作者：Jeff Hangartner

自我介绍

大家好，我的名字叫Jeff Hangartner！近期我创办了个小型独立游戏工作室，名字叫Bulletproof Outlaws。我是个在家工作的美工，程序员和音乐等内容外包人员。我刚刚完成 了自己的首个iPhone游戏《Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief》。随即我进入了丰富多彩的营销世界，从各个不同的角度融入其中，尝试 各种不同的营销策略。

我足够幸运，有些许可用在营销中的金钱（游戏邦注：作者开展行动之前也充分制定了战略计划）。而且，我想将自己已经学到的东西与他人分享。这些营销文章可能可以为其他 无法承担起资金浪费的小型独立开发者提供帮助。

第一部分内容：社交营销篇

我的游戏项目状况

直白地说，《Elusive Ninja》现在每天的销售量只有2份左右。游戏本身很不错，只是曝光度不够而已。陌生人的评论（游戏邦注：App Store中大部分应用的前期评论多数来自开 发者的朋友）都是积极的，而且我知道游戏看起来和玩起来都很棒（游戏邦注：作者花了大量时间根据测试者的意见调整平衡性），总体来说游戏有众多闪光点。所以我知道，我 所针对的并不是个低质量的产品。坦诚地说，当我听到有些人说“条幅广告不起作用！”而且看到他们所用的条幅广告设计粗糙，所广告的游戏美工做得很差而且有着不平衡的游 戏可玩性，我脑中冒出的首个想法就是“并非条幅广告不起作用，只是你自己的游戏太差了。”此前我读过其他有关营销经验的文章，也与其他开发者探讨过整个话题，这些经验 我也融合到这篇文章中。

可以理解的是，有人可能会想“等等，如果你的游戏并不卖座，那么我为何还要浪费时间去阅读你编写的有关营销的文章呢？”在这些文章中，我列举了许多自己犯过的错误以及 为何它们无法发挥作用的原因，所以看过之后你可以避免犯这些错误。我还阐述了某些有效的方法，其中所使用的营销手段你可以考虑尝试下，因为这是我从自己的试验和错误中 总结出来的。如果你是个独立开发者，光是游戏开发就会耗费你大量的时间和精力。维持社交媒体页面、参与竞争、价格下降、编写媒体宣传，如果未制定恰当的计划，这些都可 能耗费大量时间并让你感到不知所措。

理论

总的来说，我是个乐观主义者，也是个现实主义者。身为独立开发者，我相信合适的战略能够帮助游戏在App Store中取得很高的排名，但是从逻辑上来说，我知道希望自己的首款 作品能够击败《愤怒的小鸟》、《Cut the Rope》或《Tiny Wings》是个很不切实际的想法。我觉得开发者的首款游戏有可能轰动市场，但是你不应该打这个赌。你应该期盼的是 能够利用长期的“积累”战略来取得成功，这样更加缓慢但所取得的地位也更加牢固。

积累包括构建公司的品牌，构建为用户所熟悉的IP（游戏邦注：如游戏的外观、角色和故事等），交叉推广之前发布的游戏和新游戏，发布游戏更新并像首次发布那样重新营销主 更新，与媒体、玩家、其他开发者、用户构建起联系，培养粉丝团体，为忠诚用户提供奖励，鼓励口头广告等等。

所以，尽管首款游戏可能一开始表现并不出众，但是当你发布第二或第三款游戏时，你可以以此为机会让你的首款游戏获得更多的曝光度并使销售量再次上扬等等。互联网影响了 营销发挥作用的方式，尤其是整个社交网络概念。现在，我不认为成为阴暗地下室中的神秘反社交独立开发者是个最优化的战略。这就如同变成了完全冷漠并且不与“普通大众” 互动的大公司。上述两种方式都可能带来成功，但它们并没有真正投入社交媒体的怀抱。这就像当年互联网开始普及时，营销顾问会告诉企业“你们必须拥有一个网站，因为现在 每家公司都拥有网站！你的网站甚至不需要与众不同，你只需要有这个东西展示就可以了！”所以，加入到社交网络中是很重要的。这需要付出些许精力，而且比起“我想在大型 游戏网站上花5000美元购买广告栏位，希望由此能够给我带来大量盈利”此类想法来说，这是个成效较为缓慢的战略。但是构建社交媒体就像你把雪球滚下山，你会看到随着时间 推移可以构建起更为可靠的营销途径。

资金风险

我想重点在于，独立游戏开发者应该期待的是不止制作一款游戏，应该合理安排你的资金，这样方能经得起几款游戏的失败。如果你的资金足够让你从三次失败后存活下来，那么 就做的很不错了。如果你的这三款游戏中任意一款获得成功，就是件令人惊叹的事情。如果你的前两款游戏并没有获得成功，但是第三款的成功让用户关注到前两款游戏，这也是 很棒的事情。如果你的首款游戏失败了，但是第二款的成功为你的首款游戏获得了些许关注度，那么你在开发第三款游戏时就没必要担心风险问题。但是如果你的想法是“我要把 拥有的全部资源投入这款游戏中，它将成为我的代表作震惊整个市场”，你就是在玩一场风险极大的游戏。

现在我知道存在某些例外的情况，理想情况下，你不应该对任何东西进行控制，你应该在尽量短的时间内制作出最高质量的游戏。因为单纯从哲学观点来看，你应该总是投入最大 的精力来制作游戏。而且从逻辑上来说，高质量游戏更可能引起用户关注并让你成为亿万富翁。但是从业务稳定性这个立场上来看，这样你就在做一次非常大得赌博，尤其在App Store这种与众不同的环境之下。你在App Store上发布的游戏只能定价为0.99美元或1.99美元，你不能像Konami或Capcom发布主机游戏那样将其定价为19.99美元或49.99美元。所 以，为何不多花些时间来发布些许较小的高质量游戏呢？直到你的经济能够像游戏工作室那般稳定，再考虑制作代表作的事情，这样作品的失败就不会让你陷入困境中。

让我们看看以下销售图表

状况不是很好，是吗？我不想撒谎，这种销售状况确实很不乐观。我原本希望在撰写这篇文章的时候能让情况有所好转，这样我就能吹嘘“我如何将销售量从每天1个提升到每天1 万个”之类的话语了，但是还没有这么好的运气！

截止本文撰稿时，我的游戏已售出256份，而且大部分是在游戏发布之初，毫无疑问购买者几乎都是我的朋友、家人、Twitter粉丝、Facebook好友等。在这个图表中，R代表我的游 戏获得了评论，B代表我购买了条幅广告，P代表某些与媒体相关的事情（游戏邦注：在这款游戏中，指发送大量评论请求）。

256X1.99=509.44美元。再扣去50%（游戏邦注：30%为苹果抽成，20%分给游戏的程序员Derek），迄今为止我得到的盈利数为254.72美元。开发成本和广告费用总计在3000美元左右 ，所以游戏仍然还需要进一步获得盈利。

你可以从图表中看出，当我采取某些行动时，销售量就会上扬，当我无所动作时，销售量就会下滑。这是很显然的事情，但是问题在于“采取行动”需要金钱而且“行动”的时机 也很重要。我将在评论、条幅广告和超级组合版块中具体分析这方面的内容。

浪费金钱

我也必须承认，某些营销途径完全是在浪费金钱，我可能需要尝试更多次再加以实施。我的想法是，因为我有个高质量产品而且现在遇到了困难，我现在应该探索如果绕开这堵墙 。否则，我开发玩下个游戏之后，依然会碰到同样的问题。如果我可以找到这堵墙的薄弱点，然后学习如何有效地将它炸得粉碎，那么我在营销下款游戏时就会制定更具战略性的 计划。我将此视为一场枪战，所以我必须将狙击枪瞄准到最佳地点。

为何不添加更多“内容”？

有些人建议给游戏增添更多内容以及改变价格等等做法，但是凭我对App Store市场和一般市场过程的了解，坦诚地说我不认为这些做法能起到多大作用。我已经设计出50种供玩家 躲避的物体或5种可供选择的不同忍者，但是我不认为添加这些内容能够给我带来更高的关注度。假设现在我添加100个不同的物体、10个不同的忍者、RPG玩法元素、长达5个小时 的情节等等内容，我确信我可以获得更高的关注，但是从明智开发这个方面考虑，这需要耗费大量的时间、金钱和人力，而且我仍然在赌博希望游戏能够获得用户的关注。如果要 这样做的话，或许最简单的方法是添加一个丰满的女忍者和一段裸体代码。

现在这些还都只是理论而已。让我们回到真实的结果和数据上来，看看我尝试过的各种不同的营销方式以及我个人的体验和感觉：

社交营销

口头传播

近些年来，口头传播或许是最为强大的营销形式。这种方式通常不像投放条幅广告那样直接耗费金钱，它需要耗费的是时间。口头传播需要大量的宣传、与媒体相配合、与粉丝群 体互动（游戏邦注：即便只有些许Twitter粉丝）、参加论坛、回复电子邮件等。我相信，仅仅这个途径就可以转变成全职的工作。如果我能够负担得起的话，我更愿意雇佣一个人 来处理这些事情，因为这需要耗费大量的时间。

然而，尽管构建口头传播需要耗费大量的时间，但却并不显得很枯燥无味。你在这个过程中结交新朋友，你可以奖励那些帮助你脱离困境的粉丝，你可以加入不同的社群等等。事 实上，这件事情很有趣。如果你是在运营一个小型工作室的话，你可能会在每天结束时思考“我在这方面花了多少时间？在这段时间内我还可以多做些什么事情？”你必须将工作 与粉丝互动相平衡，以达到令你感到舒适的状态。

为何如此重要？

我想当你开始进行项目开发时，专注可能是最重要的事情。将其当成游戏《魔兽争霸》中的采矿和伐木来看待。当然，建造兵营训练骑士来围攻敌人的基地确实很棒，但是要实现 这个目标你必须首先花时间筹集资源。除非你非常幸运，首款游戏就取得了像《愤怒的小鸟》那样的成功，或者其他项目已经帮你吸引了大量的粉丝群体，否则你刚开始的时候可 能并不为人所知晓。结交朋友和构建粉丝群体，你就像是在招募可以帮助你传播游戏的军队。

《愤怒的小鸟》的员工发布的任何信息都会被发布到每个游戏新闻网站的首页上。他们有品牌认知、工作室声望和大量的粉丝群体。这些公司还有可能花大量资金来做促销。我并 不否认这些做法能够起到非凡的作用，但是我要提出的问题是，作为有着资金和名气有限的独立游戏开发者，我们要在这样的系统中采取何种做法？

作为独立开发者，我们通常没有足够的资金在所有顶级游戏新闻网站上投放整个页面的广告，或者以赠送许多iPad 2来做促销。但是社交营销并不需要耗费资金。假设你有100个粉 丝关注你的游戏开发，而这些人各自都有100个粉丝。当你发布或更新游戏时，就会有100个人在Twitter和Facebook上发布有关你的游戏的新闻，这样你就相当于同1万人接触。现 在，假设你与某些游戏新闻编辑和评论员的关系较好，如果有些人想要报道你的游戏，那么在你发布游戏之时，你就可以让更多的用户看到你的游戏。

同时，那些制作只坐在地下室中制作精美游戏的人会在游戏发布时才将其公之于众。少数人或许恰好在游戏发布页面看到游戏，从而使得游戏得到传播。确实在有些成功的故事中 ，开发者什么都没做，因为游戏的质量而自行引发口头传播，但是这需要有极好的运气。我们想要预先采取行动，让事情朝我们喜欢的方向发展，否则我们可能也只是像买彩票那 样期盼游戏的成功。

所以，避免反社交化是非常重要的，但是你要从何处开始呢？

Twitter

在你还在开发游戏时就创建Twitter账户。大部分的销售量可能来自于发布首日，所以要先期进行宣传和联系，这样在发布日就可以获得尽可能多的曝光度。Twitter是个很即时化 的营销形式，你可以亲眼看到你发表的新闻在互联网中传播，这确实很棒。

其实，当时我还是个Twitter新手，我只是在开发《Bulletproof Outlaws》之前一个月开始使用，所有的“RT”和“FF”术语对我来说都很陌生。现在我掌握了些许技巧，陈述如 下：

只拥有一个账户

最初我有个个人账户，后来我又创建了一个运营账户（游戏邦注：即@BPOutlaws）。问题在于，我在创建运营账户之时，所有人关注的都是我的个人账户。所以，让他们关注我的 运营账户变得较为麻烦，尤其是我在个人和运营账户上发表的是相同的内容，因为运营账户也是由我自己管理。理想的做法是，首先创办运营Twitter账户，然后在获得些许粉丝后 将其分流到个人账户中。你的运营账户是要用来为你获得盈利的，所以如果要选择其中某个账户有较少粉丝的话，我想你应该让个人账户有较少粉丝。

如果只创建一个账户的话，工作量会少得多。或许其他人在管理此类事情上做得比我更好，但是我很讨厌在各种不同的地方进行回复。而且有些人并没有关注你的某个账户，所以 他们可能看不到你的回应，你就要把消息重新发布到另一个账户上，这让我感到很混乱。使用一个Twitter账户，一个Facebook和一个电子邮箱，所有的内容都与你的运营相关，这 样可能可以节省更多的时间。

勇敢前进，让运营充满乐趣

使用单一Twitter账户也可以帮助你从个人层面上与粉丝进行联系和互动。事实上，没有人会关心你的运营账户。大众玩家关注你并不是因为想看到游戏发布的相关信息。他们关注 你的原因在于希望能够看到令他们发笑或产生好奇心的个性化内容。使用单一的Twitter账户，你可以将运营发布内容融合到个人内容中，而且不会让人们感到反感，因为你所发表 的沉闷内容相对较少。就像孩子们讨厌吃维生素，但是如果其形状是Flintstone的样子，他们就会更有兴趣。

发布内容的时间

通常，你的粉丝所住的地方与你的时区相同或相近。如果你是在日本发布消息，你可能拥有的是日本粉丝。如果你在英国发布消息，那么你的粉丝很可能大部分来自北美。你应当 考虑到粉丝受众的时区。如果你有个很重要的新闻需要公布，但是当时已经是凌晨3点了，我想可能90%的粉丝都在睡觉，所以我会等到早上8点再发布内容。我住在加拿大西部，所 以与我同在西部的粉丝估计会在每天的工作开始时看到我发布的内容，因为他们每天都会优先看下Twitter上的情况。但是对于居住在加拿大东部的人来说，他们的时间比我早2到3 个小时，所以他们会在每天早上烦闷的工作期间收到我发布的内容，或者刚好在中午休息时看到。

通过如此确定发布的时间，我将内容被粉丝看到的可能性最大化。如果我在凌晨3点发表信息，可能只有少数人会看到，而当他们登录时这条消息就会出现在“New Tweets”的底部 。我仍然有可能在凌晨3点发布内容，但是发布的确实不那么重要的内容。

另一个需要考虑的是在每周的哪一天发布内容。在周一下午发布内容可能比在周五晚上或周六下午发布获得更多的关注，因为在后者两个时间段内，人们正处在周末外出休闲时间 而不是坐在办公室中找事情打发8个小时的时间。

使用#标签

我看到很多人在Twitter中随意使用#，而且有许多人完全不使用这个标签。如果你是个开发者的话，在内容中“#gamedev”或“#indie”等与你所发表内容有所关联的普通词 汇和短语。

我在某些更新中添加了“#ninjas”和“#art”。有些人使用标签来关注内容。个人来说，我会关注“#gamedev”，所以当有人以这个标签发表内容时，我就可以看到。凭借这个方 法，我找到了许多很棒的新游戏，而且也让我自己获得了许多新粉丝的关注。如果我发现某些我认为有价值的东西，我就会转发帮助那个人做宣传。

如果你不使用这个方法，你就只能接触到直接关注你的粉丝群体，尽管这很不错，但是并未发挥出这种宣传方式的最大作用。你发布了有关音乐所耗费成本的消息，然后在上面加 上“#music”标签，可能就会有作曲家看到这个标签，然后向你提供较为廉价的服务。或者你在发布自行设计的类似《愤怒的小鸟》游戏，加上“#birdwatchers”标签，或许你会 接触到许多帮助你传播游戏的社群，取得如此成效只是因为你以某种与他们的兴趣相关的方式获得了他们的关注。当然，这完全是乱枪打鸟，但是添加这些标签并不耗费任何资金 。

这种方法还可以帮助你接触到你甚至从未意识到已经存在的社群（游戏邦注：就像作者发现了“#gamedev”一样），或者你偶然间便创造了一个社群（游戏邦注：就像“#ims211” 的无意间大爆发一样）。

我在某些新闻中加上“#ElusiveNinja”的标签，然后将我的账户设置成在发现“elusive ninja”的消息后通知我。采取这种做法后，我发现了某些我还未知道的评论以及别人对 游戏的讨论。而且游戏中还有“Tweet你的得分”这个选项，而且发布的分数会在末端加上“#ElusiveNinja”标签，这样如果有玩家发布的话我就会看到，并个人对其表示祝贺。

加入#IDRTG

它始于Touch Arcade开发者部分的一个帖子，是个有着大量iOS游戏开发者的大组织。从本质上来说，这个组织是大量独立开发者都在相互转发各自的内容。许多人并没有大量的粉 丝，但是即便是小账户也能够日积月累粉丝数量，而且根本不会耗费你的金钱。组织中的每个人都有相互帮助对方脱离困境的意图，因为我们都知道游戏最初获得曝光是很困难的 。

消息的长度

所发布的内容越短越好。最好比最多的160字少10-20个字。之所以这么做的原因在于，如果人们想要转发你的消息但这条消息有160个字的话，他们就没办法加上自己的名字，或者 他们必须重写或改变你的内容以使有足够的空间输入自己的名字。理想状况下，如果你有空间让他们加上自己的名字，他们就更有可能转发你的消息，因为如果他们转发或者你的 消息被别人转发，他们也能够获得一定的曝光度。

尽量使用短的URL。但是必须注意的是，你可能想要用公司的URL，以使公司引起他人的关注。就像如果我在消息中包含某个博客的链接，那么我就会使用bit.ly，因为博客的地址 太长了。但是有时如果我知道这条消息有可能被潜在用户看到，那么就要把“http://bulletproofoutlaws.com/”加入到消息中，这样人们就可以看到游戏的名称。

勇于提出要求

在消息开始前加上“请转发”之类的字眼完全不是什么错误之举。理想状况下，你的Twitter粉丝都非常喜欢你并且关注你，因为他们希望你能够获得成功，所以这只是个提醒他们 转发游戏相关重要消息的小要求而已。而且，如果你的消息为人们所转发，可能会有其他好心人看到“请转发”这样的字眼而再次转发。尽管这种做法能够起到作用，但是千万不 可将这些提醒写得过长。

表达你对他人的感激

当你的消息别人们转发之后，你可能会在提醒栏里面看到别人转发你的消息。我看到这类消息时，通常会对转发的人表示感谢。这有两个原因：我确实很感激他们能够转发我的消 息，而且在感谢中@他们的名字可以让我的粉丝了解他们，这样就可以形成互帮互助的循环；其他人看到我对转发我的消息的人表示感谢，也会让他们更倾向于转发我的消息，即便 只是为了让我在感谢中提及他们的名字。

