作者：Kris Graft

如果说有什么东西能够证明“优秀的游戏自然会有销量”这一说法的错误，那一定是手机应用商店。

在苹果App Store和Google Play等平台发布手机游戏的开发者在推广、宣传游戏这一环节上千万不可寄希望于运气。他们应该了解如何宣传游戏，如何展开市场营销活动。

据148Apps.biz数据显示，截止今年10月，苹果美国App Store中的应用和游戏总数达到94万9228款，其中游戏达到17万4787款。

如果这些数据还不足以吓倒你，那就听听一些成功驾驭手机应用商店的大小开发者的建议，从中找到让自己的游戏脱颖而出的方法。

苹果推荐

Semi Secret Software的Adam Saltsman自无尽奔跑游戏《Canabalt》于2009年10月在iOS App Store上线时就已步入现代手机游戏开发者的行列。他在2013年又向App Store发布了至少售价5美元的游戏《Hundreds》，销量立即突破10万，并在之后推出了Android版本。

hundreds(from pastemagazine)

Saltsman认为，让游戏获得关注需要考虑许多因素，其中包括一些运气。但开发者可以在自己能够控制的因素上多下功夫，其中包括“差异化、质量和建立群众基础”。

他补充道，“这些因素相互补充——出色的游戏很容易获得知名度，这又有助于人们区分你的游戏，而实现与众不同的方法就是呈现优秀特点。”

Saltsman称让游戏与众不同这一点并不难，但如果要将其与高质量的特点要结合，这个任务就变得更有挑战性。他称“打造出色的游戏是一场漫长的硬战。”

《Canabalt》在2009年跻身App Store十大热门游戏之列，这让Saltsman在此后数年获益匪浅，这一点体现在《Hundreds》的发布上。由于苹果已经看到《Canabalt》的潜力，并联系Semi Secret推出iPad版本，该工作室也由此开始积极保持与苹果的联系，经常在GDC和SXSW等展会上与苹果工作人员会面。这种密切的关系为《Hundreds》获得App Store打下了基础——这是该游戏获得成功的一个重要因素。

当然，没有开发者可以让时光倒流，重返2009年制作出一款iOS热作，并为将来的成功打下基础。那么我们就很有必要知道《Hundreds》在App Store大放异彩的一个更重要的因素就是，游戏本身十分契合苹果硬件所倡导的简单、高雅和富有魅力的产品理念。

Saltsman指出，“根据Greg Wohlwend的说法，《Hundreds》的另一个重要成功因素就是特别漂亮。它看起来十分美妙。所以从策略性的宣传角度来看，整个游戏设计十分适合体现苹果设备和应用商店的优点，我想这正是任何平台推荐某款游戏的核心原因。”

他补充表示，“我并不确定大家是不是都知道应用商店的推荐位置主要是用来宣传平台，推广游戏只是它们的一个额外功能。”

Saltsman称他并不建议开发者主要针对“增加平台所有者价值”这一目的来设计游戏，但如果你真想降低游戏失败的风险，就可以考虑这一途径。

这些因素结合在一起就有可能令手机游戏在App Store大获成功。而一旦获得成功，你的游戏就很有可能再次获得人们关注。Saltsman表示，“我们至今只搞过一次较大规模的促销活动，但却非常有效。这是几个月之前的事情了，我现在很好奇我们的下一次促销是否还会有如何影响。在App Store中你要学到的一个经验就是，这个平台一直在发生变化。”

数据指标

许多游戏并没有获得大量用户的资本。类似Flurry（其客户包括Zynga、General Electric）这种分析服务则可帮助对数据导向型方法感兴趣的开发者实现市场目标。

Todd Fitzgerald是Flurry销售副总裁，该公司所追踪的许多重要指标实际上就是“事件”——即移动用户所执行的重要操作，例如执行交易、在Facebook分享应用，以及用户同一款应用或游戏互动的其他方式。这些数据可以同游戏设计师的专长相整合，令游戏吸引更广泛的用户。

Fitzgerald表示，“我们可以让你获得用户年龄、性别、所在位置、个人及普通喜好等数据，这可以让开发者富有针对性地展开营销活动，以便找到自己的最佳用户。”

提到游戏设计时，付费获取用户却并不是一个很美好的词，但从广告和盈利角度来看，这却是开发者在竞争激烈的手机应用商店中获得生存而不得不为之的一个手段。Fitzgerald表示通常情况下，获取一位iOS用户的平均成本约为3美元，获取Android用户的成本相对较少。

他补充道，“Twitter和Facebook等社交媒体在非付费用户获取方面发挥了更大的作用。对于那些拥有大量应用的开发者来说，他们可以通过我们的发布平台AppSpot，以免费方式进行交叉推广。”

