before you finally get a text box to write down your problem. No way to resolve it with a one-day round trip for getting a reply that was canned and had nothing to do with what I described. No way when you can’t at least follow-up on the answer you get. I tried again and again for the next few days by submitting from the start my problem rephrased in the best way I would… fail.

It was almost 7 PM US time when automagically the release day of Pop Corny rolled to the correct Feb 3rd on all App Stores. But it was too late. Some App Stores were about to go on Feb 5th by then. The icing on the cake, however, was the reply to my last plea at Apple that told me that they don’t see any problem with the date as it is Feb 3rd. The irony!

The problem also managed to mess up OpenFeint’s releases system. OpenFeint, once you have the app approved, scans the App Store to see when your game releases. I guess that was the reason Pop Corny didn’t got on OpenFeint’s lists.

One week later I contacted them about the problem, and they said that somehow the system skipped my app, and that they had to add it manually. They couldn’t find an explanation, but I could…

This way I had zero exposure from the App Store new releases, resulting in next to zero sales. It was a disaster. Apple should really make up to me for this someday by featuring it for a day or two… I can wait.

Getting a grip and keep walking

The above disaster affected all the App Stores in the world. It resulted in Pop Corny selling 10 units on release day in the U.S. I know crap-ware that was released the same day and sold more (based on their top paid ranking). It was so, because no one knew of my new released game.

In Greece, however, it was another story. Here is most of my “social network.” People knew about Pop Corny and they were expecting it. Several major local iPhone blogs wrote about it, and the game took off. In less than 24 hours, Pop Corny was the number one top paid application. That was among all applications, not just games. 5 stars reviews started coming, and it was heaven. A few days at the top, and it was also on the local TV media.

This contrast between Greece and all other countries was to me a great illustration of how publicity is king. You must bring your game in front of the player’s face. And that is hard. It is the hardest part for a small developer. No one will look at you when you are small. Getting big seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

From the 150 emails I sent to reviewers, I got replies from only ten people. Eight of them kindly suggested I pay some fee and the other two just told me that they were too busy to bother. By monitoring the downloads on the media pack, I could see that just two of them bothered to download it. It is clear that something is wrong here. It seems that the only way to get covered these days is through dollars.

Being the number one top paid application in Greece translates to 200 sales a day (yes, it is a small store). This is 100 ($137) a day after Apple’s cut. That does not sound that bad, but given the universal decay law of the App Store (I will talk about that next), it was not enough. Meanwhile on all other App Stores, the app was doing poorly.

I knew that it was out of my reach to reverse this situation, so I decided to step back, stop desperately trying to push it, and focus on fixing some bugs and implement some new features until the day the game would go free. Going free was in my mind since the development days. The game was actually designed to work as a free game from development day one, but the final decision to go paid was taken a few days before the release.

I saw this as a second chance. My means of getting more eyeballs on the game. But I knew that going free is not easy. It is a whole different arena. Going free will give you a big sales boost mainly because of applications like App Shopper. These kind of apps scan the App Store every day and report to its users which apps has gone free, resulting in many sales. But “many” is not enough when competing with free applications. You need LOTS more.

There are services out there like OpenFeint’s “Free Game Of The Day” that provide you with the extra visibility you need for the day you go free. They feature one game every day, and promote it through their website and their iPhone app

I contacted them, they liked the game, and I took the first slot that was available, which happened to be Thursday, Match 22nd (yup, the day Angry Birds Space came out… no fear!). They are very well-organized and the process of submitting artwork was very streamlined and efficient. I submitted the appropriate banners and text, and there was nothing more left to do but wait for the day.

The day came and Pop Corny became free. The effect of this promotion was overwhelming. Pop Corny started to climb the charts all over the world at incredible speeds. It was not much later that it was ranking in the top 10 of more than 20 App Stores, and becoming number one for its category in 10 App Stores.

At startup, the game checks for a .plist file on my server that contains possible news to present to the user. This allowed me to measure the rate of downloads in real-time. It reached a whopping 48 downloads/min. A few hours in the promotion, 148apps.com featured it, and even more downloads happened. This continued for the whole day (which is actually 48 hours to cover all the globe), and I had the opportunity to correlate the spikes I saw on the news file consumption with mentions on Twitter, posts on blogs, etc. A very educative experience.

With the game on so many charts, it would be stupid to just turn to paid after the promotion day, switch charts, and lose the exposure. Also the revenue from the free version was already a multiple of the revenue with the paid. So I took the decision to keep it free. I believe I did the right thing. The game did 70,000 downloads in the weekend following the promotion day, received very good reviews from the users, and the revenue from the IAP was climbing. I was totally satisfied.

The universal decay law of the AppStore

One of the biggest myths busted by my experience with launching Pop Corny was that visibility on the App Store is king. It seems like everyone believes that being on the top 10 is the way to sell, that this will translate to visibility and sales in a feedback process that will sustain enough to make a profit. You must do all you can to enter the charts as a way to make your game sell more. For me now, this is the biggest misconception about the App Store.

With the huge amount of applications in the App Store and the new ones that enter every day, the charts only act as a capacitor. They smooth out spikes. Most sales today start outside the App Store and not inside. The people who will buy your application because they saw it on the charts are not enough to sustain it on its position, let alone to lift it. Therefore we witness “the universal decay law of the App Store” as I call it. Any application that is not receiving some help external to the App Store’s charts force will follow the graph below:

Let that be paid or free. The only thing that changes is the absolute amount of downloads, which is orders of magnitude larger when free. How fast the decay is depends on the competition, how much your icon and descriptions, attracts buyers and what rating you have.

Bottom line is that the charts cannot sustain you these days. It probably did some years ago, but not anymore. You should never think of the charts as your means to sales. Use it just as an indicator of how well you are doing. The game is played out of this field. Get reviews, Tweets, mentions, and of course get featured by Apple.

Conclusion

The App Store is not an easy place to publish in 2012. I was not expecting it to be easy, since Pop Corny was not my first application published there. However, I would really love not to have been squashed by that bug with the release day. At least it would make me feel much better if I knew I could efficiently communicate the problem to Apple.

In the end, however, I think that Pop Corny did very well and will do better with time. I learned a lot through the process, it has almost covered its development costs and also gave me the joy of having hundred of thousands of people playing my game.

With a zero marketing budget and this being my first game, it certainly exceeded my expectations. It proved that you can still have a chance on the App Store without some big dollar marketing campaign. However, it is getting really hard to do so.（Source：gamasutra）