Twitter对所有参与者来说都是个双赢的营销途径。

回报他人的关心

我有时会看看那些转发或关注我的人的简介，只是为了看看他们的情况，如果我看到有人也在发布所做项目的信息，那么我也会帮助他们转发。这也是使用#的另一个原因，我或许 还没有关注你，但是如果你发布某些很棒的东西而且出现在我#gamedev的栏位中，我可能就会去关注你并转发你的消息，只是因为我想为你提供支持。转发他人发布的我所喜欢的 内容，这种方法也为我赢得了几个粉丝。通常，我还会添加些自己的评论，比如“喜欢你的艺术制作！”或“很棒的文章！”，表示我真正对他们发布的东西很欣赏，我不是在随 便转发内容。如果我发掘到的某个其他人的项目获得了一个很棒的评论，我也会转发这类的消息，希望能够助他们获得成功。

想要别人怎么对待你，就怎么对待别人，这条黄金准则也适用于此。

要有一点“挑剔”

这是个很复杂的问题。你需要平衡转发那些帮助他人获得成功的内容（游戏邦注：可能是没有价值的内容）以及转发那些有质量的内容。如果你的Twitter消息中转发的全是垃圾和 新游戏的发布，那么谁会想要去关注你呢？转发哪些内容完全出于你自己的偏好。我喜欢转发的是那些我认为很棒或者有发展潜力的内容（游戏邦注：比如某些人发布的有关他们 自己的游戏的信息，虽然美工做得不好，但是游戏概念却非常出众）。

Twitter就是个人间的联系。如果我们发现关注的某个名人只是付钱来请他人替他们发消息，我们会感到十分愤怒，因为我们希望看到的是他们自己真正的想法（游戏邦注：无论这 些想法很深刻还是很肤浅）。尽管帮助别人获得成功是好事，但是你也必须记住，你应该努力去构建能够为你带来价值的粉丝群。

@name很重要！

就像使用#一样，在适当的时候使用@name也很有用。如果你将他们的名字放到你的消息中，许多人也都会跟你采取同样的做法。而且某些大型Twitter账户（游戏邦注：比如某些游 戏评论网站）似乎有自动的服务，他们会跟踪那些@他们名字的消息，然后自动发送消息对此表示感谢，这意味着你自己的@name将会展现在他们站点的众多粉丝面前。

某天出于好奇，我在消息中添加了@YoYoGamemaker。数个小时之后，Game Maker将我的消息转发展示给旗下700多个粉丝。如果我没有这么做的花，那些人可能根本不会看到我的账 户和内容。

Follow Fridays

很显然，每个Friday的人都会在Twitter上使用“FF”，列出许多@name。我从未发送过我自己的FF，因为我不想让人们因这种事情而感到厌烦。但是，不要盲目采取我的做法！我 所采用的FF方法是发表“感谢@bob的FF”。或者如果我看到质量较高的FF（游戏邦注：比如其他人发表“FF这些令人称赞的游戏开发者：”之类的消息），我会转发那个FF列表。

Facebook

和Twitter一样，你应当尽早启用Facebook页面。但是，我推荐将运营账户与私人账户分开。因为Twitter只是用来发表文本消息，但是你应该不希望陌生人可以随意看你的家庭相 片之类的内容吧。我个人很少使用Facebook，只是有人推荐我建立个《Elusive Ninja》的粉丝页面，我才创建了运营账户。

我只使用Facebook来发布评论和游戏的重大更新。我个人觉得Twitter和Bulletproof Outlaws博客就够用了，但也有可能我未发掘Facebook的全部潜能。

Google+

这是最近刚刚兴起的社交网络，因而我还无法判断其是否适宜用来做营销。Google+似乎结合了Twitter和Facebook功能，但只有过了这段新鲜期之后，我们才会看到Google+的真正 实力，是打败Facebook还是被Facebook打败。

Microjob服务

这个东西我最近才注意到，上面基本上都是像“支付5美元我会帮你做某些事情”之类的服务。对我们独立开发者来说，像“我会向自己4.5万Twitter和Facebook粉丝传播你的消息 ，每天三次，持续一个星期”这类服务我觉得可以利用。

我尝试了几次，毕竟5美元不贵，以下是我的体验：

多数账户是虚假的

从根本上来说，向4.5万个粉丝发布信息并不等同于向4.5万个iPhone使用者发布信息。有些Twitter账户每个小时会发布数十条消息。而且，多数粉丝的账户都是虚假账户，他们根 本不可能购买你的游戏。

仍有可用价值

这仍然有可用的地方，比如Facebook需要粉丝页面上有20个粉丝才能够获得新URL。所以，我们可以花5美元来获得20多个虚假粉丝，而你由此获得的吸引人的URL将为你带来真正的 粉丝。

查看评论

其他使用者可以对他们使用的服务进行评论，所以要稍微看下这些评论，确保其提供的服务是合法的。

其他服务

Fiverr.com和UpHype.com主页上有许多可以使用的廉价服务，比如：

“我可以制作这个引人注目的iPad视频介绍，只要5美元。”

“我可以为你设计一个图标，只要8美元。”

有些事情你自己无法完成，使用这个服务花数美元就可以解决问题。其他专业人员的设计会让你的作品看起来更加专业。你可以先保留这项服务，必要的时候可以考虑使用。

道德问题

这里存在某个道德的问题。从理论上来说，你可以花钱买些虚假的Twitter粉丝或虚假的5星级评论，只要其他人没有发现是虚假内容就可以。比起只有5个粉丝和许多3星级评论来 说，这会让你的游戏或工作室看起来比较受人欢迎。

我不能帮你决定是否应该使用这些服务，这取决于你自己的想法。就我个人而言，我花钱购买Facebook粉丝，只是为了获得/elusiveninja/这个URL，但是所有的Twitter粉丝、 Facebook好友、博客评论都是真实的。之所以这么做，是因为我希望能够准确地判断出自己所取得的成功。如果某周我的Twitter粉丝增加了50个，这意味着账户得到了推广，我就 会去Google看看是否在哪里获得新的评论或者被某个站点提及，然后对做出贡献的人表示感谢。但是如果我拥有的是5万个虚假Twitter粉丝，我就没办法知道自己是否有所进步， 因为我根本不知道哪些人真正对我的游戏感兴趣。

这个问题会在这篇文章的“评论”章节中具体阐述，因为现在这种现象非常普遍。

论坛帖子

我在几个论坛上发过游戏的帖子，主要都是些与iPhone游戏相关的论坛。我发现了两个极端的现象：要么论坛人数过少，没有足够的流量，因而看帖和回帖的人数不多；要么论坛 过于火爆，帖子在10分钟的时间里就从首页上消失。

死气沉沉的论坛并非毫无用处，因为如果有人逛到就会马上看到你的帖子。但是如果某个帖子能够在Touch Arcade这样的论坛的主页上待上几天时间，那么就会获得很高的曝光度 。你可以尝试各种论坛，尤其是那些社区类型的论坛。但是不要老是发游戏的广告，因为有些社区对此很反感，可能会将你禁言。

顶帖子

有些帖子会在首页上待一到两天时间，但是发帖人对此似乎并没有合理的掌控。如果你回复了帖子中所有的回帖，那么就没有其他办法再把你的帖子顶到首页中了。我的做法是， 当帖子消失在首页中时再对回帖进行回复，以此来保持帖子出现在首页中。当然，如果你的游戏更新了的话，你也可以发布到帖子中，靠新闻来让其出现在首页中。我认为发布评 论信息也是个不错的做法，比如“看看，IGN给我的游戏评了满分，链接如下！”等等。

简介中的个人推广

提前制作个人简介，准备好简介、签名中要使用的说明和描述。不同的论坛有着不同的格式（游戏邦注：有些使用方括号，有些使用HTML，有些只允许使用文本，有些限制简介在 100个字以内），我将完成的简介编辑成文本文件，根据各论坛不同的格式剪切粘贴即可，这让简介的编写时间缩短。

确保在签名中添加游戏和网站的链接。在互联网上，你发布的信息将会永远存在，上述做法可以让有些在你发帖数月后才看到的人迅速点击看到你的游戏。

博客

我很喜欢使用博客，尤其是在游戏开发方面。以下是博客的好处：

1、等我老的时候，我可以看看自己的游戏开发记录。

2、它让我坚持自己的游戏开发。如果我在某段时间内没有工作，我会因为没有更新博客以及博客读者不断地催促而感到愧疚，这样我就会重返工作状态。

3、博客帮助我建立起粉丝群，这些人都很关注游戏的成功与否。这些人关注游戏开发的一举一动，他们会在情感上有所投入。这些粉丝可能会利用他们的Twitter账户帮助你营销 游戏，如果评论员诋毁游戏的话也会予以反击，如果你在开发过程中感到消沉，他们还会鼓励你。Behemoth这个公司有着庞大的粉丝群，尽管他们只有三款游戏，但是他们对粉丝 的态度很好，无论接下来他们发布的是什么游戏，发布首日都会有数万人购买他们的游戏，只是为了给他们提供支持。这比那些有着大量游戏却只有50个Twitter粉丝的公司要好得 多。

4、作为游戏开发者，我也想帮助其他游戏开发者获得成功。这也是为何我花这么多时间编写这篇文章的原因。我在阅读其他人的博文时也会学到很多东西。如果我能够将自己的发 现通过博客展现给其他开发者的话，这是多么棒的事情！

5、偶尔你编写的博文会受到普通大众的关注，他们在Twitter或诸如Digg之类的站点上传播博文的链接，这样你就有可能获得更多的关注度和某些新粉丝。

博文篇幅

你不必像我这样发表这么多博文，我只是特别喜欢写博文而已。开发博客的更新博文只需要数个段落，阐述正在进行的开发、接下来数天的计划等等，这不用花多少时间。实际上 ，我在博文更新上浪费了很多时间。开发下款游戏时，我可能会缩短花在这上面的时间。

更新频率

我每天更新博客，这只是个人偏好而已，其实每周更新一次就足够了。关键在于你必须有规律地定期更新，这样人们才会知道何时去查看博客，而且这也会强迫你为自己的开发制 定合理的计划。我推荐在周天晚上或周一早上编写博文，在工作日发布新内容。从我博客的访问情况来看，工作日的访问人数比周末更多。可能周末人们都会外出，而工作日时当 他们完成自己的工作，就会在闲暇时间去看看博客。

做法

在Wordpress等网站上注册免费的博客。这上面有大量可供使用的模板，用起来很简单。个人介绍、游戏内容、概念艺术以及目前的开发状态，这便足以构成你的首篇博文。将你的 博客地址链接到Twitter、Facebook和论坛签名上。你要让博客成为人们想要了解你以及你的作品的相关信息的默认地点。

竞赛

我还未采取过这种方式，以下所述主要是我从其他人的做法中观察所得，也可以算是自己未来的计划。竞赛可以是高分竞赛，奖励转发游戏消息的人，粉丝艺术比赛和“设计BOSS ”竞赛等。

奖品可以是游戏的推广码、iTunes礼品卡或者像iPad、海报和其他商品等实物奖励（游戏邦注：必须确保合法性）。

你可以定期举办竞赛，比如每周评选最高得分，也可以不定期及举办随机推广码赠送。如果你的竞赛和奖励很有趣，那么就有可能给你带来额外的曝光度，让你的游戏受到众人的 关注。游戏《The Heist》在举办竞赛期间荣膺App Store榜首之位（游戏邦注：作者不觉得这是游戏成功的唯一原因，但肯定大有帮助）。宣传那些在竞赛中获胜的人，即便只在 Twitter消息中提到亦可！

降价

这对iPhone开发者来说是件大事。如果你的游戏从9.99美元降到免费，那么肯定可以获得大量的关注和下载量。但是，让我们更深入地分析这种做法。

降价的好处

无论你在合适降价，你的游戏都会被展示在“今日降价游戏！”的类别中，并显示出游戏的原价和现价。这肯定可以带来额外的曝光度。

促销发布

就个人而言，我觉得“发布促销”是个很棒的想法。在游戏发布头几天进行促销，能够帮助你的游戏在App Store中立足。

暂时VS永久

我不觉得永久性的降价可以带来很多好处，但是如果采用的是暂时降价的方式，你必须要让所有人知道降价只是暂时的。假设你刚刚花9.99美元买下游戏，第二天它就降到了0.99 美元，而且好似此后会维持这个价格。这会让你感到很郁闷，或许就会在给游戏的评论中发泄不满。假如你还没有没游戏，然后看到游戏降价到0.99美元，你觉得这个价格很划算 ，但是当时手头有些事情就忘了。几天之后想起了这个游戏，发现价格变成9.99美元。这也会让你感到异常郁闷，你可能就不愿意花9.99美元买下了，因为你会觉得这个价格并不 合理。

如果销售时写上“只售3天！”或者“只在元旦出售！”，用户就会知道在为期多长的时间内能够以优惠价买到游戏。这在发布促销中很重要，因为在发布销售中你想要的是在尽量 短的时间内获得尽量多的销售量，这样才能够获得更好的排名并希望能够得到苹果的推荐。如果你在发布时说两天后游戏会从0.99美元升至9.99美元，那么人们肯定在这两天时间 里争相购买游戏。

节日促销

我向来对节日不是很关注，而且我现在是独立开发者，没有5天9小时的工作计划，对这方面的关注更少了。但是当我还在为节日到来时没人工作感到奇怪时，其他开发者的感恩节 销售、新年销售、返校销售、黑色星期五销售等活动正如火如荼地进行着并获得了大量的曝光度和新用户，而我却什么都没有得到，只是因为我不关注节日。

不要跟巨头起冲突

节日销售的要点在于，那些节日是人所共知的。所以当你在节日降价并期待下载量能够突飞猛进时，育碧和EA之类的巨擘也都把他们的游戏从9.99美元降到0.99美元。每个游戏新 闻站点都会报道这些大公司的消息，玩家也更偏爱花很少的钱来购买这些大公司的产品，所以可能都没有人注意到你的游戏。你不仅没有获得额外的下载量，而且每次下载获得的 盈利也大大减少。

这种状况很棘手，你只能避开，尽量不与这些大公司起冲突。而且，如果你的发布时间与大公司的游戏发布时间相同的话，也会面临同样的问题。你能够做的就是随便选个发布和 促销时间，避开像新年周末这样的高峰期。

我觉得《Elusive Ninja》的发布之所以情况不佳，应该归咎于其发布之日是在今年E3展举办的首日。我处在两难的境地中，要么将发布日推迟3或4周直到E3展热度退去，或者选择 在E3展首日发布游戏。我已经计划在E3展期间开展某些推广措施，所以我按照原定计划行事。但是不幸的是，我的推广并没有及时发挥作用，所以最后以悲剧收场。如果我以后再 面对这种情况的话，在准备好促销方法的前提下我会按照原定计划行事，如果没有准备好的话，我会将游戏发布时间推迟到下个月。要知道在任天堂发布新主机时，当然没有人会 去关注独立iPhone游戏。

为促销做推广

如果你正在计划进行促销的话，就需要让公众知道这件事。可以使用Twitter、免费媒体报道服务和你能够利用的所有媒体。覆盖范围越广，效果越好。

当日免费游戏

现在有很多此类的服务，你付费换取他们报道你的免费游戏。我还未使用过这种方法，但是我知道某些提供这种服务的地方。个人觉得付费来赠送自己的游戏有些愚蠢，尤其是在
营销资金有限的情况下。而且，采用这种做法还会有如下风险：

免费带来的风险

你最先将游戏定价为2.99美元，获得了某些4星和5星的评论。从总体上来说，游戏很不错，看到游戏的新用户都很乐意购买。当你在数天时间里将价格变为免费时，自然可以获得 大量的下载量，但是你也收到了大量1星的评论。

当你将游戏转变为免费时，你得到的是大量可能根本没有玩过你的游戏的玩家。因为他们没有在游戏中投入任何资金，所以也不会关心是否给予了像样的反馈，或者觉得根本不需 要花较长的时间来体验你的游戏。我想起当年视频游戏租赁的年代，孩子们用零用钱租赁某些NES游戏来打发周末的时间。许多此类游戏都很差，但是你已经花钱租赁了，整个周末 它都是属于你的，你就会想要找出些证明你花这份钱有一定价值的东西！通常情况下，你最终会喜欢上那个游戏，而如果游戏是免费的而且你只玩数分钟的话，你可能很快就会将 其抛弃。

有人说如果你要将游戏转变成免费的话，就要做好评级至少下降1星的思想准备，这是值得考虑的经验法则。

免费和排名

我不知道下述说法是否是真实的，就我目前所看到的情况，尽管游戏免费后可以获得大量的下载量，但是你的游戏现在是被归类为免费游戏排名列表中，获得的这些新用户不会影 响你在付费游戏中的排名。比如说，你在App Store的付费游戏中排名第180位，将游戏转变成免费后，获得了5000万的下载量并荣登免费游戏排行榜首位，但是当你转回原本的价 格时，在付费游戏中的排行还是180名。

但是这是否意味着免费总是不好的做法呢？这完全取决与你的目标：

明白自己的目标

从本质上来说，这是个你在营销游戏时时常需要做出的选择：想获得大量用户的关注还是想盈利？

这个问题的答案没有对与错之分。根据你目前所处的状况以及所取得成功的程度，你的目标可能会有所改变。如果你的游戏刚刚发布，你可能需要的是大量的曝光度，所以发布促 销正是适合的手段。随着销售量和排名开始逐渐下滑，你也想要收回开发成本，那么就应当使用正常的价格和竞争促销。某一天你醒来时发现，苹果正在推荐你的游戏，知道这可 以带来大量用户的关注，所以你就要在赚钱和冲击排行榜前20名之间做决定。如果你想要赚钱的话，就保持价格不变。如果你想要提升游戏的排名的话，就要降低价格尝试吸引更 多用户，并且希望此举能够补偿你降低售价损失的盈利并且产生更多的盈利。

如果你的游戏开发成本很低，你或许可以将游戏转变为免费，这样可以给工作是带来更多的曝光度。如果你的游戏已经构建起大量的粉丝群，你知道有许多人等着购买游戏，你可 以选择将游戏定价在3.99美元以使盈利最大化。如果你的游戏耗费2年的时间才开发完成，你可能不能把它定价在3.99美元以下，否则便无法收回开发成本。

每次当你面对营销抉择时，你就必须在那个阶段重新评估你的目标。

免费增值和IAP（应用内置付费功能）

坦诚地说，我对这些东西的了解并不多。这些方法有这巨大的盈利潜能，但是作为与程序员通过互联网合作的个人游戏开发者，我没有去尝试这么麻烦的做法。尽管IAP有着巨大的 盈利潜力，但是不要让玩家感到生气，不要让玩家觉得游戏不公平或者只是个赚钱的工具，这是最重要的。

社交媒体分享

我对火狐浏览器的AddThis Add-On颇有好感，因为这个功能在我的浏览器上添加了个小图标，点击图标后便可以在下拉菜单中看到社交媒体站点（游戏邦注：如Digg、Twitter、 Reddit和Facebook等）。当我获得新评论或发布新闻稿时会用上这个功能。我觉得这是个让所发布内容在Digg之类的网站上变得热门的绝妙方法，但是这些服务中的某些我还不是 很熟悉。

Skype

如果你没有Skype账号的话，就去注册一个。你会发现有许多人想通过电话与你交谈，推广他们的服务或者采访你，所以有个Skype账号是很方便的。

结论

这篇文章中阐述了许多使用社交媒体来做营销的流行方法。这些方法都很便宜甚至是免费的，所以身为独立开发者，你或许可以尝试下。

第二部分：传统营销篇

广告渠道

1. 促销码

我在促销码方面积累许多经验，且听我细细道来。游戏通过App Store审核后，你会得到50个促销码。每次更新游戏内容，你都会再得到50个促销码。数量不会超过50个，所以一旦 用完，就结束啦。遗憾的是，关于如何使用，我没有事先进行广泛调查，所以我在广场中像发放糖果一样将它们全部送出，白白浪费这些资源。所以为让你免犯下相同错误，下面 是些小建议：