《无尽之剑》的强大影响

Chair Entertainment的《无尽之剑》系列已经成为苹果游戏的一个标杆，也是苹果经常在App Store以及其硬件发布会上特别提到的例子。

infinity blade iii(from gamasutra)

《无尽之剑》采用了Epic的虚幻引擎技术，它不但是Chair和虚幻引擎（游戏邦注：Chair是Epic Games子公司）的展示品，也是苹果智能手机和平板电脑的演示产品。作为“玩家心目中的理想游戏”，《无尽之剑》及其续集重塑了人们对移动设备技术的期望。

Chair营销及PR主管Laura Mustard表示，“我们并不会只看平台条件，就下结论认为自己只能设计哪种类型的游戏”。Chair并不制作刻板的手机游戏，而是瞄准主机风格的玩法和图像，令自己的游戏有别于应用商店中的其他游戏。

这款游戏所展示的超凡技术令苹果这个平台所有者产生了兴趣。Mustard称“要以创造独特，能够以非凡方式展示设备，并且让人由衷惊叹‘你值得拥有！’这种游戏为目标。”对多数手机应用开发者来说，美术和视频的高制作价值并非可行选项，但如果你拥有资源和人才，那就可以创造极有影响力的产品。

Mustard补充道，“与App Store联系人沟通，让他们提前知道你的计划，并且预留时间考虑展示你的游戏。要提前计划，但计划也要有弹性，以便抓住推广可能产生的推广机会。我们一直都保持计划性，这其中也一直包含为更好的机会而更改计划的准备。”

Chair还在《无尽之剑》系列中使用折扣，交叉推广，以及同作家和音乐人进行跨媒体合作的方式来推动营销活动，从而创造了成百上千万美元收益。

《Plague Inc》的传染性

plague(from gamasutra)

在英国独立开发商Ndemic Creations推出的这款游戏中，玩家会置身于一场全球蔓延的疾病，这听起来并非主流题材，但却能够晋升为苹果App Store付费榜单第一名。该游戏有效而出乎意料地打败了App Store众多大型公司。

以下了该游戏开发者James Vaughan观察成功游戏跻身热门榜单前列所总结出的一些经验：

“不吝投入广告和用户获取”：Vaughan指出这种方法“极为昂贵，这要求开发者在拥有优秀游戏的基础上，还必须‘超级系统化并且严格以数据为导向’但这在我看来并不有趣。”

“与大品牌合作”：“如果找到合适的品牌，这可以是一种极为强大而有趣的方法”。他称强大的品牌可以在人气方面弥补弱势游戏的不足，但这个品牌与游戏之间必须具有很强的关联性。另一个问题是这将意味着你不是在替别人宣传，而不是打造自己的品牌。

《Plague Inc》是一款含有微交易模式的付费游戏，拥有1500万次下载量（游戏邦注：它在Android平台支持免费下载）。以下两者就是Vaughan在《Plague Inc》身上所采用的方法。

鉴别和瞄准细分市场：他表示“虽然这个方法越来越难了 ，但在应用商店中找到一个相对空缺的细分市场，还是可以让你过得更轻松一点，因为你无需同其他成千上万款类似应用竞争。你拥有自己的阵地，可以等玩家自己找上门。”但这一方法的挑战就在于其成功性“完全取决于细分市场的大小”，并且细分市场的大小也实在难以预测。

“制作人们愿意告知好友的游戏”：这一点类似于“细分”方法。这个营销方法是免费的，具有很强的影响力，可以绕过传统媒体和应用商店审核流程。但要找到这个方法的正确“角度”却非常困难，并且“难以在最后时刻添加到游戏中”。

Vaughan称口头传播的作用不容小觑——这并不需要真正的PR，游戏也不需要获得苹果推荐，但却能够在三天内登上榜首，原因就是玩家的自动传播。

《Plague Inc》于2012年5月发布于iOS平台，同年10月登陆Android平台。尽管不是一款新游戏，但仍能保持强劲势头。Vaughan的策略就是持续为玩家提供新内容。“在我看来，最管用的方法就是通过更新吸引玩家——为他们添加新内容。”

他已经看到了更新的效用：游戏发布三个月后跌至付费版单第78名。但进行一次较大更新后，又反弹至第14名。“这也是一种赢得额外收益的好方法——热情的玩家已经做好为高质量的新内容付费的准备。Mutation 1.5版本在9个月后发布时，产生了我们有史以来最高的日收益纪录。”

这些方法让不同发开发者获得了成功，但如果你想在当前的手机应用商店中获得一席之地，要切记：你的游戏有可能在应用商店中默默无闻，永不见天日，即使你已经遵循成功开发者的做法。

Vaughan称“当今手机应用商店竞争极为残酷，有大量出色而高质量的游戏一发布就被无数竞争者淹没，你可以从许多人那里获得如何使用营销和PR来获得关注的经验，这一点当然很重要，但我发现即使是最聪明的方法也只有相对较小的短暂效用。”（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）

Making your game stand out in brutally-competitive mobile app stores Exclusive

By Kris Graft

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As part of our mobile games-themed week, we speak with developers who managed to break through the noise of mobile app stores. We’ll be updating our mobile event page all week long.

