作者：Keith Stuart

《Bad Hotel》是一款优秀的智能手机游戏。简短、有趣、过瘾—-只看一眼你就会迷上它。但正如大量积极评论和评分所显示的，并非所有游戏都能达到这个水平：它将塔防益智元素与音乐元素巧妙地融为一体，创造了新鲜又特别的体验。所以，成功是必然的，对吧？

badhotel（from guardian）

错。因为所有从事智能手机游戏开发的人都知道，iOS和Android设备的应用商店都超级拥挤，成千上万款游戏互相竞争，无论是糟糕，还是惊艳，都挤在同一个数字商店的货架上。所以，所有开发商都面临着如何提升“曝光率”的挑战。

上个月，Lucky Frame的创始人兼《Bad Hotel》的联合设计师，Yann Seznec写了一篇有关游戏第一个月销售表现的文章。他在文中讲述他做出的正确与错误的决定，以及对应用商店排行系统的理解等制约游戏发行和成功的主要因素。真是值得一读的好文章。

所以我请Yann将他成功的原因归纳为5个关键元素，即所有智能手机开发商在发行新作时都应该考虑到这些内容。这5大元素如下：

媒体报道是一件长期的任务

“我们之所以能够为《Bad Hotel》争取到的积极的报道结果不只是因为这是一款好游戏（它当然是！）—-有许多好游戏并没有得到太多报道。同时因为上一款游戏《Pugs Luv Beats》所吸引的巨大关注，我们能够成功地与某些博客主和记者保持联系。我们尽力活跃于消息圈中，通过发放传单并散播具体信息使所有人知道我们的新游戏。”

忽视在周四发行游戏的传统

“我们是在周二发行游戏的。这么做让我们多得到了更多的关注，使我们的势头一直保持到周四晚上，那时是苹果刚好开始更新推荐应用。”

获得推荐很重要

“这不是什么新鲜事了。当然，出现在App Store的首页确实会大大增加销售量。我们并没有得到‘大’推荐（游戏邦注：如‘编辑精选’等），但哪怕稍稍的‘曝光率’也具有极大的帮助。当苹果对我们游戏的推荐终止时，游戏的销量迅速出现滑落。这是自然而然的事。

像Lucky Frame这样的公司，实在是小到不能被苹果注意到。虽然苹果总是会先注意到大公司（或只是更成功的公司）并与他们合作，但证明自己的实力才是更关键的元素。我认为那就是为什么我们能获得苹果推荐的原因了，因为我们在发布前两天的造势很成功，所以我们能在最关键的周四晚上出现在推荐列表中。

所以我们的成功足够吸引到苹果的小小关注，但还不至于让苹果与我们直接联系或以更有力的方式去推荐游戏。小小的一步罢了！”

靠前的排名竞争激烈

“忘记1%的应用捞走所有钱吧—-其实是0.001%！那时，我们在世界所有应用中的排各大约是第100名—-但那意味着大约每天必须出售1000份游戏（或更多一点）。对于一款标价为0.99美元的应用来说，其一天的收益便是700美元。而作为一家只有三个人的小公司，这便意味着我们只是不赔不赚（如果持续一整个月的话）。根据我们的估算，我们的游戏就是那99.99%中的一员，而这也再一次证明了绝大多数的开发商而难依靠应用销量维持生计。”

应用商店评分系统是很难对付的

“我完全支持让用户在iTunes商店上给应用评分，即使他们给的是差评。但是这个系统现在却关闭了，真奇怪—-我们没有公开或私下评论的渠道了，所以当有人因为应用不能用于其手机上而只给出一颗星的评分时，我们却什么都做不了。而当其他用户看到那个评价时，可能就不会购买我们的应用了。类似地，在应用商店中有一种奇怪的评价风气，就是人们拿评分换自己想要的功能。例如‘我喜欢这款游戏，但是我想让你改一个地方。现在我只给一颗星，如果你改了，我就给你五颗星。’”

（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）

Bad Hotel and the five things every iOS developer must know

by Keith Stuart

Bad Hotel is a great name for a smartphone game. Short, funny, intriguing – before you’ve even seen a single screenshot, you’re interested. But as the wealth of positive reviews and a healthy Metacritic rating suggest, this is not all the game has to offer: it’s an entertaining and compulsive mix of tower defence puzzler and musical toy; a stylish, confidently eccentric treat. So success was inevitable right?

Wrong. Because as everyone who’s involved in smartphone game development knows, the app stores for both iOS and Android devices are congested mega-zones, crammed with thousands of games, many of them terrible, many amazing, but all lumped together on the same digital shop shelf. Getting your game noticed is the fundamental challenge facing any developer.

Last month, Yann Seznec, the founder of Lucky Frame and co-designer of Bad Hotel wrote a fascinating blogpost about the game’s first month on sale. He discussed the decisions he made that paid off, the mistakes, the stats, the impossibility of understanding the App Store rankings system and other factors that played a part in the game’s release and success. It was fascinating reading.

So I asked Yann to condense all that into five crucial elements that every smartphone game developer should consider on releasing a new title. And here’s what he came back with:

Press and media coverage is a long-term thing

“The extremely positive reception we got for Bad Hotel is not only as a result of it being a great game (which it is, of course!) – there are many great games that do not get as good coverage. But we were very fortunate to get some attention for our last game, Pugs Luv Beats, which we managed to take advantage of in terms of keeping in touch with bloggers and journalists. We tried to keep people in the loop as much as possible, telling everyone about our new game both with teasers and concrete information.”

The traditional Thursday release date is overrated.

“We released on a Tuesday. This actually allowed us to get a bit more attention than we probably would have, and it helped us gain some momentum towards Thursday evening, when Apple’s features are refreshed.”

Features are important

“This is not a new idea, of course, but being featured on the front page of the App Store helped raise sales significantly. We didn’t get a “big” feature (like Editor’s Choice or similar), but even just having some extra visibility helped enormously. When we stopped being featured our sales dropped accordingly. Nothing too surprising there.

A company like Lucky Frame is too small to be on Apple’s radar. The bigger (or simply more successful) companies will get contacted by Apple and will be able to develop a relationship with them, but it seems like you kind of have to prove yourself first. I think that’s why we were featured – because we had managed to create a really strong buzz for the first two days of release, leading up to the all-important Thursday evening when the lists are refreshed on the store.

So we were successful enough to get a small feature from Apple, but not quite big enough to get contacted by Apple directly and featured in any major way. Baby steps!”

The competition near the top is very fierce

“Forget about 1% of apps making all the money – more like .001%! At one point we were ranking around 100th in the world for all apps – but that meant selling around 1000 copies in a day (maybe a bit more). For an app at $.99 that means income of around $700 a day… we are a three-person company, which in our case represents approximately breaking even (if it were to sustain for an entire month). Our calculations, though, show that we were in the 99.99th percentile of app sales, which once again proves that the vast majority of developers are not sustainable from app sales.”

The App Store ratings system is very tough to deal with

“I am entirely in favour of giving users an opportunity to review apps on the iTunes store, even negatively. But the current system is strangely closed – we have no way of responding publicly or privately to reviews, so when someone gives us a one-star review because it, ‘doesn’t work on my phone’, we are unable to help them out and get it working. Instead, other users see that comment and possibly don’t buy our app. Similarly, there is a strange culture of reviews on the App Store where people will hold their star ratings ransom for some arbitrary feature. ‘I love this game, but I want you to change a thing. One star for now, I’ll change this to five star when you change that.’”（source：guardian）