* 送给媒体，而非好友

这是关于促销码的一个重要建议。不要通过它们让好友和家人得以免费享受内容，或是其他愿意掏出1-2美元支持作品的人士。将促销码送给媒体。评论网站需要评价很多作品，通 常不会付费下载。你会希望自己能够告诉他们：“嗨，很高兴能够向你免费提供内容，这样你就能够进行检验！”，尽可能方便他们发表意见。你也许也会希望能够把这些促销码 当作比赛奖品，或让热门网站发布促销码信息，或在Touch Arcade论坛中发送。

* 不要过早行动

作为新手，你也许会想：“我最好还是通过电子邮件向评论者发送促销码，这样我就能够幸运地获得他们的些许关注，我要把流程简单化，他们多半不会回邮件索要代码，等我送 出，他们会选择其他直接送出代码的游戏进行评论。”这会让你很快失去许多代码，或白白浪费资源，无从知晓代码最终是否有进行兑换。

相反在邮件中标注：促销码只要索取就能获得。多数发给评论者的邮件都会石沉大海，所以若你直接送出促销码，它们多半只是弃置于某人收件箱中。我发现想要评论你作品的评 论者多半都会回复索要代码。有些人士还会在其联系页面提示；“请不要直接在邮件中发送促销码，若有需要，我们会同您联系。”我想自己大概因此浪费了30个促销码，因为我 就是抱着上面所说的那种心理。

* 促销码无法发表评论

最近苹果做出系列调整，所以我们无法通过已兑换促销码在App Store发表评论。所以如果玩家免费体验游戏，他们就无法发表评论。这些媒体人士虽然无法在App Store发表评论 ，但他们会在自己的网站上写一些评论。

* 截止日期

促销码在得到的4个礼拜后就会过期，所以你知道什么是糟糕举措？在头天请求获得大量代码，这就是我采取的策略。待到媒体朋友重新和我联系，我逐步发现更多联系媒体人士的 渠道，找到利用促销码的新途径，很多我头天索要的代码都差不多到期。所以我后来发送的是对方还没来得及体验前就过期的代码。整个过程完全一团糟。

* 利用和滥用？

另一有关促销码的糟糕情况就是你无法判断哪个促销码已用过。送给某人促销码后，你无从知晓他们是已进行兑换，还是代码尚未使用，仍旧有效。

* 解决办法

我通过AppFigures追踪游戏数据（游戏邦注：其费用是5美元/月，服务很好，能够提供各种数据和图表）。追踪数据的一个优点是，你能够获悉促销码每天带来的购买量。这个数 据非常有用，因为若你只给出少量促销码，通过你所获得的邮件回复以及ppFigures中的“今日销量覆盖国家”数据，你就能够缩小已用过促销码的范围，这需要进行许多猜测， 但已是最佳方案。

在Touch Arcade的帖子中，大家倾向补充：“请发布你用过的代码”，然后大家就会照做，所以开发者能够获悉哪些代码还能够使用。我当时没有想到这点，但你可以参考这个方 式。但这依然是个恼人情况，若有人没有回复告知你代码已用过，然后你默认代码依然能够使用，将其发送给其他人，那么那个你一直希望得到其关注的知名网站最终给出的反应 会是：“促销码无法使用，下款游戏！”就像去工作面试时一直在犹豫不知道自己要穿什么衣服，直到达到面试地点才知晓。

* 礼物

若你真的用光促销码，最后一招就是把游戏当作礼物送给评论者。问题你是只能送给国内人士，所以作为加拿大人，若美国网站想要促销码，那我就束手无策，我只能让美国朋友 将我的游戏送给他们。这个我还没有试过，但这是种创造性思维！

* 如何获得更多促销码？

我还只用过自己的首批代码，但若你推出更新内容，游戏就会得到另外50个代码。所以这非常值得你就内容稍作更新，修复些许漏洞，换得这些代码。但随后你需要经历苹果的整 个审核过程，这非常麻烦。过去当你更新内容后，你就失去前个版本所拥有的所有评论，但不妨看看某些App Store上的应用，现在似乎完全不是那么回事，它只会在评论旁标注“ （V1.3）”（游戏邦注：即某个版本编号），所以大家就知道这是针对前个版本的评论。

2. 旗帜广告

“凭借商业理由做出商业决策。”这是我的商业导师在课堂上告诉我们的。只要你的举措具有商业理由，你完全可以不按牌理出牌，坚持自己的主张。营销是耗尽资金最快的方式 ，因为你或许由于随意决定资金用途，未获任何回报，而白白浪费资金。

在哪里挖掘广告位置？

很多网站的顶部或底部都设有“广告业务”链接，他们会在那里提供位置和价位信息，或邮件地址，让你能够发邮件咨询相关内容。我发现很多网站都通过BuySellAds.com出售广 告位置，这个平台提供优质服务，从中你能够获得数据、图表等信息。你甚至还可以过滤搜索范围，将目标缩小至和苹果相关的网站。

调查研究

我借助Alexa和SiteTrail调查网站数据，主要是了解他们的流量，来自哪个国家，每月的页面浏览数量。我还在台式电脑和iPhone查看这些网站，主要是了解他们的广告陈列位置 和陈列方式，我还会查看他们是什么类型的网站，他们的用户主要集中在哪里，其更新频率。BuySellAds呈现网站的月印象次数和点击率。坦白讲，很多信息对我来说意义不大， 但我从中积累不少经验：

* 印象次数不等同于点击数量

网站具有500万印象并不意味着你的旗帜广告会获得庞大点击量。若就有500万印象/月的家具设计网站和有1000印象/月的iPhone游戏网站而言，你当然要选择后者，因为其用户才 是会购买你作品的群体。若就网站有500万印象，但广告位置在页面底部，会滚动展示，和网站只有1000印象，但广告处在页面顶部，且保持固定而言，你还是要选择后者。印象次 数只是指广告的加载次数，所以若广告处在底部，且还会滚动展示，用户不一定会看到。

* 费用

有些网站的广告费用只需10美元/月。有的费用则很高，需300美元左右。我发现价位，而非印象指数，是判断广告运作情况的最佳参考。若现在有两个广告位置，一个500万印象， 一个1000印象，但500万印象的费用是10美元/月，而1000印象的则需300美元/月，很可能是因为后者网站经营者是根据自己的统计测量发现自己的网站广告确实值300美元这个价钱 。

* 点击费用

坦白讲，我很少谈及此方面，我觉得这没什么价值。根本来说，这就好像是你需就广告点击量支付相关费用。所以通常以XX美元/1000印象（点击量）的形式呈现。但我觉得其中意 义不大，印象或点击量并不会自动带来销量。所以你可能拥有500万印象，但毫无销量，除非在1美元/1000印象标准中，你投入5000美元。若你是家大公司，拥有雄厚资金宣传类似 《愤怒的小鸟》之类的作品，也许这就有其价值，但现在资金有限，我宁愿采用XX美元/月这样的固定费用，这样我就能够规划我的预算。通过5000美元，我能够购买许多300美元 的广告。关于网络营销，我并不是很了解，所以这个理念背后定有其原理，或存在最佳运用时机，但现在我作为独立开发者，没有那么多资金，暂时无法采用这个方案。

* 广告设计

若你能够制作动画广告，那就制作动画广告。它会比静态广告更吸引眼球。若你没有任何美工技能，那就咨询UpHype或Fiverr之类的微工作网站，只消花费5美元就能完成内容制作 。在这个项目中，我自己承担广告中的主要美工工作，我自己绘制草图，然后将其调整至iPhone屏幕，所以拼凑广告内容就变得相当简单。我截取某些画面，然后套入设计框架当 中，就大功告成。你会发现几乎每个网站的广告尺寸和形状都不相同，所以记得设计种规格（游戏邦注：如横向瘦长广告、纵向宽幅广告、四方形广告）。

* 追踪预期

不要只是购买广告位置，然后弃置不管，或者只是随便瞄下数据。购买广告位置后，写下你对广告位置的预期，如“20位新Twitter粉丝”、“每天增加50次点击”、“在意大利增 加10份销量”，选择适合自己的目标。然后追踪实际成果。若你购买投入100美元购买一个月的广告位置，你的目标是在当月获得100份销量，而你最终只获得5份，你需思考，是由 于广告位置需要更新，还是需要改变广告设计方案。根本来看，是由于实际情况和预期存在出入，所以不要再投入资金，直到你发现问题所在，弄清其中原因，获悉如何解决。

* 不受诱惑

我参加的商业课程提醒我们：记住营销者有宣传游戏的职责，而其他销售广告位置的人士也有其职责——销售广告位置。所以你会碰到这样的情形：你购买某些广告位置，但其未 带来任何成果，而销售者告诉你：“你需耐心等待，再注册1-2个月，你就会收获成果，这就是广告的运作模式”。这并不完全错误，但这又回到商业决策。你是否觉得这是个好构 思？你是否有理由相信情况会因广告位置而发生扭转？若可以，那就没问题。关键是你不要出于内疚或压力决定长久坚持，而是要把握充足商业理由。

* Touch Arcade

我谈论Touch Arcade是由于这是判断iPhone游戏风靡程度的权威网站，我想很多iOS开发者都充满好奇。TA相比其他网站价格昂贵，但其拥有庞大流量和目标群体，目前我无所成就 ，只是和TA保持愉快合作关系。他们即时回答我的问题，发送我所需的信息，帮我把广告安排在我希望的时间段，至于专有插播广告，他们允许滚动展示，或安排其他不同广告、 动画广告。

我其中购买了9月中旬的专有广告位置，广告处在边栏的顶部，每周600美元，将维持2周。这对独立开发者来说有些夸张，是吧？我也不知道最终会带来什么结果，但不妨看看我的 商业理由：

1）他们具有庞大流量

2）其流量来源就是我的目标群体

3）广告位置专有，所以内容将全天24小时呈现。

4）广告处在醒目位置，所以用户定会看到

5）上述优点全年不变，但最重要的是：我把广告定在9月12日，这期间会有什么大事？大家都开始回校。开学头个月会发生什么事情？学生还没有完全走出假期，还在调整自己的 学习状态，老师才刚刚开始自己的课程大纲，尚不会布置大量家庭作业，也无需复习考试，所以这些每天被困8小时的目标群体会开始玩弄手机。他们很可能会拼命通过手机发短信 和玩游戏。更重要的是，大家处在同个教室、学校，这是个绝佳的口碑宣传时机，这就像耳语一样简单，“嗨，试试这款游戏”，或看到彼此都玩这款游戏。

6）随着事情的进展，我或许会在头个礼拜把价格降至99美分，作为“返校促销”，这会给我带来些许曝光度，因为网站会发布这款游戏正在进行开学促销的消息。

7）我或许还会引入些许高分竞争，鼓励用户参与体验。

8）我也许能够在此之前赶出《Elusive Ninja》高清版，所以我就能够同时宣传当前版本和高清版本，能够在高清版本中交叉宣传当前版本。

以上就是我采用此策略的理由所在。现在也许还没有任何成果，我已投入1200美元的广告费用，只有等待最终结果。但就黄金时间、绝佳策略和理想位置来看，投资1200美元广告 费，已是我想到的最佳方案，所以我很满意我做出的决策。我现在也可以向相同的广告位置投入这笔钱，但我暂时没有这么做的商业理由。

我预期游戏在这2周内至少能够取得1200份销量的成绩，因为就目前来说，若游戏能够抵消开发和营销成本我就很满足，我完全把这当作一个学习过程。就网站数据来看，我觉得这 是个合理销售目标。若我的销量依然很糟，我会检查自己的操作方式，看看哪里出错。若取得不错销售成绩，我会总结其中原因，未来再次复制相同佳绩，这包括在Touch Arcade 购买更多广告位置，或者扩展营销活动，或举办更多比赛。我只有静静等待，到时就有相关数据辅助商业决策。

营销从某种程度看是个冒险活动，其宗旨是探索大众用户的内心世界。但当你就所做事情握有足够理由时，就不会那么紧张和困惑，就不会每天深感愧疚，内心平静非常重要，它 让你能够专心下个项目，不会怀疑自己的决策，每天担心所投资金。

3. 评论

评论也是个重要方面。大家都知道这非常重要，可靠网站的给力评论从理论角度看会让你获得名声和财富。而未能获得足够评论是iPhone开发商会遇到的情况。

记住我不是支持“付费评论”或者“付费下载”或者“奖励下载”机制。我不是说评论者不应就自己付出的时间和劳动获得相应资金补偿。我只是陈述这些机制如何运作，你作为 开发新手所需应对的方面，这样你就能够做出明智决策。使用，还是放弃这些服务，完全取决于你自己，但你需要记住的是苹果平台抵制App Store的欺骗行为，所以付费评论虽然 不是什么大事，但若你存在付费收买下载量的行为，应用还是会遭到抵制。

付费评论？

我猜想iPhone刚问世的时候，评论者应该是迫不及待地评论游戏，能够参与至App Store热潮非常美妙，所以评论一款可爱的新游戏会提高网站的关注度，但随着时间的流逝，情况 开始出现变化，评论者慢慢发现评论影响差异很大，或埋没其中，或成为大众焦点。从变化角度看，评级颇有价值，因此现在很多评论者开始收费评论。

或许有人会发邮件联系你：“我和好友可以便宜帮你在App Store给出5颗星评价，若要了解更多，请和我联系。”我或许有些夸张了，但真实情况确实是大同小异。我无法想象这 被列作不合法行为，这很难导致敲诈现象。这不过是有些年轻人发现自己能够通过联系某些小型开发商赚钱些许收入（游戏邦注：他们绝不会向Rovio和Capcom发送邮件），写App Store评论只要1分钟时间。

但若你打算购买App Store评论，最好还是寻找那些透明化的服务，如你可以找某个愿意以5-10美元在UpHype和Fiverr给你的作品5星级评价，若他们企图敲诈，你可以取消合约或 给出服务差评。同样你也可以寻求更专业的广告代理网站（游戏邦注：如ComboApp，他们提供“独立评论者的10个App Store评价”等服务）。

保证

通常这些“购买App Store评论”的服务都会给出系列保证：“所有评价都会在4-5星级之间，若评论者给出的评论低于4星，我们会要求他们向开发者提交建设性评论和反馈，这样 开发者就能做出相应调整，将应用提高至4-5星级。”若你算走此路线，这是个很好的保证，为什么要付费购买糟糕评价？有些人会考虑不周，所以最好还是确保资金花得有所值。

媒体职业操守

记住有些评论者不索取费用，说来也怪，就我所知，大型网站通常不收费，反而是小网站常常收费。所以不要激动，不要觉得你读到的所有好评都是开发者花钱买来的。而且有些 收费评论者通常承诺会客观评价，不论好坏，他们把费用当作投入时间的回报。他们不保证会给出5星级评价。我并不是要把评论者刻画成无道德形象。

其实我并非对付费评论有意见，所以我也不是在发表任何评判。书写适当评论需耗费时间，App Store每天都会涌现上百款新应用，它们每天会发出许多邮件要求他人评论，所以我 觉得评论者就其付出劳动和时间收取一定报酬合情合理。我的意思是说，我们是游戏开发者，游戏开发行业如今因要求他人完成无报酬额外工作而声名狼藉。你无法对此有所不满 ，认为：“评论者工作一天后还应该在晚上腾出时间免费帮我写评论！”

所以这里不是要抱怨当前评论模式的运作方式，而只是阐述：“作为开发者，你可能会遇到的问题”，因为其中有些实在令我措手不及，作为开发者，你需把握其中利弊。

4. App Store评论

别人想要什么，你也会想要什么。这存在心理作用，但从根本来说，我们期望别人期望的东西。这就是为什么我会在购买评论前先了解其他评论。这就是为什么App Store有个前10 排行榜，很多应用长期处于其中。这就是为什么大家会购买5颗星评价。这就是为什么麦当劳广告牌显示有超过10亿顾客在此用餐。这就是为什么要请名人代言产品。这就是为什么 电影会在预告片中称：“埃伯特赞不绝口！”（游戏邦注：罗杰·埃伯特是著名影评人和剧本作家）当然这些是个别情况，但通常我们会希望尝试已有人参与且表示赞许的内容， 这会让我们更有安全感，特别当这需要花费金钱时。

现在想象一下：你浏览App Store，发现某个非常不错的应用。它没有什么惊人之处，但似乎非常有趣。但其中没有评论、评级。似乎没人下载过这款游戏。你在下面发现一款质量 相当的作品，但其有10个5星级评价，极力描述其独特之处。你觉得在哪款作品中掏钱更保险？

这同样也体现在Facebook粉丝页面。花5美元给你的粉丝页面购买几百个粉丝，让路过用户觉得你的页面颇受欢迎，而非一片荒芜。我个人不太注重粉丝页面，所以我也没觉得花钱 购买粉丝有什么不妥，因为它对我来说几乎没有什么实际用途。但注意这里你会遇到道德滑坡问题。

评级

App Store评论算是最重要的评论，它们会影响游戏的App Store级别，App Store严重依靠“冲动购买”，你App Store页面的内容会极大影响用户的购买决策，会影响内容评级（ 游戏邦注：若你从好友那获得10个5颗星评价，有人给出1个1星级评价，游戏依然魅力不减，相比无好友评级，却有人给出1个1星级评价情况而言）。这并不算欺骗，你好友和家人 也许真的很喜欢这款游戏，但就像我所说，大家都这么做，所以你最好还是不要让自己处在不利地位。

5. 购买下载量

这里是另一有趣内容。首先，苹果显然抵制这些服务，但为取得成功，以及有些简单服务会无视苹果警告，向你推荐服务，这里我将进行详细描述。而“付费安装”后面会详细谈 论。

情况就是你支付XX美元/下载。那么假设你的应用在App Store售价99美分。你选择某服务，假设你将支付3美元/下载。随后会有很多玩家登陆，因为他们知道若下载游戏，就会得 到3美元。最终结果是你花钱促使很多用户下载游戏。这提高内容的App Store排名，让作品能够处在榜单前列，让更多随机普通用户看到你的作品，促使你的榜单位置更进一步。 我知道某大型专业开发公司曾在此服务中投入2000多美元（他们的游戏在短短几周后就进入榜单前10名）。

从逻辑角度看，我发现借助系列服务的最佳时机在于作品已具有一定曝光。所以若你推出某更新内容，或获得某大型网站的推荐，作品的销量就会直线上升，此时你会希望他们获 得更多曝光，而在销售业绩非常低的情况下使用此服务则效果不佳。这有点像让星星之火变成燎原之势，而不是尚未有火苗就将其抛出。

“基于奖励”

这其实是间接购买下载量。这个模式不是直接以真实货币进行交换，相反下载游戏的玩家能够获得虚拟货币，这些货币能够在其他注册此服务的游戏，或网站所提供的服务和产品 中使用。

道德标准

可以通过两种视角看待此模式：游戏行业(开发者、发行商）视角；玩家购买和体验视角。

就游戏行业角度来看，若你有足够资金，付费完善排名和评论非常有吸引力。你能够通过各种方式声援作品：“这带给我绝佳机会，App Store充斥太多糟糕应用，我的游戏很好， 但它在混乱中被人遗忘，所以我要说的是它应该出现在App Store榜单中”，或者“确保5颗星”的评论者可通过“评论者就投入时间获得回报，开发者能够从目标群体那获得有价 值反馈，或他们能够在App Store上获得4-5颗星的评价，所以这是个双赢模！”给自己辩解。我并不是说这不是正当辩护，这其实取决于你自己的感觉。