If there was ever an entity that once and for all disproved the old notion of “if it’s a good game, it’ll sell,” it’s the mobile app store.

Game developers who are releasing mobile games on storefronts such as Apple’s App Store and Google Play can’t afford to leave anything to chance when it comes to getting word out about their game.

They need to know how to get the word out about their games — they need to know how to market them.

Let’s start off with a quick dose of perspective, to illustrate just how much of a drop your game is in the bucket of an app store: As of October this year, there were 949,228 total apps and games on Apple’s U.S. App Store. Out of that total, 174,787 were games, according to 148Apps.biz.

If those numbers don’t scare you off completely, here are some developers, big and small, who have managed to navigate the ocean of apps in mobile app stores, and find success.

Hundreds breaks through the noise

Adam “Atomic” Saltsman of Semi Secret Software has been on the modern mobile game scene since the seminal infinite runner Canabalt launched on the iOS App Store in October 2009. 2013′s elegantly minimal $5 game Hundreds came to the App Store and promptly sold 100,000 copies, and came to Android later this year.

Gaining attention for your game involves a lot of factors, says Saltsman, including a dose of luck. But the factors that developers can control include “differentiation, quality and grassroots awareness building,” he says.

“These things all complement each other – it is easier to build awareness for something that is awesome. Being awesome helps differentiate your game, and being different from other games is awesome,” Saltsman adds.

Saltsman says making your game different isn’t quite so hard in itself, but when you have to combine that with making your “different” game high-quality – whatever that means to the mainstream at the moment – is where the task of standing out becomes even more challenging. “Awareness-building is a long, uphill battle too,” he says.

The success of App Store top 10 game Canabalt in 2009 paid dividends years later for Saltsman, when Hundreds launched. Apple knew of Canabalt’s success, and approached Semi Secret about an iPad version, and ever since then, the studio has actively made sure that those ties remained strong, through regular contact and face-to-face meetings with Apple at trade shows like GDC and SXSW. That close relationship helped the game get featured on the App Store – a huge factor in a game’s success.

Of course, not all devs can rewind the clock and make a hit 2009 iOS game that lays the foundation for future success. So what also gave Hundreds a bigger chance of a prominent slot on the App Store was that the game itself fit into Apple’s hardware marketing message of simple, elegant and attractive products.

“The other thing about Hundreds, thanks to Greg Wohlwend, is it is super beautiful,” says Saltsman. “It just looks gorgeous. So from an almost tactical propaganda perspective, that whole game design was well-situated to help make Apple’s devices and store more desirable, which I think is really the core goal of their featuring, really for any platform.”

He adds, “I am not sure that everyone really understands that featuring or featured slots are first and foremost ads for the platform. Advertising your game specifically is really just a side effect.”

Saltsman says he’s not suggesting that developers design games primarily for “added-platform-holder value,” but it’s something to consider if you want to mitigate the risk of your game flopping.

All of these factors can combine for the perfect storm of app store success. And once that success is in place, there’s the opportunity for a discount to get your game back on peoples’ radars. “We have only done one major sale so far but it was actually very effective, on the same scale as the big corporate Starbucks promotion we were involved in,” says Saltsman. “That was a few months ago – I am curious if our next sale will be anywhere near as strong given the additional time that’s passed. The main thing you learn from being on the App Store basically since its inception is that it is always changing.”

The metrics approach

Most games don’t have what it takes to reach an larger audience on their own. Companies like Flurry, which works from companies ranging from Zynga to General Electric, have become valuable to developers who are interested in the data-driven approach of meeting market needs.

Todd Fitzgerald is VP of sales at Flurry. Some of the most important metrics that the company tracks are “events” — the significant actions made by mobile consumers such as making a purchase, sharing the app on Facebook and other ways that users are interacting with an app or game. That data can then be combined with game designers’ expertise to evolve a game to gain a wider audience.

“We show you age, gender, location, persona and common interests,” says Fitzgerald. “This allows a dev to target future campaigns in order to finds users that look like their best users.”

Paid user acquisition isn’t the most romantic of ideas when talking about game design, but from an advertising and money-making angle, it’s crucial to understand the kind of brute force ad campaigns that you’re up against on mobile app stores. Fitzgerald says the average amount a company pays to acquire an iOS user is around $3, and slightly less on Android.

He adds, “Social mediums like Twitter and Facebook are playing a bigger part [with non-paid user acquisition]. For those devs with a portfolio of apps, we see some pretty sophisticated cross-promotion happening, for free, through our publishing platform called AppSpot.”

Infinity Blade and the “you gotta have this!” factor

Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade series has become a staple of Apple’s game lineup, and one that Apple regularly features prominently not only on its App Store, but also at its major new-hardware unveilings.

Infinity Blade uses Epic’s Unreal Engine tech, acting as a showpiece not only for Chair and the heavily-licensed Unreal Engine (Chair is owned by Epic Games), but also for Apple’s smartphones and tablets. A “gamer’s game,” Infinity Blade and its sequels helped adjust peoples’ expectations of what is technically possible on mobiles.

“We don’t look at platforms and say ‘well, this is what that type of game looks and plays like, so we need to design to that,” says Laura Mustard. She heads up marketing and PR at Chair, which has a background in console games such as Undertow and Shadow Complex. Instead of making a the stereotypical mobile game, the studio aimed for console-style gameplay and graphics that set it apart from other app store games.

The technical prowess exhibited in the game created interest from platform holder Apple. “Always look towards creating something unique and something that really shows off the device in a way that is remarkable and says, ‘you’ve gotta have this!’” says Mustard. High production values such as art and video aren’t an option for most mobile developers, but if you have the resources and the talent, it can make all the difference.

Mustard adds, “Communicate with your App Store contacts so that they know your plans in advance and have time to consider your game for special features and events they have in the works. Last, plan in advance, but then be flexible and then be ready to shift your plans in order to take advantage of promotional opportunities that may arise. We always have a ‘plan’ and it always includes being willing to change that plan in favor of a better one if it presents itself.”

Chair has also used discounts, cross promotion between Infinity Blade games, and transmedia partnerships with authors and musicians to aid in marketing efforts, resulting in tens of millions in franchise revenues as the result.

Plague’s infectious success

A mobile game that puts players in the role of a disease that’s reached global pandemic proportions might not sound incredibly mainstream, but UK-based independent developer Ndemic Creations was able to reach #1 on Apple’s App Store paid charts with Plague Inc. The game effectively – and unexpectedly – ended up going toe-to-toe with big companies on the App Store, and winning.

Here are some approaches that James Vaughan, the game’s developer, has observed that successful games used to get to the top of the mobile game charts:

“Throw a fuckload of money at advertising and user acquisition”: Vaughan notes this approach is “hugely expensive, and doing this requires you to be “hyper-scientific and rigorously data-driven,” on top of having a strong game. “Not fun, in my opinion,” says Vaughan.

“Shack up with a big brand”: “[This can] be very powerful, and fun, if you find the right brand,” he says. A strong brand can make up for a weak game, in terms of popularity, though there needs to be strong alignment between the IP and your game. Another issue is that you’re not developing your own brand, rather someone else’s.

Plague is a paid game supplemented by microtransactions, and has 15 million downloads (on Android, it’s a free download with a full game unlock). The following two approaches are the ones that Vaughan used for the game.

Identify and target a niche: “It is getting harder all the time, but finding a relatively empty niche on the app store makes your life significantly easier as you don’t have to compete with thousands of other similar apps,” he says. “You have the world to yourself and can wait for players to come to you, without getting distracted.” But the challenge with this approach is that the amount of success is “utterly dependent on the size of the niche,” says Vaughan. And predicting the size of that niche is very difficult.

“Make a game that people want to tell their friends about”: This is related to the “niche” approach. This approach to marketing is free, has high impact and bypasses traditional press and app store curation processes. But finding the right “angle” of the approach is difficult, says Vaughan, and is “hard to add into a game at the last minute.”

Vaughan says word of mouth played a crucial role – there was no real PR effort, and the game was not featured by Apple on its App Store, yet it went to the top of the charts in three days because players wanted to talk about it on their own.

Plague launched in May 2012 for iOS, October of that year for Android. Even as the game ages, it remains a strong performer. Vaughan’s strategy is to keep giving players new content. “In my opinion, the most powerful way to re-engage with players is through updates — adding new content for them to enjoy.”

He has seen the effects of updates first-hand: Three months after launch, the game fell to #78 on the paid charts. After a major update, it jumped up to #14. “This can also be a great way to earn additional revenue – passionate players are prepared to pay for new, high quality content. The release of Mutation 1.5, nine months after launch, resulted in our highest grossing day ever.”

All of these approaches have proved successful for different developers, but if you’re going to take on a mobile app store today, make no mistake: Your game could disappear into the app store void, never to be seen again, even if you do follow practices established by successful developers.

“Mobile app stores are brutally competitive these days and loads of great, high quality games sink without a trace due to the sheer volume of apps being released,” says Vaughan. “You get lots of people talking about how to use marketing and PR to help get attention and these are definitely important, but I find even the cleverest approach has a relatively minor, short impact.”（source：gamasutra）