开发者需要注意的弊端是，付费收买下载量的方式很难判断游戏的真实成就。当然你拥有50个5颗星评论，但是否40个都是靠付费获得？当然你能够让游戏挤入前10，但其是否真的 有此资格？若游戏不够杰出，付费过后，作品又掉出榜单，除半天出现在前50榜单中，你是否真的有从中获得什么？若快钱是收益底线，那么这些都不是问题。但很多iPhone开发 者都是喜欢制作游戏，希望扬名的小公司或双人工作室，这些就是他们需要考虑的问题。

另一方面是购买和体验游戏的玩家。下载5颗星游戏，结果发现5颗星评论不符实际，不仅会让玩家感觉受骗，而且还会促使他们留下极差评价（游戏邦注：如果内容渐入佳境，结 果还不会这么糟）。知道有人付费获得评价后，你就很难再相信评价。这同时也会影响游戏的成功，存在此类服务会让玩家觉得：“为什么这个蹩脚的计算应用会出现前20中？他 们肯定是花钱挤进来的！”，其实也许并非这么回事。

促使我们采用这个模式的诱惑是玩家至少看过游戏，若作品处在底部，他们也许连看都没看过。此外，游戏还有可能在前10榜单中呆1天完全捞回成本。

我还没给《Elusive Ninja》购买任何付费评论。我觉得没必要，我觉得游戏非常优秀，我愿意接受挑战。我更愿意把资金投入其他营销活动。我更愿意跟进作品的运作情况，所以 扭曲结果没什么好处。我更愿意投资开发下款作品，而不是花钱购买游戏评论和销量，毕竟这是我的首款游戏。

但这完全取决于个人决定。一旦游戏出现在App Store，进入大众视野，你就会收到提供这些服务的邮件。所以想想要怎么处理，若你决定通过付费品牌、下载帮自己一把，设定“ 我的预期结果是什么”的目标，留心这些目标是否实现，这样你才不会白浪费资金。

苹果政策

我觉得苹果在抵制App Store“欺骗”现象方面做得很好。其制止购买下载量服务，不允许促销码兑换者评价游戏，其显示日常数据，而非当前数量（游戏邦注：所以若游戏获得大 幅宣传，只有隔天才能知晓，这令人很难判断合适宣传时机），且还改变排名算法，现在排名不单基于下载量，还参考游戏时间。这些都是苹果在平衡App Store竞争领域方面所付 出的努力，这样各开发者都享有公平机会。

我觉得这还有完善的空间，但苹果的举措颇值得称颂，这原本对他们来说毫无影响，不论排名机制是否公平，他们都能从中获利，但他们还是坚持替开发者主持公道。若你选择尝 试这些“付费评论”服务，苹果会限制你的应用，你也只能默默承受。你要知道苹果反对你欺骗App Store。

6. 网站评论

这些通常被称作获得关注的必杀技。《Elusive Ninja》已获得若干大小网站的评论，但还未出现在顶级网站中（如Touch Arcade和Gamespot）。下面是我从中积累的经验：

* 一鸣惊人后往往很快就销声匿迹

获得大型网站的评论能够促进游戏销量的提高。这不是由于网站非常热门，所有用户都听说你的作品，而是由于如今网络联系密切，大型网站的评论会自动被其他网站和Twitter消 息转发。我的TweetDeck设有“Elusive Ninja”搜索专栏，所以只要这些词语在微博中被提及，内容就会出现在我的检测区域。当tipb.com 评论我的内容时，我的页面就会整天持 续弹出微博和转发内容，看到整个专栏信息满满，我感到非常兴奋。有人告诉我说我的评论“同时获得报道”，也就是“遍布各处”。游戏销量3天内跃升至“可观”的12-15份， 这就之前的每天0-2份来说是个很大的突破。我脑中开始浮现变身百万富翁和购买黄金快艇的憧憬。

几天后，游戏销量重回到每天0-2份水平，所有谈及“elusive ninja”的微博都戛然而止。这是常出现于App Store应用的情形。不论你是刚推出作品，获得媒体关注，还是开展竞 争宣传，发布更新内容，成为话题内容。基本模式通常是销量激增，然后又回归平淡（游戏邦注：如未采取其他促进举措），有时你会因此获得超越先前状况的日销售成绩，但通 常相差不大。我觉得我们最好基于这个模式制定策略，做好下滑的心理准备，而不是怀揣快艇之梦。

* 小型网站

我过去曾运作过小型网站，所以我非常欣赏这些平台。但坦白讲，就数量来看，这些平台似乎成效不大。但获得这些网站的评论也是好事一件，在你宣传游戏名称和创建品牌的过 程中，任何评论都有其价值，很多小型网站的评论者都是杰出人士，他们都喜欢谈论游戏，你能够因此结交到朋友。但回到日销售数据上，低流量网站评论的影响力微乎其微。待 到游戏具有知名度，用户在谷歌搜索相关评论时，若这些是积极评论，就有其相应价值，但这些评论本身的曝光度就不高。

就付费评论来说，若网站以30-80美元评论游戏，不妨参考我在旗帜广告部分提到的，展开系列调查，探究网站流量情况。网站评论的影响力究竟有多大？若网站规模不大，自然就 不值得你投入这些资金。若你花100美元购买评论，而这只让你在接下来几天获得每天3-4份的销量，是否真的值得？再次重复，跟进结果，特别是在有投入资金的情况下。

* 超级必杀技

由于评论的促进性质，游戏最好能短期内获得众多网站的评论，而不是仅获得零星好评。短期关注带给App Store排名的影响很大，这会带来更多关注，保持良性循环，让作品窜升 至榜单当中。

* 发送促销码

就像我在促销码部分提到的，不要直接发送促销码，除非评论者索要，或者你愿意冒浪费之险，代码数量有限。记住即便向索要者发送代码，也不代表他们会评论你的游戏。曾经 有人向我索要代码，在我送出后，他们回复：“非常感谢，你是否考虑在我们的网站购买广告位置？”他们没有明确表示：“若你想要获得评论，就购买广告位置”，但这就是此 次互动留给我的感觉。这里的教训是记住你的目标不是获得尽可能多的评论，因此我的建议是有效利用促销码，而不是毫无计划地挥霍。

* 跳过个人邮件

下面的内容可能会不那么令人愉快，但我发誓绝不是刻意营造这种感觉。若你是新手，你没有媒体的联系方式，对营销服务了解不多或没有什么资金，你会自然形成这样的想法： “我在谷歌搜索iPhone游戏评论，直接给出现的网站发邮件，我能够找到其中的编辑，写封个人邮件，表示自己读过他们的内容，附上我的宣传资料和促销码，促使其给出评论。
”

不要浪费时间！我只从发出的30封个人邮件中得到2-3个回复，而且发现其他开发者也面临类似情况。我花很长时间书写和发送这些邮件，我不是对评论者心存不满。他们无法一一 回复每天收到的大量邮件，很多游戏因此被人遗忘，或作品还不够优秀，不足以促使对方发表评论。它们和我的游戏不同，不愿花时间获得差评，这也不是坏事，完全能够理解， 但记住，若你从中得到的只是通过剪切&粘帖邮件得出的相同回复，那你最好还是直接剪切&粘帖，利用省下的时间去做更富创造性的事情。

慢慢你会认识更多媒体人士，有更多露面机会，你需要在个人邮件中投入更多时间，特别是给那些曾评论过你游戏的评论者，因为你的名字和声望已具有一定份量。想象一下某个 名不经转的新开发者给小岛秀夫发邮件称喜欢《合金装备》，和小岛秀夫给某开发新手发邮件称他很喜欢他们的作品。哪个人收到邮件会更高兴？

7. 不同网站，不同模式

所以若你决定自己完成这些邮件，你可以通过剪切&粘帖格式化邮件节省时间。好极了！除非你刚开始寻找邮件地址，发现有些网站有提供填写表格，而不是邮件地址。这个网站是 这种格式，那个网站采用另一种格式。忽然间，你原本以为只要花半小时发送邮件，现在你得腾出几天时间，填写这个表格，遵循各种提交指南。

这会让你坐如坐针毡，即便是腾出1个星期，提交的数量也在100份以下。所以我们要如何提高效率？

* 评论请求提交服务

我发现有些服务会有偿帮你向各网站发送评论请求。我感觉最好的是iSpreadNews。它收取的费用相比其他网站低很多，你还可以定制内容。而且他们的反馈时间和用户服务都很令 人满意。我建议你阅读他们的问答内容，其中很多指示信息，特别是“你是否希望所提交的内容扩散至美国？”版块。他们的提交系统也很令人满意。我是在自己发送许多邮件后 才发现这个网站的，发现其“1000 char描述”、“100 char描述”功能解决了我手动发送所遇到的公差问题。

我订阅149美元的“西欧”包裹（303个网站，9种语言）。我觉得我并不需要“所有”内容，因为我很生气中国盗版了我的游戏。哈哈，开玩笑的。但我觉得完全可以去掉阿拉伯的 5个评论网站和1个冰岛网站，节约些许费用，我觉得这些地方的iPhone游戏市场潜力不大。我7月6日提交我的请求，我觉得之后销量没有迅速下降要归功于此，后来便有评论网站 发邮件索要促销码，所以我知道他们确有帮我发送邮件。我真希望自己能够早点发现这个服务。

我发现不论是通过服务，还是自己发送，我得到的邮件都相差无几。我宁愿花点钱，免操这份心，然后着眼其他内容（游戏邦注：如投入其他营销活动，或设计下款游戏），而不 是花1周多的时间亲力亲为。而且我还发现致力此方面的专业服务公司和这些网站的关系更密切。如果我是评论者，我会给予专业机构提交的评论请求更多关注。

* 其中荒谬性

下面我想谈谈其中的荒谬性，因为我所谈论的不是付费评论，而是付费购买有偿评论机会。想到这，你会觉得这个观点非常荒谬，但这就是行业目前的情况，我们所能做的就是探 索此荒谬机制的高效运作方式。

* 建立关系

和评论者、媒体建立关系非常重要。但我觉得若你具有一定名气，或你推出过1-2作品，曾和多位评论者和编辑沟通过，个人邮件就效果显著。这些关系也会随时间的流逝逐步建立 起来，随着你积累更多经验，越来越有知名度。但最初你尚未建立这些关系时，最好还是借助这些宣传服务，因为你毫无名气，大家的期待都不高。

你刚来公司只会收到老板发出的集体圣诞节卡片，随后你就会到老板家吃饭，下一年你就会收到他送出的私人卡片。你 不会头年就期待私人卡片，但若在你们已建立一定关系，你 还只收到普通卡片，你就会觉得很寒心。

* 追踪评论

我在WET Productions（游戏邦注：作品有《My Virtual Girlfriend》和《My Virtual Boyfriend》）Mike Amerson的营销文件中学到这些策略。我给“elusive ninja”和“bulletproof outlaws”设定谷歌通知。若出现新评论，谷歌就会发邮件告诉我：“有新网站出现你标记的这些关键字，请查看”，所以我能够获悉作品何时获得新评 论，何时被谈到。这点很棒因为我能够密切关注口碑传播情况，我能够访问这些网站，向评论者表示感谢，回复评论和问题。建立关系益处多多。

另一策略就是设定同你作品类似的谷歌通知。若你制作的是钓鱼游戏，你知道市场存在许多钓鱼游戏，你会希望基于这些游戏名称创建通知，因为有时评论这些游戏的网站也对你 的游戏感兴趣，因为它们存在共同之处。你会发现某款钓鱼游戏在钓鱼爱好者网站获得评论，你原本也许根本就不知道这个网站的存在，通知功能让你开始注意这些网站，所以你 可以发邮件给它们，向他们发送游戏内容。若你很懒，不想创建通知，你可以每周进行谷歌搜索，指明“过去1周”或“过去24小时”。

* 标记评论

我标记所获所有的评论。这能够促使引用和连接更便捷，大家无需每次都通过谷歌搜索。我将引言呈现在App Store商品信息，若我另外制作预告片，我也会将这些内容融入其中。 这也让我们能够在推出更新内容时迅速联系自己希望联系的人士，若他们想要深入了解Bulletproof Outlaws，我会直接同他们联系，告知我的下个项目，或给他们发送专有内容。

8. 营销机构

我在评论版块谈到一些，但市场存在许多处理开发者广告需求的服务机构。有些机构就其服务内容表述模糊，采用很多流行词汇，没有具体说明价位，他们“创造满足用户需求的 定制协同营销方案”。若我早知道这些公司的意思，我就不会同他们联系，我喜欢网站富有效率，开门见山。

ComboApp这样的网站更符合我的要求。其列表陈述网站提供的系列服务，详细描述可能结果，且还表明价格。我以开发者视角深入研究这个网站，我喜欢定制协调营销方案，但现 实是我只有XX资金，所以请直接告诉我能够凭此获得什么服务？

仔细研究列表中的服务，下面是我对比网站描述、价格和体验时考虑的因素：

* 对比价格

相比其他服务，应用发布组合包裹似乎是个不错选择。从中你可以获得新闻报道（183美元），10多个应用评论（98美元），以499美元向50多个评论网站提交信息（427美元）。但 若你通过自己写新闻公告稿获得UpHype或Fiverr之类网站的App Store评论，你就能够以427美元获得50多个评论申请，省下60美元。然后就像前面提到的，你就能够以149美元通过 iSpreadNews向300多个网站提交评论请求。然后就需要查看ComboApps提交的网站是否优于iSpreadNews，但由于这些服务不会体现在通讯录中，我通常只能猜测。ComboApps或许更 多关注北美网站，但若北美网站收取费用，你就会陷入荒谬的“付费争取有偿评论”境地。

我并不是说这没有价值，我没用过ComboApps，它们看起来很专业，很受欢迎，注有编辑的热门网站贴牌新闻公告似乎要比通过免费PR服务提交的新闻公告更具份量，但这些都是预 算有限独立开发者需要考虑的问题。这又回到“商业决策”理念。可以投资，只要你进行充分研究，具有投资的商业理由，设立目标，追踪投资结果，做出进一步决策。

* Twitter陈述

我发现Twitter通常带来瞬间曝光。想要让粉丝3万的Twitter帐号提及游戏内容不是难事，但通常大网站都会发布很多微博，以致鲜有人关注它们发布什么内容，你的信息会因此淹 没其中。1小时内就会消失。Facebook的陈述内容会维持几天，博客目录或内容也会关注1周左右。所以若你付费获得某人的Twitter陈述，不要抱太大希望，若3万粉丝中，恰好有 80%恰好不在正确时刻查阅消息，他们就不会看到陈述内容。星期二凌晨3点的Twitter消息对3万粉丝而言意义多大？或者Twitter消息早晨9年发布，但此时粉丝有50多条新微博需 要阅读？或者下午2点，当大家都忙于工作，无暇浏览Twitter消息？

* 保障评论

这是我愿意深究，获取更多信息的内容，但我发现其此方面表现突出。他们很可能同付费评论网站有联系，聘请他们评论你的游戏，你可以通过自己承担省下其中费用，但这存在 时间和精力问题。我觉得唯一值得花钱购买的评论是流量庞大的大型网站，但这需要花费很多钱，所以若你打算投资这笔钱，就注意追踪数据，看看下次是否还值得继续。且记住 同我们分享从中获得的经验。

* 销量/下载量生成

这其实就是我在购买下载量中有谈到的，只是这听起来更像Admob和Flurry App Circle模式，在此模式中，你不是给予下载游戏的用户金钱奖励，而是让游戏名称或广告优先在 Admob弹出窗口中呈现。

9. Admob

我觉得资金有限的独立开发者使用Admob的意义不大。你投入些许资金，表明愿意支付的广告点击费用，你支付的费用取决于广告在Admob弹出窗口呈现的机率。我投入50美元，将 我的出价降至最低，旨在查看最终结果。我在1天内获得1250次点击（游戏邦注：1250 X 0.04美元=50美元）和23.8多万印象（广告呈现的次数）。棒极了。

点击量不同于下载量，当天销量增长为零。所以看起来你似乎只是付费让大家加载你的App Store页面。若你具备雄厚资金，这也许是个好方案，你无疑能够因此促进大家使用你的 游戏页面，但若你资金有限，无人能够保证投资会换来销量。我的App Store描述非常糟糕，其他拥有更优质描述的作品也许取得更好成绩，但综观他人成绩，我开始持怀疑态度。

若你是小型开发商，我建议你省下50美元，放弃尝试Admob。我无法想象若你投入5000美元，结果会怎样，但我绝不会第一个吃螃蟹，损失50美元已非常多。

既然Admob的主要问题在于点击量不等同于销量，那么按实际销量收费的服务呢？这将我们带入：

10. Flurry App Circle

在这里，我深入挖掘Admob以外的理念。这是相似的构想，你投资资金（虽然你最少有投入250美元，而不是50美元，设定出价（出价越高，广告呈现的机率越大）。区别在于 Flurry App Circle按实际销量收费。若当日看到App Circle广告的用户购买游戏，这就是广告创造的销量，他们就是基于此判断实际销量。这无疑更令人放心。你可以选择投资 5000美元，若游戏未获得任何销量增长，资金依然完好无损。

另一落实此方案的安全方式是若游戏在App Store售价1.99美元，苹果分成30%，你的每份实际收益是1.4美元，若你出价1.35美元，你依然能够获得0.05美元净利润/份。所以从理 论来看，你完全可以选择投入50万美元，若全部打水漂，你依然能够从每份作品中获得5美分净利润，所以通过用苹果商店所获收益抵消Flurry资金，你也不会出现亏损。这是个安 全机制。当然问题在于1.35美元是个较低竞价标准，平均出价是1.5美元，最高出价超过4美元。“Flurry推荐引擎首先向用户呈现理想应用，出价决定应用呈现顺序，”所以若你 只出价1.35美元，作品就无法频率呈现。

一个重要方面是你可以设定日常预算极限，若你投入资金，最好进行相应标注。我把预算设定在250美元，并未发现任何问题，但你不会希望碰到这样的情形：侥幸成功，获得5万 份销量，但未设定日预算，结果只能将钱欠着。就我所知，若碰到这种情形，你可以联系Flurry，他们非常乐意提供帮助，但要保持理智，确保自己处在安全情形。

所以我在《Elusive Ninja》投入250美元，要价1.35美元/安装（作品在App Store售价1.99美元，所以每份能够获得5美分利润）。过去1个月，我获得5.2万多印象，6499次的点击 量，而通过App Flurry则获得6次安装，由于我只按安装数量付费，而不是按点击量，所以我的250美元只带来了6份销量。

最终结论是若你设定日预算计划，压低出价，使其处在能够创收的水平，运用App Circle就不存在什么负面影响，但若你采用此策略，就不要心存过多期望。若你把出价抬高到4美 元以上，我想销量可能会出现迅猛增势，但若作品定价99美分，每次安装，你就要付出3美元。若你具备充足资金，试图提升销量以落实游戏的超级必杀技，这能够帮你提高榜单位 置，从而获得一定回报。但若你是资金紧张的独立开发者，这就不是最佳营销方案。

若我资金雄厚，作品销量成绩突出，我会进一步试验Super Combo策略，这归根到底是App Circle和Admob的选择问题，我会选择App Circle，因为你只需就合法下载量进行付费。

11. 苹果的强大推荐功能

众所周知，这是个大型工具。这是能够促使你获得名声和财富的销量助推工具。无人知晓获得推荐的标准是什么，或哪个应用获得金色标签。遗憾的是我也不知道苹果推荐机制的 运作模式，所以若你希望从文章中获悉如何获得推荐，恐怕要大失所望，但下面有些根据调查得出的相关内容：

* 影响因素

这基于研究受推荐作品的相关内容，还有某些基本逻辑。苹果似乎倾向推荐机制看似完善的作品。不论是运用大量设备功能，还是展示杰出画面效果，抑或者在游戏设计、控制方 案方面有所创新。

除此之外，短期内的庞大销售数据也能够吸引苹果关注。若作品备受大众青睐，苹果也会进行特别介绍。大量5颗星评论很可能会让游戏在苹果页面获得展示，但我无法估算所需具 体数量或好坏评级比例。还可以通过结识某苹果员工，或者直接获得某个苹果雇员的关注，但若你能够做到这点，你就完全无需读这篇文章。

你会发现很多有关如何通过进行简单谷歌搜索获得推荐的秘诀和建议。关于这点有很多更详尽的理论（游戏邦注：就像创造细分应用，在一周中某特定日子发行内容）。所以最后 提示：直接给苹果发邮件，请求其推荐内容，或者提醒其作品多么精彩作用不大。我不知道这是否有所作用，但根据开发者的试验结果来看，这无疑无法带来什么正面影响。

* 精品应用

作品首次上线会自动获得精品应用版块的介绍，所以这天，你会感觉良好，觉得作品能够在被其他精品应用挤下前一举成名，变得风靡。这就是开发者特别关注作品头天营销和销 量情况的部分原因，此时你能够不费吹灰之力就获得些许地位，而之后就很难轻松获得，所以你非常希望用户能够访问你的作品。

* 提前准备

苹果通常会在出乎意料的情况下推荐你的作品，你通常会收到一封邮件：“请发送给我们若干XX尺寸的图像”，你不确定随后会发生什么情况。但你会照他们的要求操作，随后你 就发现自己获得推荐，作品销量疯狂增加，你驾着黄金快艇朝夕阳驶去。

其实通过索要更多图像并不意味着你会获得推荐。但无论如何，我们最好还是有所准备。

* 设计超级必杀技

所以若你刚获得苹果的推荐。你现在所能做的就是坐等丰收，考虑购买哪个类型的黄金快艇，是吧？你完全可以这么做，但就像我之前说的，App Store的所有内容通常都是突然出 现销量高峰，然后陡然下滑，回归为零。推荐除带来获多点击，并没有产生什么不同。若你获得推荐，推荐消失后，你的日销售成绩也会有所提高，但若是Rovio、Chillingo和 Halfbrick获得推荐，你觉得他们会放松地坐等丰收？还是他们会采用行动促使作品排名更上一层楼？

不论是购买Touch Arcade网站的视觉修复，还是通过营销机构进行大量口碑传播，抑或是发布新闻报道推荐，举行比赛，制造商品，添加更新内容，若游戏获得推荐，记得设计总 体规划。在推荐魔力退却前，你只有几天，最多1周时间将计划付诸实践，就像马里奥的Invincibility Star消失后，你又重新回到摆脱Goomba的情境，所以事前是否做好计划相差 很大：推荐或许会让你窜升至60名，但1周后就跌回150名，或让你升至60名，而超级必杀技则能让你几个月里稳居前20名。

* 大众融资

这在互联网领域是个非常新颖的概念。模式就是你创建页面宣布项目所需资金，许多感兴趣的人士就会捐出些许资金。公布项目者最终筹得所需资金，而大家仅需献出绵薄之力。 这是个有趣理念，若某天我资金紧张，无法靠自己的资金完成项目，我也会尝试此方式。

* Kickstarter

这是目前最受欢迎的大众融资服务。Kickstarter的FAQ版块详细陈述所有内容，所以我这里就不详细解说（游戏邦注：其中的“Robots Love Ice Cream”项目在Twitter非常活跃 ，获得某些博客的专门叙述，已成功融资1.8万美元）。

第三部分内容：资料及维护篇

网站

显然，你需要为游戏找一个合适的网站，幸运的是你无需为此大费周章。最近很多游戏开发者在Wordpress网站上都拥有一个网页，或者拥有一个单页网站用于宣传他们的游戏。像 苹果的“Available On The App Store”图像就让用户能够快速地发现游戏的存在。在网站上提供一些游戏相关图片，预告片，以及营销广告和宣传资料链接，让那些想要帮助你 宣传游戏或者评价游戏的人能够更便捷地了解你的游戏。花点钱去注册一个类似于“http://www.thegame.com/”的域名，让用户能够直接访问你的游戏网站，使那些专业人士，德 高望重人士或者普通玩家能更加重视你的游戏。

App Store描述

有许多网站可以帮助你编写App Store描述，也有一些仅是提供给你一些诀窍。花一些时间上谷歌搜索一些诀窍，自己编写App Store的描述，可以因此省去一些多余的费用。你可 以按照以下的结构进行编写：

-前两句引人注目（当用户刚进入iTunes的游戏App Store时，他们只能看到关于游戏描述的首两句话，其它内容只有点击进入才能看到）

-快速描述或者总结概念，情节或目标等等（有趣的宣传推广方式）

-引用接收到的评价或夸奖（人们总是喜欢尝试别人赞许的事物）

-更深入的功能表（列出更多能够突出你游戏特色的细节）

-联系资料（游戏的网站，Twitter链接，常见问题链接等）

我的App Store中关于《Elusive Ninja》的描述违背了上述的一些观点，销量并不好，所以千万不要参考《Elusive Ninja》的描述，也许我只是想通过这款游戏进行测试，看看是 否摆脱了这些标准我们也能创造出好的App Store描述，但是现实却是残酷的，而我也遭到低销售量的惨痛代价。所以“照我说的做吧”！

App Store截图

你可以张贴出5张截图，所以好好利用这个机会吧。最初我只想着张贴原始截图，但是来自游戏开发商Ravenous Games的Derek却使用了一个模版把我的截图变得更加生动。我喜欢 他所创造的这种样式，所以决定如此张贴我的截图。在我的宣传资料袋（Press kit）里还有好多未加工的原始截图，但是在App Store中却是一些经过处理的截图，以此更好地吸 引玩家的注意。我并不是“截图中的小截图”的死忠粉丝，因为我认为在购买一款游戏之前都希望能够清楚地看到游戏的画面效果，但是我认为《Elusive Ninja》的画面效果非常 清晰，即使原始截图被压缩后也不会影响其效果。我不知道这种转化好不好，也许人们更喜欢未加工的原始截图，但是我喜欢图像表现出来的奇特感，所以我选择使用后者。

同时也需要记住，很多评论者并不是根据App Store上的截图做出评论，所以他们并不希望看到这些精心加工的截图以及上面附带的营销内容。而且评论者也不善于应对这些华丽的 截图，因为这些营销广告会让他们感觉自己也是在为游戏做宣传。所以请理解他们更喜欢原始截图的想法，最好能将游戏网站的logo和标题文本嵌入截图中。如果你正在制作华丽 的截图，确保能同时提供你的Press kit的链接地址，以此满足那些喜欢原始截图的人的需要。

预告片

如今你需要一个预告片。每个人都想要了解游戏的运行情况。但是你必须记住，不能在预告片里泄漏太多信息。最好让你的预告片尽可能的简短，以此才能吸引玩家的好奇，过长 的预告片只会让玩家感到厌烦。我曾经看过许多关于益智游戏以及简单的动作类游戏的预告片，很郁闷的是如此简单的游戏却有长达5-10分钟的预告。如果游戏理念很简单，尽可 能地把预告片的时间压缩在30-60秒之内。玩家们想通过预告片进一步了解游戏，掌握游戏中的特殊技巧和功能，但是如果预告片不能如他们所愿，将会让他们对游戏失去兴趣。

在你快完成游戏设计之前尝试着去制作你的预告片。你想要在游戏真正发行之前便开始进行宣传，而带有游戏设置介绍内容的预告片能够帮助你做到这点，你也会因此获得一些反 馈，而根据这些反馈对游戏做出适当调整，从而让它能以更好的状态出现在市面上。

DIY预告片

不幸的是，苹果并未真正提供制作游戏预告片的简易工具。这点让我很惊讶.你也许会觉得这个工具应该是在游戏被安装的时候录制游戏预告片的简单设备，但是没有！你只能通过 苹果模拟器让游戏运行然后通过桌面录制设备来完成预告片的录制。对于iPhone游戏来说这并不是一件坏事，因为它们不需要使用疯狂的控制器和电话功能，而对于iPad来说就不 同了，iPad模拟器慢到让人抓狂，我甚至不能想象用它来记录影片会是什么场景。

我想尝试SimCap（游戏邦注：这是一个新的应用，可帮助捕捉桌面上的视频显示），这是专门用来记录模拟器的一种新型应用。SimCap的最大优点便是它带有SoundFlower（游戏邦 注：虚拟的音频数据传输软件）能够帮助记录音频。从根本上说，SoundFlower能够让音频能够与视频同步出现。其实这个过程很困难，我自己都不是很理解这一机制，但是根据教 程我却能够轻易且完美地实现这一步骤。

我使用影视特效去制作我的预告片，而你也可以使用iMovie（苹果电脑编写的视频剪辑软件）， Adobe Premier（视频编辑软件）或者 Adobe Premier（微软开发的一款简易非线 形编辑软件）等软件进行操作。你也可以去谷歌上搜索一些有用的程序，付费或者免费获得它们。截取游戏中一些有趣的片段，做一些稍许的改动，添加一些文本以描述游戏的功 能，如果你不能抓取游戏的音频，就用一些吸引人的音乐替代作为游戏的背景乐，然后上传这个视频到YouTube即可。

外包预告片

像oDesk和Elance等自由网站上有许多人在提供预告片编辑的服务。你必须投入80-300美元不等的费用去让别人帮你制作预告片，但是如果你没有任何艺术细胞或者不想为了制作视 频而做深入研究，那么这种外包方式将能帮你省下不少钱和时间。虽然在一些微任务网站上，如UpHype和Fiverr也有一些人也在提供预告片编辑服务，而且要价只要5-10美元，但 是我却怀疑这种价格到底能有怎样的服务质量，所以我对这些网站不抱太大的期望。

Press Kit

这是很多独立游戏开发者并未察觉到的一大策略。当一个评论者想要评论你的游戏时，他们同时也想在文章上张贴截图或者一些游戏图像，或者他们的网站上有一些特定的设计模 版，让他们能够按照这一模版进行评论，而这时候他们就更需要标题截屏，游戏图像或者游戏玩法的截屏等等。但是除此之外，我发现迄今为止很多评论类文章都是简单地截取自 你的游戏描述中，不过你也不要抱怨了，谁让你自己暴露了那些信息呢！关键是我们必须知道很多评论者不管在什么时候都掌握了很多资讯，特别是关于iPhone的相关信息，因为 很多新开发者在制作新游戏的时候每天都会与这些评论者进行交流，所以你应该让他们能够尽可能简单地对你的游戏做出评论。

里面有什么内容？

我的《Elusive Ninja》的宣传资料袋里好像装了太多东西了，但是我认为多总比少好。

它里面包括：

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\BPO_logos\

这里包含各种版本/大小的BPO（游戏邦注：工作外包的单人独立游戏工作室）logo。有横的，竖的，黑的，白的，全彩的，以及透明背景的PNG格式。如此齐全的选择让人们能够挑 选最适合自己布局的logo。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\游戏_图像\

这里有来自真实游戏中的各种图像。曾经我为了适应大屏幕的iPad而调整了较大的游戏图像，而这些图像可以轻易地被拼凑在一起，我抓取了《Elusive Ninja》的一些游戏界面， 点缀图像，以及标题logo，而将它们集中地放在这里。如果我从游戏中获得了概念艺术，角色设计等内容，我也会将它们归进来的。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\图标\

当你最后提交游戏到App Store中时，你将选择一系列大小不同的图标，从最小的57×57到最大的512×512。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\新闻稿\

对于《Elusive Ninja》，到目前为止我拥有一篇新闻稿，如果我有机会举办编写更多新闻稿的话（如游戏更新或交叉促销时），我将把相关资料添加近来。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\屏幕截图_精选\

这些是App Store中我的屏幕截图的精选版本，包括一些修饰和营销广告。对于App Store来说，这些精选很有利，因为能够帮助它们吸引到更多用户的注意，但是同时你也需要注 意，评论者并不喜欢使用这些精选版本，或者说不会使用它们，因为如果使用这些带有营销广告的截图，那么这些评论者看起来就像是在为游戏做广告，如此看来我们便能理解为 何他们更喜欢原始截图了，因为他们可以自由地在上面张贴自己的网站logo等等内容。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\屏幕截图_原始\

请记住这些可是原始的截图。虽然精选截图只有5个“名额”，但是你却能随意安置20个任意的原始截图。我认为可以选择多种不同的截图，以便使评论者不用使用相同的截图。从 游戏中抓取截图是一件很痛苦的事，所以为了能让评论者更容易对游戏做出评论，你需要事先截去一些游戏图像。

另一个好处便是你可以自行选择置于宣传袋中的截图，你可以确保20张截图都是合适的，而不是其他人随机截取的图像，因为那些图像有可能会出现一些效果低劣的情况，如你的 主角被挡住了等等。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\AppStore简介

对于这一点我只是放置了我所写的App Store相关描述。我用不同格式保存了这一描述：.TXT， .DOC和.ODT，因为有些网站支持粗体，有些却支持斜体等，当然了也有只允许使用 原始文本的网站。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\概况介绍.PDF

这是一个很大的PDF格式文件（需要你花点时间将其压缩为2 meg的文件，而不是巨大的20 meg或者丑陋的400k压缩文件），你可以将一些合适的文本形式保存下来，让人们可以点 击获得它并在上面进行剪贴或者点击相关链接等等。我几乎把《邪恶联盟》的布局以及一些相关的概况介绍都复制下来了。说实在的，我并不能肯定这么做是否有意义，如果人们 正眼看待并使用这些文件那答案就是肯定的了，而且这些文件用于游戏中的图像和截图中，并不需要耗费我们太长的时间去整理组合，看起来较为专业，所以我很乐意使用它们。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\概况介绍.PNG

如果人们想要把概况介绍张贴在自己的网站上，那么这种压缩版本便最为适合。我随意地往宣传资料袋里塞了好多东西，因为这是我第一次进行这项工作，我不知道哪些资料有用 哪些无用，抱着宁愿多放也不想遗漏的理念。

\《Elusive Ninja》_宣传资料袋\《隐蔽忍者》_宣传资料袋.ZIP

出于方便而将上述文件转化成ZIP文件格式。我尝试着将最大的文件也保持在10 meg左右。因为我认为人们肯定不喜欢太大的宣传资料袋文件，没有人会去下载50 meg的资料袋吧， 除非他真心喜欢像《光晕》这类型的游戏。除了将宣传资料袋附加在电子邮件上，我还特制作了一个相互连接的短网址。我很担心人们会不会不相信短文件链接（特别是随机生成 的URL文件），所以我想同时涵括2种链接，就像“这是原始文件，这是方便的压缩文件！”

独家内容

有一些网站表示想了解我今后游戏的一些独家内容。我并不想这么做，除非真的有一些新闻媒体对我的游戏很感兴趣。对于下一款游戏，我可能会添加一些不一样的东西，包括幕 后的一些波澜和竞争或者用户所感兴趣的一些新鲜事物。拥有独家内容的网站能够让你的内容得到关注，而你也会因为它们的突出而备受瞩目，这是一种双赢局面。

新闻稿

新闻稿能够让外界知道你正在做些什么。我们的商业顾问建议我们能够尽可能地写好新闻稿。实际上，因为你可以使用很多免费的新闻稿编写服务，所以这么做对你来说并没有太 大的损失。

你可以打开我的博客目录，那里有我不久前体验过的不同服务以及体验后的结果。回过头来看，的确，拥有更多的新闻稿也总比没有的好，因为在新闻稿公布后，你的公司，游戏 名字将被更多媒体所熟知，他们也会更加愿意选择你的游戏或者将你的新闻稿作为头条新闻进行刊登（比起他们从未听说过的公司来说这种情况好太多了）。你也会因此收到一些 连线请求。就像在我发表了第一篇新闻稿后，很多之前不知道我们公司的媒体便主动要求采访我。

编写新闻稿

我选择自己编写新闻稿，因为我发现网络上到处都是“如何写好新闻稿”的文章。在谷歌上进行搜索，那里有很多编写新闻稿的细节内容，如如何编排文章，应该提及什么或者不 应该说到什么等等。

外包新闻稿

你可以雇佣其他人帮你编写新闻稿，很多营销商和自由作家都提供这种服务。但是我认为花100美元或者更多钱去雇佣其他人帮你描述你的产品，或者帮你写发表文章真的是件很愚 蠢的事，因为比起其他人，你更了解自己想要表达什么，特别是当你需要频繁发布新闻稿的时候。但是如果你不擅长写作，或者英语并非你的第一语言，那么这一做法就很有价值 了。

提交新闻稿

当你向不同网站提交你的新闻稿时你需要耗上一点时间，因为每个网站对于文章的格式，长度以及各部分的划分都有不同要求，如果你是自己编写新闻稿的，那么你只需要花上一 些时间直接提交新闻稿即可。但是如果你是雇佣其他人帮你编写，那么有可能你需要重新拆分文章或者将其进行改写，以便适应不同格式要求的网站。

你也可以雇佣一些人帮你提交新闻稿，我之前并未这么做过，但是我想下次尝试看看能否因此省下一些不必要的麻烦。你可以向一些收费网站提交新闻稿，但是如果你资金紧张的 话当然也可以选择一些免费的网站进行张贴。

排行榜

如果你的游戏是以社区交流为基础或者带有竞争性，那么你可以考虑发行游戏排行榜。奖励那些位于排行榜前列的玩家，推动玩家的游戏竞争，或者在博客上公布获胜者等等。

周边产品

不要在这上面投入太多钱。如果你的游戏很受欢迎位于排行榜的前十名，那么你可以放心地花钱进行推广（首先进行市场调查），但是如果你的游戏并没有太大的名气，那么也不 会有人去关心你的推广活动的。但是如果你有了空闲时间，并且有了“闲情逸致”，那么你可以考虑将一些内容拼凑在一起创造一个类似于“咖啡新闻”的免费网站。你可以将游 戏中的一些图像墙纸拼凑在一起。游戏公司The Behemoth便尝试着制作出他们游戏角色的雕塑/玩具。游戏开发者更关心他们首几款游戏的成败而不是推销，但是如果他们能够免费 且更简单，快速地进行这项工作，那么推销对于他们来说也是很有帮助的。我将《Elusive Ninja》的墙纸拼凑在一起，因为我只是简单地使用游戏中的一些图像进行拼凑所以很快 便完成了这项工作，但是我知道除了我现实中没有人会真正去使用这些图片的。

维护

那么，你现在已经获得很多与你游戏相关的东西了。Twitter，Facebook帐号，广告，评论，博客等等。但是还没有结束！一旦你获得了这些东西，你就更需要去维护他们的稳定， 并保持信息的更新。让我们快速浏览一些有帮助的内容：

旗帜广告

随时观察你的旗帜广告，并判断哪一些广告是真正有成效的，而非只是解析你的App Store页面或者只是表面广告。如果你的广告并未达到预期效果，那么今后几个月时间内不要去 更新它了，把钱投资在其它地方或者其它类型的市场营销中。如果你是小型独立游戏开发者，那么你便需要投入更多地时间于此，因为你缺少大量的投资资金。而如果你来自一个 拥有大把营销资金的大公司，那么你便不需要时时刻刻盯着这些广告了，因为你的金钱可以帮助你达到一些可能的目标。

Twitter/Facebook

在这些网站上随时保持更新！特别是Twitter。而Facebook你倒不需要管得太勤，你可以只是那里回复一些关于公告或者与你有关的评论。Twitter现在很庞大，很多人每天都在使 用它，所以你也需要在这里有自己的立足之地。我曾经试过几周时间不上网，但是因此却错过了很多实时更新的内容，错过许多转发别人有趣内容的机会，错过很多有趣的交谈以 及很多游戏开发行业中的新动态等。

我在iPhone和笔记本电脑上安装了社交阅读器，使我能够在外出，搭车或者上厕所的时候也能刷新内容，同时我也保持这些网站在电脑后台的运行，以便我在工作的时候也能收到 新Tweet的弹出窗口。

论坛发帖

我开始使用火狐浏览器和LastPass（在线密码管理器和页面过滤器），它们都很方便。我几乎把所有帐号和密码都保存在LastPass上以便我能够自动登录，当我在论坛发表帖子的 时候我也可以将其记录在我们的书签上。所以我可以随时点击“打开所有的标签”从而看到我所有帖子，并自动登录让我能够第一时间了解是否有新的回复，如果有回复的话我便 可以登录上去做出回应了。这真的是一个很有效率的工具。

评论

当你收到新评论时，记住先感谢评论者，不论他是通过Twitter还是电子邮件，或者直接在你的文章下面做评论。这么做一方面是出于礼貌，另一方面还能够帮助你与评论者建立良 好的关系。

评论者需要花费时间去为你的游戏做出评论，你也能因此而受益，而你只需要花费几分钟时间就可以发表感谢的语言。

如果你的网站设有评论区，并且有人在上面发表观点或者提问问题，那么你应该对此做出正面且中肯的回答。这是帮助你与玩家建立其良好关系的重要方法。

我注意到有些人喜欢匿名发表一些严厉的评论，但是当开发者出现在评论上时，所有人的语调就瞬间变柔和了。当然了，他们并不好突然巴结你，而且他们对你的游戏给出负面评 价也是正常的，因为每个人都有自己的观点，但是他们却会因此扭转了整体的气氛：

评论者1：“这款游戏真失败！”

评论者2：“看起来很放荡！”

评论者3：“简直是浪费钱！”

开发者：“大家好！我是这款游戏的开发者。我很好奇你们对这款游戏的哪一方面感到不满意，如果不介意的话能否跟我细说？如此我也许能够在做出修改，或者至少在我下一款 游戏中更加慎重考虑这些观点。

评论者2：“我不买这款游戏是因为它应该卖0.99美元而非4.99美元”

评论者3：“1个小时之内我就能轻松地完成这款游戏”

评论者1：“（罗列出两大段批评这款游戏的方方面面）”

开发者：“非常感谢你们。我也一直很担心这款游戏是否太过简单了，但是作为游戏制作者，我们一直在接触游戏，所以真的很难对此做出明确的判断。我将考虑添加一些较难的 关卡，以便让这款游戏对得起这个价格。但愿我有能力让这款游戏免费出售，但是我却不得不因此为自己买单。:)”

说实在地，让每个人都喜欢你的游戏确实很困难，但是如果能够友好对待玩家并让他们知道你正认真阅读他们的评价，便能因此减少一些不必要的负面评价，而因此能让你的帖子 看起来更亲近，并给读者留下好印象，从而帮助你与玩家建立起良好的关系，有时候还会为你争取到更多有意义的反馈。

预告片

如果你的游戏中有一些新事物出现（如新的地图，新的角色以及新的结局等），那么你可以将这些新事物整合成一个新的游戏预告片。如果你的游戏是拥有很多主要角色的角色扮 演游戏，或者带有多个核心机制的益智类游戏，那么你的预告片可以着重描绘每一个角色或者每一个游戏机制（Capcom便为旗下游戏《街头霸王》制作了这样的预告片）。

新闻稿

在谷歌上搜索你的新闻稿中的关键词并看看他们会出现在哪里。因为你并不知道读者会被你的哪篇新闻稿所吸引，所以尽可能多地编写你的新闻稿吧，只要你自己编写并提交给那 些免费的发布网站，那么就不需要多花钱了。赶紧试试吧！

Press Kit

有需要的话随时更新你的Press Kit。如果你需要更新一些游戏图像，你可以将一些截图放到这个资料袋中。

博客

定期写博客。我们都未完美地做到这一点，所以你也不要自责了。我曾经为了让自己看起来更有责任感而坚持100多天每天更新，但是有时候我也会遗漏掉或者每天更新四五次以弥 补一些空白。其实你的博客不需要长篇大幅，只要让读者知道你仍然在坚持守护这个博客便可。说实话，我现在看起来有点虚伪了，因为我在写这篇文章的时候已经有超过2周没更 新博客了。当我关注于这个长篇营销文章时，除了日常的一些琐碎我确实没什么好写的内容了。当然了，当我完成这篇文章后我将再次回到博客中进行更新，但是我应该不可能再 坚持每天一篇的信念了吧。

你可以在Digg（以科技为主的新闻站点）或Twitter等平台发表“文章”。你并不知道什么内容才能吸引读者的兴趣。我曾经发表过一篇关于制作雨景效果的文章，有人把他张贴在 Hackernews（游戏邦注：一家关于计算机黑客和创业公司的社会化新闻网站）便开始有许多人围绕这一话题展开讨论，而我则因此获得了大量的网站流量以及忠实粉丝。而如果我 没提交这篇文章，读者也不会看到它们。

确保你的网站允许玩家做出评论和反馈。可能刚开始你只能收到1，2条评论，甚至你的很多文章在一开始并没有任何评论，但是随着时间的过去评论便会越来越多了。同时你还必 须对评论者做出回应，因为如果他们花时间对你的文章做出评论，那么就意味着他们将与你的游戏发展共同前进，而以后你也能继续听取他们更多的反馈。这就是我所说的“结交 新朋友”，所以千万不要羞于表现自我。

竞赛活动

当你有时间的时候可以尝试着规划游戏竞赛活动。反复进行游戏竞赛并没有什么错（就像每周高分竞赛一样）。一段时间过后你也许能想出新的奖励或者挑战观点。如果你将要开 发一款新游戏，那么如何做才能帮助你的新游戏，甚至是老游戏吸引更多注意？让玩家在你的一款老游戏中进行竞赛，赢的人便能够获得新游戏的优惠码了。

The Behemoth发表Twitter称只要玩家下载其旗下《城堡毁灭者》中的Pink Knight角色更新，他们便向“Keep A Breast Foundation”捐出1美元，以支持抵抗乳腺癌的活动。这种 做法不仅让人对其感到钦佩和敬仰，同时也为他们的游戏吸引到更多的关注。The Behemoth真的是一家优秀的游戏开发公司，如此高明的市场营销理念和社区营造手段值得我们学 习。

推广

如果你想要进行产品推广，那么你还可以继续选择免费的“咖啡新闻”推销模式，不时地将你的新设计拼凑在一起。你也可以通过颁发竞赛奖励而进行游戏推广。

另外一种方法便是举办竞赛让别人帮你设计推广模式。就像墙纸设计竞赛或者T恤设计竞赛等。有一些很厉害的艺术家喜欢做这些工作，因为借此他们可以表现自己的才能并消磨不 用开工的休闲时间。

App Store描述

当你添加了新的功能时必须同步更新相关描述，你还可以从评论中找到一些简短但却正面的观点加进去，并确保附上该评论的出处网址，出处的名声越大对你越有帮助。就像在电 影中，结尾是“Roger Ebert”（游戏邦注：全美最富盛名的影评人）肯定比“我的妈妈”更加有说服力吧！

辅助工具

TweetDeck-我喜欢这个客户端。不只是因为它看起来很灵活，而且因为它的手机版本适用于智能手机，并且能让你自行安排发布Tweet的时间。比如我凌晨5点才上床睡觉，那么我 可以设定一条在早上10点才能发出去的Tweet，因为那时候最多人在线。

AppFigures-这个应用跟踪网站提供了一种很不错的服务。虽然它需要每个月收取5美元的费用，但是却很值得。因为你可以在此获得大量数据，图表，你可以核对不同App Store中 的所有与你相关的评论等等。同时你也可以让它每天早上给你发电子邮件，告知你前天的销售情况。

Flurry（移动分析公司）-该公司能帮助你追踪相关数据，包括玩家的游戏时间以及游戏频率等。就像我有一个事件跟踪机制来追踪用户点击“获得更多游戏”区域的行为，这样我 就可以知道这个按钮有多少人点击了。

AppMetrics（iPhone）-我之前在使用免费应用程序AppStat Lite，通过这个软件我可以随时核对我的Flurry数据变化，但是在不久前我换成了AppMetrics。这个软件也是免费的， 也能够帮你追踪Flurry数据，你可以了解到有多少新用户等等。虽然这与实际销售不同（盗版问题可能对此产生影响），但是你却可以因此获得一些有用信息。

bit.ly（网址缩略服务服务商）-我在bit.ly申请了一个帐户，因此我能自己定制URL短网址了。除了bit.ly/aBCdeF，你还可以输入bit.ly/elusiveninja_trailer找到自己的这款 游戏。

Google Analytics -就像其他人一样，我使用这个谷歌分析工具去记录我的博客的点击率。还记不记得早前当人们的网站上还没有太多访客的时候，将访客数记录在网页底部的情 况吗？看起来我真的是老了呢！

Analytic（iPhone）-当我外出时我使用iPhone上的这个软件观察网站的点击率。

Paypal-我并不是很喜欢Paypal，因为它需要我们存钱进去，但是我却发现几乎所有广告宣传，微工作以及自由网站都需要我们使用Paypal。但是现在，在Paypal页面的下方有一个 选项“没有Paypal帐户？那么可以使用你的存折或者信用卡进行支付”，以此让用户无需向Paypal帐户中存钱便能够通过信用卡进行支付了。多么方便！

OpenOffice-这款软件是免费的而且很棒。我正是使用这个软件编写这篇文章，我还使用它制作我的市场营销成本和结果的电子数据表。我总是强调应该随时追踪这些数据，所以现 在你更应该好好熟悉电子制表程序的相关内容！

第四部分：心理素质篇

在博客Bulletproof Outlaws中，我已经讲一些关于游戏开发和运作时应有的心态。现在我想谈谈在家营销游戏的心态，因为许多人都把关注重点放在游戏的玩家数目和数据资料上 ，却忽略了自己要经历的心理考验。这就好像打牌，盯紧自己的牌固然重要，但克服游戏过程中的输赢得失问题的心理和眼界也不容忽视。

游戏并不一定等同于自我价值

我把电影《Fight Club》中的一句话改述成：“游戏的销售额不代表你的水平。网站点击数不代表你的水平。游戏下载量不代表你的水平。对游戏的评论不代表对你的评论。应用 商店排名不是你的名次。”

不要把你的游戏当成你的自我标签。当然，这确实不太容易，毕竟你花了数周、数月、甚至数年的时间来制作游戏，你的血、汗、泪浸染了游戏的点点滴滴方方面面，你彻夜不眠 、假日不休，竭尽所能地制作游戏……你几乎把游戏当成自己的孩子来培育了，当你最后向全世界宣告它的诞生，希望证明梦想也能成为职业，怎么可能不把游戏当成半个自己？

心情起伏

第一天，游戏销售情况振奋人心，你得到了5星的评价等级。你一边想：“我太了不起了，我成功了！”一边着手计划下一款游戏，仿佛大把的“$”已经在你眼前纷至沓来、闪闪 发光。第二天，你的销售额下跌了一点，1星的评价也冒出来了。某个大网站评论说你的游戏操作太难、内容不足，评级只有2星。你重装AppFigures，几乎分分秒秒都在看你的应 用商店排名下降情况。一周以后，随着游戏滞销，你也陷入不可自拔的痛苦中……你没有心思再碰下一款游戏设计，但又不想重回全职工作、闲暇才能做游戏的生活中，这种矛盾 纠结于心，挥之不去。

当你把游戏的一切当成自我时，你的自我价值就随着游戏数据起伏不定。每天的心情都像坐过山车，做什么事都集中不了精神。你开始怀疑自己的决定，你没动力做新游戏。长此 以往，你不仅破坏了自己的精神状态，独立游戏制作人的前途也岌岌可危了。

游戏失利固然劳心伤神，但游戏大获成功也不见得高枕无忧。你的游戏大卖，你开始洋洋得意，你在工作室里跷脚、美滋滋地吃着水果，把制作下一款游戏以挣取发展资金的事忘 到九霄云外。你开始觉得自己的决定都是对的，你不再做研究，不再制定计划。这时候，数据上的任何一点小下降对你来说都是致命打击，因为你的期望太高了，正所谓爬得越高 ，摔得越疼。这好比炒股，你的股值一直在起起起落落。销售额高时，你能保持淡定，销售额低时，你也能保持从容，那么无论遇到什么状况，你都能做出明智的决定。

你必须关心游戏的排名、评论等，但不要把这些东西当成作为游戏开发者的评价。如果你得到的评级有不少是1星，那么就好好研究这些评论，找出共同点，然后想想你哪里做得不 好……是美术风格选错了？操作有问题？游戏整体设计或主题不好？游戏bug太多？要怎么修复这些问题？需不需多做几次测试？是否要在开发中投入更多资金或时间？

诚然，错误再所难免，但这并不意味着你是个不合格的游戏开发人。你要做的只是吸引教训，以免重蹈复辙。

我本人的经历

开通Bulletproof Outlaws博客时，我正在搞市场推广，给我的游戏《Elusive Ninja》争取曝光率、积攒玩家。我链接到Hackernews，发现1个小时内就得到5000点击量。我记得我 当时非常激动，兴奋到把这当成人生的大突破。我甚至问我的网络供应商升级网站（以防网站流量太大会崩溃）要多少钱……一天过后，点击量又落回每天20到40次。

现在，如果那种事再发生，我只会像只无头鸡似地四处闲荡，我的第一个反应会是：“不错，点击量很高啊……看看我能兴奋到什么时候吧……。”总之，要稳住心态。

《Elusive Ninja》发布后，头几天的销售量非常可观，之后就走低了。我没太大反应，只是说：“不太乐观，但为什么卖不出去？呃，好好研究一下，曝光率不够。好吧，这基本 上是营销的问题了：怎么给我的游戏争取曝光机会？”还是那句话，保持淡定。

虽然事情还没出现转机，但我已经计划开始下一款游戏了，当然，新游戏发布时，我还会借机推广《Elusive Ninja》。我还可以打广告，所以我不致于六神无主。我按部就班，坚 信有办法扭转乾坤，或者（万一失败了）我会从这款游戏中吸取教训，为新游戏的成功打下基础。

有人会说我这只是过分自信和盲目乐观，但我认为作为独立开发人，无论是做游戏、玩音乐、拍电影还是写东西，这两种心态都要有一点吧。

日常报告

很多时候，我希望我总是能得知最新的应用商店销售情况，心想：“如果我那么有时间盯着这些东西，我就应该好好利用销售额尖峰！”虽然很现实主义，但老盯着销售情况的结 果只是，我一天24小时，一周7天都在等着数字升上去，如果没升上去，我就捶胸顿足。我喜欢AppFigures服务，因为只有每天早上才能收到关于销售情况的电邮；有时刚过中午我 就想知道，我便对自己说最好断了这个念头，因为在第二天的电邮发来前我什么法子也没有。我刚开通Bulletproof Outlaws博客那时，每隔几小时我就在iPhone上查看一下销售额 。现在我一周最多查看一次了，所以我不再伤脑筋了。

重视人际关系

如果你太过关注销售额情况，把它当成自我来看待，往往也会影响你的人际关系。无论是在聚会上和朋友谈论你的游戏，还是在网上回复差评，你的心态都会有所流露。如果你的 销售情况不佳，你就会怀疑自己，朋友一问起游戏的事，你就想发火；别人一给批评，你就想骂人。所以，只有把自我价值与销售情况的关系理清，才能更积极地处理这些事，甚 至在逆境中看到一线生机。

这很难，每个人都会在这方面出差错，但处理好人际关系非常重要，特别是在当今的网络大背景下，人与人之间的联系都是通过网络来维系，你的所做所有都会在网络上留下抹不 去的痕迹。对于小开发团队，人们通常把矛头对准项目之后的人，而不只是项目本身。

Notch、Jonathan Blow、Adam Atomic、Edmund McMillen……如果你是搞独立开发的，可能知道这些家伙都是出了名的独立游戏制作人。搞独立开发往往不是匿名的大企业，所以 你得积极努力和其他开发人、新闻界、评论家、朋友和家人等处理好关系。这不是说你必须压制自己的想法或观点，而是你应该记住怎么表达，否则别人会认为你是个不通人情世 故的呆子。

建立人际关系

谁都清楚和新闻界搞好关系是多么重要的事，但别忘了还有你的粉丝，甚至是批你批的最狠的人。建立人际关系的方法很多，比如在Twitter上和别人聊天、查看追随者的主页、回 复玩家的提问（甚至是很尖锐的问题）、制作一个电邮名单来提醒自己保持联系等等。

我的个人经历

我开始开发《 Elusive Ninja》时，曾收到某人的电邮，告诉我他想在卡尔加里（加拿大某城市）谋一份游戏策划的差事。可是我实在没有钱雇他，但我没有那他的邮件放任不管 ，也没有对他说“抱歉，现在不招人！”我回复了他的邮件，里面附上一份卡尔加里市的游戏开发商的名单并祝他好运。我知道那里的风景宜人，之前也做过研究，所以我知道从 哪去弄那份名单。我不过花了几分钟就换来了他的万分感谢。现在，如果我有需要，那个已经在卡尔加里的人一定会非常乐意地伸出援手。

当我收到游戏测试者的反馈时，我保证逐条回复他们的邮件并感谢他们的支持。当别人转发我的Twitter时，我保证回复他们“感谢转发！”如果有人在Twitter上找游戏开发的工 作，我会四处转发他们的Twitter简历，因为我有许多游戏开发的同行。在即时回复邮件方面我做得还不好，但我会努力挤时间。

人际并不会直接影响游戏的销售额，但从长远的角度看，随着声望的积累，你开始有份量，你的游戏会得到更多关注，不论是积极的还是消极的。当你有了强大的粉丝基础，总是 更容易度过难关。再加上大多数人都挺友善的，结交新朋友也很有趣，所以不要老想着“这人对我有什么好处？”，而应该多想想“我要怎么给别人留下好印像？”

保持联系

在商业交往中，最重要的不是分发自己的名片，而是收集别人的名片。因为大多数人忙着做自己的事，根本没空理睬你，除非已经当你是朋友或认为你有利可图。你在Twitter上的 好友可能会时不时地喊你一下，因为你能给他们透露一些游戏开发的幕后消息。但大型游戏新闻网站上的评论员每天要接收上百条邮件，你觉得他们会主动联系你？如果你不自觉 联系他们，你可能再也不会跟他们有交集。所以，当你的新项目运作时，给他们发邮件吧，告诉对方你是某某某，感谢他们对你上个游戏的评论，提醒他们是否想了解你的新游戏 等等。

利益/价值

人际关系的建立基础是利益。能从交际中获得最多利益的人正是努力维持关系的人。一旦双方建立起友谊，就会互相给予对方价值从而保持联系；但建立起友谊之前，给予好处往 往是单方面的行为，特别是对那些从无名小卒成长为企业家的人。

举个例子。鲍勃知道乔是某大型游戏新闻网站的评论员，那时的鲍勃还只是一文不名的小开发者，所以他努力吸引乔的注意力、和乔保持联系，因为乔的评论会给他的游戏带来大 量关注和曝光率（鲍勃得到利益）。几年过去了，鲍勃经营了一家顶尖游戏开发公司，此时公司正在出售一款成千上万人排队抢购的游戏。乔联系鲍勃得知独家新闻，为自己的游 戏网站增加大量关注和曝光率（乔得到利益）。

理想的关系是双方都能给予对方好处。就像上面的例子一样，鲍勃拉乔一把，乔借鲍勃力。所以一开始，你要这么想“我要怎么给这个人创造价值？”而不是盘算着“这个人能给 我带来什么好处？”二者的差别说小也小，只不过是发封邮件的事，说大也大，相当于合作互相推销。

处理评论

你会得到1星的评级和苛刻的批评。这种事再所难免，无论你的游戏多么好，你的名气有大。无论如何，总有人不喜欢你的游戏。网络允许人们自由表达自己的想法，当然也包括直 接抨击你。

当我把《Elusive Ninja》的预告片挂到视频网站上时，我心想“太好了！我的游戏预告片上了我最喜欢的网站！大快人心，我前半辈子的努力付出终于迎来了人生的高潮”。接着 ，下面出现了一堆这样的评论“没意思”、“差劲”、“老套”和“华而不实”。说实话，看到这些评论真的很令人沮丧。但我知道，在网络这种宽松的环境下，实话实说很容易 ，使用别名的评论往往比本人说话更尖锐，再加上确实有不少糟糕的游戏，人们已经习惯了游戏没有上乘的画面，所以就算真的闪出几个华美的镜头，人们的反应也只是“看看就 好”。

所以我告诉我自己，不要给自己施压，因为即使是最新的《马里奥》或《合金装备》的预告片会有人叫衰。

我和一个朋友逛E3游戏展的一个摊位时，我说了句“哼，差劲。”然后意识到这个摊位是有人连夜搭建的，此时可能就站在前面欣赏着自己的杰作、陶醉于建立起自己的游戏公司 的梦想之中，而我却冷不防地打破了他的美梦，留他在泪水中感伤无人赞赏他的艰辛工作。

我的教训是，不要把批评和自己本人联系起来；脸皮要厚一点，不要把别人的批评当成对自己的人身攻击。

友好待人

我在以前的文章中提过这一点了，但我想再次强调，因为这点太重要了。当许多批评炮轰你时，要保持冷静可能非常困难。那就别看电脑了，休息个把小时或清闲一整天，这样在 处理消极评论以前，你就有机会冷静一下。最坏的举动莫过于以同样不堪的回复回应消极评论。一旦你这么做了，就等于向别人暴露你的弱点，一方面别人会认为你这人靠不住， 另一方面你自己的心情也会变得很差。

另外请记住，你不必回应每个人。如果有人显然是在挑衅你，或者只是固执地认为你的游戏不好，那么就不必再回应了，跳过他们的评论或礼貌地表示求同存异。确实要回复的话 ，就这么回复吧——“我真不知道该怎么说了，如果您不喜欢我的游戏，没事，您别买就是了！”

不惧做决定

保证你所做的决定是出于商业原因。做出错误的决定没关系，毕竟所有人都会犯错。如果你所做的决定是出于确凿的、充分的理由，你就不会像草率出错时那样狠狠地责备自己了 。

相信自己

一旦做出决定，那就随它去吧。过去的就让它过去吧。你做过研究，知道凡事都有正反两面，然后决定好要走的路。不要太有压力，没有必要彻夜不眠地怀疑自己、担忧结果，因 为在出结果以前你什么也做不了。无论结果是好是坏，你要做的就是相信即使结果不理想，你也有办法弥补。几乎不存在什么困境是无法克服的。你做的每一个决定、你承受的每 一次批评，都会增加将来做出正确决断的信心。

正确对待他人建议

你会遇到许多人跟你提建议，如你的游戏应该怎么设计、你的游戏应该是什么风格、你要怎么打理你的生意、你应该雇用什么人、你应该在什么上面投多少钱……会跟你提这些建 议的通常是跟你亲密的朋友或家人，他们是出于好心帮你才不惜贡献出自己的人生智慧。

对待他人的建议的主要原则是，扪心自问：“这个人在我的行业里算成功吗？”如果答案是否定的，那么就对他们的建议持保留态度，再换个角度想“这条建议是否符合我的情况 ，是否与我的经历合拍？”虽然这么盘算别人的建议未免太过冷酷，但要成为独立开发者，学会淘汰无效信息是重要的课题。你老爸或许是个成功的商人，但那并不意味着他对游 戏行业的营销方式了如指掌。你最好的朋友可能闲暇时也制作游戏，但那并不意味着他对游戏的发行和营销一清二楚。但从另一方面来说，如果是像小岛秀夫（游戏邦注：Hideo Kojima，《合金装备》的制作人）这样的游戏开发人给你出的点子，那就得听了。这并不是说其他人的建议都没用，只是要你学会从中挑出有效的信息。

即使你没打算采纳某人的建议，也要礼貌地感谢他们，然后继续按自己的意思去做。还是上面提到的那句，出于商业目的做决定。如果你事前做过功课、计算过数据了，那么要排 除纯粹出于好心但无实际经验证明的建议就更加容易了。你确实知道你为什么选择了A方案而放弃你的朋友（非业内人士）所坚持的B方案。万一他的B方案是正确的，你免不了要听 他说“看吧，我告诉过你了！”但你可以一笑置之，因为你明白自己当初是在未知后果的情况下做出最佳选择。

当然，写这部分内容对我来说还是蛮讽刺的，毕竟我的《Elusive Ninja》还算不上真正的成功，前面我也提到“这个人在我的行业里算成功吗？”，所以你可以跳过这整部分内容 了。虽然我的游戏还不算成功，但从游戏的制作、发行到营销的这整个过程，我确实颇有经验了。在开创Bulletproof Outlaws博客以前，我已经在游戏开发公司干了5年了，所以 虽然我可能没有太多成功的经历，但是！我确实有不少经验。

盯紧财政

没点钱什么事也做不成。你不需要太有钱，但至少要保证付得起每个月的房租和最低限度的伙食。人们非常容易就忘了自己的经济情况，因为当你知道大事不妙时，你只是抱着侥 幸，认为不查看银行帐户就没事。这就像接受你免不了犯错的现实，你必须意识到你的财政也有入不敷出的时候。

如果你拖家带口（另一半、孩子等），那么盯紧财政就太重要了。你应该知道并且和他们商量“什么时候放弃？我愿意损失多少？（万一）我愿意负多少债？我靠什么偿还债务？ ”在此，我非常想推荐读者们去看一个非常棒的加拿大电视节目《Till Debt Do Us Part》，其中深入刻画了一个负债的人如何克服看似毫无希望的困境。当然，事先做好预算比 最终被迫放弃更好！

即使确实到了不得已的时候，“放弃”也未必就是与梦想绝缘。只不过要把追求梦想的时间往后拖几年罢了。

就我个人来说，我刚30岁，用不着养家糊口，每个月的开销相当低（每月房租600，伙食200，娱乐如喝酒泡吧200）。我还没负债，所以我也不介意因为做游戏而欠点钱。如果我负 债1万美元，那我就先不干了。如果我手头紧张，通过我那些搞美工的朋友和其他关系，我可以找到足够的零活来应付每月的生活开销。我以前在酒吧当过酒保，工钱可观，所以我 可以回头再干一两年来还债。如果我还想从事电子游戏，现在有足够的启动时间，重做也很容易，而且我能保证找到工作来支付债务（即使工资不太多，或工作不如做自己的游戏 来得有趣）。

说了这么多，我的重点其实就是我已经做好最坏的打算了，我可以安心地继续做游戏，不受财政问题的干扰。我可以很淡定地花钱买昂贵的设备，因为我对自己的财政情况一清二 楚，我知道什么时候营销投机榨了我太多钱，我就得收手。你必须有这种意识，这样你才能放长眼光。我钱不多，但我知道把力使在刀刃上。

当然，如果你的第一款游戏就挣够了一百万，那以上内容你可以跳过了，请尽情地在钱堆里打滚吧。

怪事

你的游戏发布后，什么随机事件都来了。你会收到许多游戏公司的项目或服务邀请邮件，有些是合法的，有些则相当可疑。新游戏当然也引起了营销代理商和盗版商的注意。

盗版现象

你的游戏一上应用商店，盗版就会随之而来。你无法阻止盗版。你可以花些时间设置禁止盗版游戏运行的机制。但迟早有人会破解。所有游戏都有盗版，所以不要以为就你倒霉— —在被盗版的船上，你不是一个人。

最让人沮丧的是，盗版居然比合法下载版抢先。《Elusive Ninja》内置移动数据分析服务Flurry可以追踪游戏数量。这款游戏刚在应用商店上架数周，Flurry上就有个成员联系我 讨论促销奖

品的事。他在邮件中提到我的游戏好像破了30000销售量大关。我郁闷了“什么情况这是？”因为根据AppFigures，我的游戏销售量不过200份。我查了下Flurry 统计数据，将其与 AppFigures的结果作比较。请看下面两张世界地图：

当我第一眼看到这张图时，我笑了，显然是盗版搞鬼。我早听说iPhone游戏盗版猖獗，但没想到这么猖獗。盗就盗吧，我才不管，反正这也不是我能解决的。我记得有人追踪盗版 游戏者，却收到对方的回复邮件说“为了正义与荣誉，我们盗版了你的游戏”。看吧，追踪盗版简直是浪费精力。总会有人盗版你的游戏，这只是技术的本性。盗版游戏的人从来 就不打算购买你的游戏，所以你也说不上损失金钱。如图可知，就算没有这些大搞盗版的人，我也不会从亚洲地区获得3万美元的销售额。

所以淡定地看待这一切吧。我决定把劣势转化为优势——把应用商店的游戏描述改成“游戏XXX用户已破20000大关！”哈哈，我没说假话啊。这样别人偶然瞄到我的游戏时，会以 为我的游戏非常热门。我曾打算放出新闻稿“《Elusive Ninja》有2万名用户！”但我觉得那样可能太过火，考虑到我的道德底线，还是算了吧。

服务邀请

除了盗版者，营销代理、推广服务、评论服务等等也会盯上你。当然这些你都可以从谷歌上搜索到，不过用不着你找他们，他们就自己送上门来了。有些邮件是你自己早有耳闻的 服务商发来的，有些邮件只能看看就算了。怎么区分呢？我首先做的是给邮件“纠错”——英文拼写那么烂，来路可疑；然后谷歌一下邮件的网址，考查其合法性；最后是谷歌对 其服务的相关评价、用户感言、网站流量等等。

我曾收到一封邮件称“我和朋友会给你的游戏5星的应用商店游戏评级，价格从优，欲知详情请联系我”。曾经有人明确地给出假网站跟我谈服务项目，目的是骗我的游戏推广码以 获取免费游戏，根本不是帮我推广或评论。

有许多合法的推广服务当然不错，因为他们的描述会极大地带动销售。我发现不少人喜欢用手机或网络电话联系我，但我个人不太好这口，因为我喜欢自己琢磨研究。通常这些服 务商会全天候电话轰炸，确实让人招架不住，特别是当你正在开发第一个专业项目时。

切记，他们联系你是因为需要你。与有利于自己的公司联系、拒绝不利于自己的服务邀请，让对方知道你需要时间通盘考虑，研究之后再做最终决定。

结语

我猜大多数人会跳过本文，但我确实认为本文是我写的所有系列文中最重要的文章之一。走上创业路线，特别是成为独立开发人，这是一条漫长而孤独的旅程，很多时候面临的是 心理战。自己就是自己最大的敌人，同时也是最可靠的伙伴……这取决于你的心态。

相关拓展阅读：篇目1，篇目2，篇目3，篇目4（本文由游戏邦编译，转载请注明来源，或咨询微信zhengjintiao）

Indie Game Marketing: ARTICLE I – Social Marketing

Jeff Hangartner

INTRO

Hi, my name is Jeff Hangartner! Recently I started a small Indie game studio called Bulletproof Outlaws. I’m an artist working from home and outsourcing the programming, music, etc. I’ve just finished my first iPhone game – Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief. It was officially released on June 6th, 2011. I’ve jumped into the wonderful world of marketing and I’m approaching it from a bunch of different angles and trying various marketing avenues out. I’m fortunate enough (and planned ahead strategically enough) to have some money to spend experimenting with marketing and I figure by sharing what I’ve learned, these marketing articles can help other small Indie Developers who can’t afford to waste money heading down dead-ends and trying experiments that might not pay off.

There are 5 marketing articles:

ARTICLE I – Social Marketing

Using word-of-mouth marketing via Twitter, blogging, forum threads, etc. to build awareness for your game, and a realistic look at the pros and cons of price drops and using microjob services.

ARTICLE II – Traditional Advertising

An in-depth look into the sketchy side of the industry that people don’t seem to talk about like buying downloads, paying for reviews, etc. Also covering traditional expensive marketing like banner ads and marketing agencies and ad services like AdMob.

ARTICLE III – Game Related & Maintenance

What to put in a Press Kit, using Press Releases, creating screenshots and trailers, etc. Plus how to efficiently maintain everything we’ve talked about so far.

ARTICLE IV – Psychology

How to survive the internal side of marketing as an Indie Developer and dealing with the stress of spending your money, watching sales figures rise and fall, making big decisions, handling critics and pushy marketers, and a big blunt look at how rampant iPhone App piracy is.

ARTICLE V – Optimal Marketing Plan

A summary of everything, condensed down into 36 steps from Pre-Launch to Launch Day to Post-Launch, that I feel make up an Optimal Marketing Plan for an Indie Dev with little to no money who needs to make sure every dollar spent counts.

ARTICLE I – Social Marketing

Where My Game Is At

No beating around the bush: Elusive Ninja is down to basically around 2 sales a day right now. The game itself is a good game, it just doesn’t have any exposure. The reviews from people I don’t know (obviously the first few reviews of any App on an App Store are the Developer’s friends haha) are all positive and I know the game looks great and plays good (I spent lots of time with testers tweaking the balance) and overall it has lots of polish. So I know I’m not working with a bad, low-quality product. Honestly, when I see someone saying “Banner ads don’t work!” and their banner ads were made in Paintbrush and they’re advertising a game with terrible art and unbalanced gameplay, my first thought is “okay, well it’s not that banner ads don’t work, it’s that your game sucks.” I’m also throwing in some knowledge based on other people’s experiences from other articles I’ve read along the way, and Developers I’ve talked to about the whole subject.Understandably, you might be thinking “Wait, if your game isn’t selling, why would I bother reading your articles on marketing?” haha In these articles, I outline a lot of the mistakes I’ve made and why they didn’t work, so you don’t have to make those same mistakes yourself. I also break down efficient ways to use some of the marketing avenues you may be thinking of trying out, which I learned through trial and error over time. When you’re an Indie Developer,

you’re already wearing a dozen hats at once as it is just developing your games. Throwing on maintaining a Social Media presence and running contests and price drops, writing Press Releases…it can all be pretty overwhelming and time-consuming if you don’t have a plan.

Theory

The summary: I’m an optimist, but also a realist. My Indie Dev side wants to believe that the right strategy can lift a game decently high in the App Store, but my logical side knows that expecting to pull off an Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, or Tiny Wings on your first go is a little overambitious. I think it’s possible for a Developer’s first game to hit big, but that you shouldn’t bank on that and that you should expect to approach things from a long-term “piling up” strategy that’s slower, but more solid.

Piling-up would involve stuff like building a brand name for your company, building an IP (your game’s look, characters, story, etc.) that people can become familiar with, cross-promoting your previous releases with your new ones, releasing updates for your game and re-marketing the major updates as if they were new releases, building relationships with the Press, with Gamers in general, other Developers, your customers, fostering a fan-base, rewarding loyal customers, encouraging word-of-mouth advertising, etc.

So while the first game might not do well at first, when the second or third game you release comes out, you can use that as an opportunity to get your first game more exposure or a new boost in sales, etc. The Internet has affected the way marketing works, especially the whole Social Networking concept…I don’t think that being a mysterious unknown anti-social Indie Developer in your shadowy basement is the optimal strategy these days. It’s the equivalent of being
the totally impersonal huge mega-corporation that doesn’t interact with the “common folk”. Both of those CAN work, but they’re not really embracing Social Media. It’s kind of like when the Internet first became widespread and marketing consultants would tell companies “you have to have a website, everyone has a website these days! You don’t even need to have a fancy one, you just need SOMETHINGout there!” Some basic participation in Social Networking is important. It takes some work, and it’s a slower strategy than just going “I’m going to buy a $5000 ad on the biggest game site on the net and cross my fingers and hope that I make jillions” but by building a Social Media presence you’re rolling a snowball down a hill and watching it build up into a much more reliable marketing avenue over time.

Financial Security

On that note, I think it’s important to approach Indie gameDev expecting to make more than one game and to get your finances in order ahead of time to support yourself through flopping a few games. If you’re financially secure enough to survive 3 flops, you’re in a great position…if any of your first 3 games hits, awesome. If your first 2 games don’t hit but the 3rd gets you attention for the first 2, awesome. If your first game flops, your 2nd hits and gets some attention for your 1st, you don’t have to worry while you develop your 3rd game. But if you approach things going “I’m going to put everything I have into this one game, it’s going to be my

Magnum Opus right off the bat” you’re playing a MUCH riskier game.

Now I know that there are exceptions to that, and that ideally you shouldn’t hold anything back and you should put out the highest quality game you can as soon as you can because just from a philosophy/respect point of view you should be doing your best work at all times…plus logically a quality game is more likely to catch on and make you jillions, etc. But from a business stability standpoint, you’re taking a much bigger gamble that way, especially with the way the App Store has changed things. Releasing a game on the App Store, you’re looking at having to release it for $0.99 or $1.99…you can’t release a game for $19.99 or $49.99 on the App Store like you could if you were Konami or Capcom releasing a game on a console. So instead of releasing one huge epic quality game, why not take some time and release a few smaller quality games, until you’re financially stable as a studio, and THEN work on that Magnum Opus when it won’t cripple you if it flops.

Ya, Ya, Let’s See a Sales Chart Already!

Not pretty, eh? I’m not gonna lie, it’s a little embarrassing haha I was hoping I could turn things around by the time I wrote this article so I could be like “How I went from 1 sale a day to 10,000 sales a day” but no such luck…yet!

I’ve sold a whopping 256 copies (haha programmer number!) as of writing this, and the vast majority were at the start when I Launched and that was no doubt mostly my friends and family, Twitter Followers, Facebook friends, etc. buying it. Along the top of the chart, R represents when I got a Review, B represents buying a Banner ad and P represents something Press related (in this case, sending out a bunch of review requests).

256 copies x 1.99 = 509.44 minus 50% (30% for Apple, 20% for my programmer, Derek) = 254.72 actual theoretical money in my pocket so far. Dev costs plus advertising has been around $3,000 so that’s nowhere near enough to break even yet.

You can definitely see that when I “do stuff”, my sales go up, when I “don’t do stuff”, my sales go down. Obvious, but the problem is that “doing stuff ” tends to cost money and the timing of “stuff” is important…I’ll get into that in the Reviews, Banners, and Super Combo sections.

Wasting Money

I’ve also admittedly (and at times knowingly) dumped money into certain marketing avenues that were dead-ends and a total waste of money, and I’ll probably do so a few more times before I’m done experimenting. My thinking is that because I have a quality product and I’ve hit a wall, I should explore getting around that wall now while I have some money to do it with and while I don’t have to make much to recover the development costs…otherwise all that’ll
happen is I’ll develop another game and hit the same “how do I get it noticed?” wall. If I can at least figure out the weak points in that wall and learn how to chip away at them efficiently now, I can focus a little more strategically when I’m marketing my next game. I consider this a shotgun blast, so that I can figure out the best places to aim the sniper rifle.

Why Not Just Add More “Stuff”?

Some people have suggested adding more to the game, changing the price, etc. but going by the vibe I’m getting from how the App Store market and general marketing process appears to work I honestly don’t think that would do much. I could have 50 different objects to dodge or 5 different ninjas to choose from and I don’t see a way that that would get me any more attention than I’ve gotten…it’s just another stat for the marketing blurb which isn’t getting read to begin with. Now if I added like 100 different objects, 10 different ninjas, 20 levels, RPG gameplay elements, a 5 hour fully animated plot, etc. I’m sure that’d get noticed more, but development-wise that would be a ton of time, money, and man-power, and I’d still be gambling and hoping to get noticed. The easy route would be to just make the ninja a big-tittied ninja chick and put in a Nude Code and I’d get all sorts of attention haha

Anyway, this is getting into theory now. So let’s get back to actual results and data and take a look at the different types of marketing I’ve tried and my experiences with them:

SOCIAL MARKETING

Word-Of-Mouth

These days word-of-mouth is probably the most powerful form of marketing at your disposal. It generally doesn’t cost money directly, like putting up a banner ad does, but it DOES cost time. Word-of-mouth tends to require a lot of building hype, networking with the Press, interacting with your fan-base (even if it’s just a handful of Twitter Followers), participating in forum threads, responding to E-Mails…I truly think this alone can be a full-time job and down the road when I can afford to, I’d like to actually hire someone to handle some of this stuff just because it’s such a massive time-sink and you end up having to check threads, E-Mails, Twitter, etc. 24/7 to keep on top of it all.

On the plus side, while it’s time-consuming to build up word-of-mouth, it’s not torture or anything. You make new friends, you reward fans for helping you out, you get to participate in different communities, etc. It’s pretty fun actually, it’s just that at the end of the day if you’re a small studio you have to consider “How much of my time am I spending doing this, and how much more work would I be able to get done in that time?” You’ll have to balance this stuff in a way that’s comfortable to you.

Why’s It So Important?

I think when you’re starting out, it’s probably the most important category to focus on. Think of it like the gold and wood collecting stage in an old top-down Warcraft game. Sure, making Barracks and Knights and laying siege on your enemy’s base is awesome, but to get there you have to spend some time building up your resources. Unless you fluke out and create Angry Birds on your first go, or already have a fan-base of some sort from other projects you’ve done, you’re probably going to be starting out as a total unknown. Collecting all the gold and wood all by yourself as just one unit would take forever and wouldn’t leave anyone left to build the barracks. By making friends and building a fan-base of Followers, you’re recruiting an army who will help you spread word about your game.

The Angry Birds guys can announce ANYTHING and it’ll be posted on the front page of every game news site that day. They have the brand recognition, studio reputation, and fan-base that demands attention when one of their Press Releases pops up on Editors’ screens and that “ROVIO ANNOUNCES…” headline catches their eye. Plus it’s probably safe to assume that they’ve made a lot of great contacts in the media since Angry Birds first exploded onto the scene.
Whether the way this works is good for the game industry in general or not (hope you like Halo, ’cause I hear 4, 5, and 6 are coming) is a discussion in and of itself, but for the sake of keeping on topic I’m not touching that haha I’m not bitter about this at all…I’m just saying: This is how it looks like things work from what I’ve seen, so our question to solve is how can we work within this system as Indies with limited funds and reputation?

As Indies, we generally can’t afford to post a full-page ad on all the top gaming news sites and run promotions where we give away a dozen iPad 2′s. But socializing doesn’t cost us money. Imagine if you had even 100 fans following your game’s development, and each of those people has 100 fans. When you release or update your game, that’s 100 people Tweeting, Facebooking, etc. about your game’s news and now you’re reaching 10,000 people through them that
you never would have had direct access to.

Now say you’re friendly, out-going, social and polite with various game news Editors and Reviewers that you meet on your development adventures…if a handful of them decide to cover your game because they dig you, well now when you Launch your game, you’re hitting that 10,000 people from before plus all the people who visit those news sites.

Meanwhile the guy who’s making a great game, but sitting in his basement keeping to himself is Launching his game to..well, the handful of people who happen to notice his icon on the New Releases page in the few hours it takes for it to be bumped off there. There are success stories where the Developer doesn’t do anything and word-of-mouth just happens to spread because the game catches on, but that’s rolling the dice and crossing your fingers. We want to be a
little more pro-active and tilt things in our favor here, otherwise we might as well just be buying lottery tickets.

Okay, so it’s important to not be anti-social…but where do you begin?

Twitter

Start your Twitter account ahead of time, while you’re still developing your game. Most of your sales are probably going to happen on Day 1, so ideally you want to build up some hype and connections so that on Launch you can get as much exposure as possible and get a nice big clump of buys on Day 1 that get you attention (hopefully from Apple, leading to a Feature, which will lead to more sales!). Twitter is such an instant form of marketing that you can basically watch your news Tweet spread across the Internet as it’s happening, which is pretty cool.

I’m actually super new to Twitter, I only started using it a few months before I started Bulletproof Outlaws, and all the “RT” and “FF” lingo was foreign to me.

I’ve got the hang of it now, and here’s what I’ve figured out:

Just Have One Account

Originally I had a personal account, and then created a business account (@BPOutlaws). The problem there was that everyone was Following my personal account by the time I finally made my business one, so to get them to Follow my business account was a chore, especially since for the first bit I was posting the same stuff to both my personal and business account since it was just me working on my business stuff by myself. Ideally the way to do it would be to start a
business Twitter first, and then down the road when you have some employees, branch off into a personal Twitter account as well and announce it on your business one. Your business one is the one that’s going to be making you money so if you’re going to have less Followers on one of those two accounts, you want it to be your personal account that has less Followers.

It’s also a lot less work to start with just one account. Maybe other people are better at managing this stuff than I am, but man, I hate having to reply to stuff in 10 different places. And then the people who aren’t viewing your one account don’t see your response so you have to repost it to the other account or just accept that you’ve now got multiple streams of different amounts of information out there and blah blah blah, it’s just super confusing. Consolidate it all into one Twitter account, one Facebook account, and one E-Mail address, all related to your business, and you’ll spend way less time
running around.

Go Ahead, Mix Business With Pleasure

Using just one Twitter account also helps you connect with fans on a personal level. Realistically, no one cares about your business account. The general Gamer public isn’t Following you because they’re dying to see “BULLETPROOF OUTLAWS RELEASES ELUSIVE NINJA FOR IOS” in their Twitter feed. They Follow you because they’re hoping to see stuff like “Wired on Redbulls, pulling another all-nighter, but I got the awesome rain effect in! Brain in zombie mode zzzz… ” that makes them chuckle or makes them curious, and gives you some personality. By using just one Twitter account, you can mix your business announcements in with your personal stuff and it won’t turn people off because you’re presenting the boring stuff in smaller doses…kind of like how kids hate taking vitamins until you bust them out in Flintstone character form.

Time Your Announcements

Generally your Followers are going to live in or near your time zone. If you’re Tweeting in Japanese, you probably have Japanese Followers. If you’re Tweeting in English, you probably mostly have people from North America. Take into account the time zones of your Follower audience. If I have a big important announcement that’s ready to be Tweeted but I’ve stayed up late working on it so it’s 3am, I know probably 90% of my Followers are sleeping, so I’ll wait to Tweet it till around 8am. I’m in Western Canada, so the people on my side of the country are getting the Tweet at about the time work starts and they first check their Twitter feed for the day, and the people in Eastern Canada are around 2 or 3 hours ahead of me, so they’re getting the Tweet sometime during their boring work morning or just before noon when they can slack off and catch up on Tweeting.

By timing thing this way, I’m maximizing the chance of one of my Tweets catching on and making the rounds throughout the boring workday. If I Tweet at 3am, only a few people will see it, and it’ll be at the bottom of people’s “New Tweets” feed when they DO log in. I’ll still Tweet at 3am, but I’ll Tweet less important stuff.

Another thing to consider is the day of the week. Tweets on a Monday afternoon are probably going to get more attention than Tweets on a Friday evening or Saturday afternoon when people are off doing things for the weekend instead of sitting at their office trapped for 8 hours looking for distractions to kill time with.

Use The Hashtags

I see a lot of random #hashtagging on Twitter, and a lot of people not using them at all. If you’re a dev, throw on #gamedev or #iosdev or #iphone or #indie or any other really common words or phrases that in any way relate to what you’re Tweeting about. I was adding #ninjas and #art on some of my updates. There ARE people who Follow tags out there. Like personally I’m Following #gamedev so when someone Tweets with that tag, it pops up on my Twitter feed. I’ve found a handful of cool new games that way, and picked up a handful of new Followers myself. And if I see something I dig, I’ll Retweet it to help that person out.

If you’re not using any #hashtags, you’re just reaching your direct Following audience, which is good but just not as optimal as it could be. Who knows, you may make a Tweet about music costs, put a #music tag on it, and some composer sees it, digs your game, and offers up their services for cheap. Or you may announce your Angry Birds game with a #birdwatchers tag and tap into a community of people who spread word-of-mouth about your game just because it caught their attention being in some way related to their hobby. This is how Internet memes start…imagine your Tweet catches on as a meme the way All Your Base, Lolcats, or The Starwars Kid did. Sure, it’s a total shot in the dark and not at all likely, but it doesn’t cost anything to throw in a few hashtags just in-case.

It can also help you stumble into communities you didn’t realize existed (like my finding #gamedev), or you may accidentally create a community (as in the case of the totally unexpected but awesome #ims211 explosion).

I tend to tag some of my news with #ElusiveNinja and I have my Twitter set up to notify me whenever it encounters “elusive ninja” in a Tweet. I’ve actually discovered some reviews I didn’t know were out there, eavesdropped and jumped into discussions about my game, etc. this way. Plus Elusive Ninja has a “Tweet your score!” option that Tweets scores out with #ElusiveNinja at the end so if any of those go out, I’ll see them and can congratulate some of them personally, etc.

Join The #IDRTG

It started as a thread in the dev section of Touch Arcade, it’s a big group of a ton of iOS devs. Check out the #IDRTG here! It’s essentially a ton of Indie Devs who all Retweet eachother’s stuff. A lot of them don’t have a ton of Followers, but even the small accounts all add up over time, and it doesn’ t cost you any money.

Everyone in the group has the intention of helping eachother out because we all know getting initial exposure can be difficult.

Quit Blabbin’ Will Ya?!

Keep your Tweets as short as possible. Shoot for under the 160 char limit by a solid 10 – 20 characters if you can. The reason for this is because if people want to Retweet your Tweet and it’s at 160 characters, they don’t get to stamp their name on it, or they have to post it as a Long Tweet which might not be possible from whatever Twitter service they use, or they have to rewrite or chop out bits of your Tweet to make room. Ideally if you can have a chunk of space for them to attach their own @names to the Tweet, they’re more likely to Retweet it because they’ll get some exposure too if their Retweet or your Tweet is Retweeted (confused yet?).

I actually tend to add #hashtags if I Retweet a Tweet that doesn’t have any on it, because I figure the person doesn’t realize they could throw on #gamedev or #iphone or #freelance or #dinosaurs and get a ton more views of their Tweet.

Use the shortest URLs you can, like those bit.ly ones. But keep in mind you mightwant to use your company URL just for the name to be noticed. Like if I’m Tweeting a link to a blog entry, I’ll use a bit.ly because it’s a long URL. But sometimes if I know a Tweet will probably catch on or reach a new audience, I want “http://bulletproofoutlaws.com/” stamped in my Tweet so that people see the Bulletproof Outlaws name.

Don’t Be Afraid To Ask

There’s nothing at all wrong with throwing a “PLS RT” at the start of your Tweet. Ideally your Twitter Followers all like you and are Following you because they WANT you to succeed, so this is just an extra little “Hey, I know you guys dig my stuff, but this particular Tweet is important so could you make sure to Retweet it for me to help me out?” request. Plus if your Tweet is Retweeted, you’re bound to run into a handful of kind souls who Retweet it just because they see the “PLS RT”. Save this for the important Tweets though, people probably won’t put up with “PLS RT – Made the best sandwich EVER for lunch, mmmm tomatoes!” for long.

Show Your Appreciation

When you get Retweeted, you’ll see people’s Retweets in your Mentions column. I like to shoot a quick “Thanks to @bob @joe and @sarah for the RT!” after I get a few RTs. This is for two reasons: 1) I really do appreciate the RT, and by thanking them by their @names, they get their Twitter accounts mentioned to my Followers so it helps perpetuate a big cycle of everybody helping everybody get noticed. And 2) Other people see that I thank people who RT my Tweets,
which makes them more inclined to RT my Tweets even if it’s just to get their Twitter feed mentioned.

Twitter is really a win/win situation for everyone involved on it.

Return The Favor

I’ll sometimes check out the profiles of people who RT or Follow me, just to see what people are up to and if I see someone Tweeting about their project and I think it’s neat, I’ll RT them out of the blue. This is another reason to be using #hashtags…I might not be Following you, but if you post something cool up and it pops up in my #gamedev column, I might end up Following you or simply RT your Tweet because I want to support you. I’ve picked up a handful of
Followers just by RT’ing people’s stuff that I like. Often I’ll add a little comment to the start too, like “Love your art!” or “Great article!” just to show that I actually do like what they put out there, I’m not just spamming random stuff. If someone who’s project I dig gets a good review, I’ll RT that too, in hopes of helping them out.

The Golden Rule pretty much applies here: Treat others the way you’d like them to treat you!

Be A Little Picky

This one’s a toughy. You want to find a balance between RT’ing (sometimes crappy) stuff to help other people out or to be nice, and RT’ing quality stuff. If your Twitter feed is crammed full of RT’ing garbage and news announcements, who’s going to want to Follow you? They’re just getting spammed all day. This will come down to your own personal preference though. I like to just RT stuff that I legitimately think is cool, or even has the potential to be cool (like someone’s Tweet about their game that looks like it has an awesome concept even though the art is terrible).

Twitter is all about the personal connection. We get miffed when we find out a celebrity we’re Following is just paying someone else to Tweet for them because we want to feel like we’re really hearing that person’s thoughts (whether those thoughts are deep or silly). While it’s great to help everyone else out, you also have to remember that you’re trying to build your own following of people who trust you to provide value.

@names Are Important!

Like using #hashtags, it can be helpful to include some @names when appropriate. A lot of people will shoot you a Tweet back with your @name in it when you have their name in yours. And some large Twitter accounts (like for game review sites) seem to have automated services that keep track of who’s Tweeting their @names and they send out auto thank-you’s which means your @name getsTweeted to their jillion Followers.

I was messing around with Game Maker for fun one day to see what it can do (I dig it by the way, it looks super-powerful and I believe it can export games to the iPhone) and I Tweeted “Re-created part of #ElusiveNinja in @YoYoGamemaker today haha pretty awesome program, looks like it’ll port to iOS soon! #gamedev” Lo and behold, a few hours later @YoYoGamemaker RT’ed my Tweet to their 700+ Followers. They would probably never have seen my Tweet if I hadn’t
thrown in their @name.

Follow Fridays

Apparently every Friday people on Twitter go “FF:” and list a bunch of @names of people who’s stuff they dig. I’ve actually never sent out my own FF because I don’t want people to be mad if they get left out of the FF haha But don’t follow my example on this one! What I DO do with FFs though, is shoot out a “Thanks to @bob for the FF!” or if I see a collection of good FFs (like someone else Tweets “FF these awesome gameDevs:”) I’ll just Retweet that FF list.

Facebook

Like Twitter, start your Facebook early. For Facebook I’d recommend having one just for your business stuff and keep your personal one private. Twitter isn ’t a big deal to combine because you’re just shooting out text messages, but you don’t want random people checking out your family photos and all that jazz. I very rarely use Facebook, but someone recommended throwing up a Fan-Page for Elusive Ninja so I ended up making a Bulletproof Outlaws account.

The only thing I can really think of to mention about Facebook is that you need 20 Fans to get a nice short facebook.com/elusiveninja/ URL (as opposed to a really long goofy URL). All I really do with the Facebook site is post reviews or big news updates about Elusive Ninja to it. Personally I feel like Twitter and the Bulletproof Outlaws blog is enough, but admittedly I might not be utilizing Facebook to it’s full potential!

Google+

This just popped up recently, and I don’t have enough info on this to make any judgements yet! It looks like it combines Twitter and Facebook concepts, but we’ll have to see how it all pans out once the “ooo a new toy!!” phase wears off and it either dies off or kills Facebook haha

Microjob Services

This is something I had no idea existed until recently. The jist is that there’s a bunch of “for $5 I’ll do Such and Such” sites out there. A lot of the stuff is weird like “I’ll send you a pic of your name written on my boobs!” and “I’ll draw a picture of your dog fighting a robot!” but for OUR purposes as Indie Devs, there are services like “I’ll Tweet any message or link you want to my 45,000 Twitter and Facebook Followers 3x a day for a week.” that I figured we could utilize abit.

I gave a few a go because hey, for $5 I’ll try it out. Here’s what I learned:

Most Accounts Are Spammy

Basically that guy offering to Tweet to his 45,000 Followers isn’t Tweeting to 45,000 iPhone users looking to buy games. It’s more like the guy’s Twitter account will be something spammy like @GreatOffers and they spam a dozen Tweets an hour to it. Odds are most of the Followers are bots or fake accounts or just people who really aren’t going to be buying your game. The ones that offer to add Fans to your Facebook page add accounts that are riffs off celebrity names and stuff, like, it’s pretty blatant that they’re fake haha

But That Doesn’t Mean We Can’t Use ‘Em

The most obvious way to use this is that Facebook requires 20 Fans on your Fan-Page before you can get a sleeker URL for it…so hey, throw down $5 and you’ve got 20+ Fans and now you can get that better URL right away which’ll be more useful for getting ACTUAL Fans.

Check The Reviews

Other users can review the services they use, so give those reviews a glance to make sure the person offering the service is legit.

Other Services

Just glancing through the main pages of Fiverr.com and UpHype.com here are some examples of cheap services that might be useable:

- “I will design a killer amazing ANIMATED banner for $5”

- “I will draw a cute chibi style portrait of you for $5”

- “I will create this amazing iPad video opening/intro for $5”

- “I will create a voice over up to 10 minutes for $8”

- “I will design a logo for you for $8”

These aren’t things you couldn’t do on your own, but they’re super cheap quick little services. Take a trailer for your game and add a sweet voiceover, stylish little

intro, etc. and now you’ve got something that looks a little more pro than if you were just doing it on your own. This is all just stuff that you should keep in mind is out there and available.

The Slippery Ethical Slope

There’s definitely a question of ethics that pops up here. In theory, you could just buy a bunch of fake Fans, a bunch of fake Twitter Followers, a bunch of fake 5-star reviews, etc. which as long as people didn’t realize they were fake, it’d make your game or studio look more popular and important than when you have 0 Fans, 5 Twitter Followers, a couple 3-star reviews, etc.

I’m not here to judge how you decide to use these services, that’s your own decision. For me, I bought a handful of Facebook Fans to get the slick /elusiveninja/ URL, but all my Twitter Followers and Facebook friends and blog commenters and reviews and such are real. This isn’t a moral high-horse thing, it’s more because I want to be able to judge my success accurately…if I gain 50 legit Twitter Followers one week, that tells me that something happened to promote my Twitter account so I can Google and find out if I have a new review up or got a mention somewhere and thank whoever was responsible. But if I had 50,000 fake Twitter Followers I wouldn’t be able to really tell down the road “I’m doing better than I was before!” because I’d have no idea how many of those actually gave a crap about what I’m doing.

This topic is going to come up more in the Reviews section of this article because it was pretty mindblowing to find out how prevalent this kind of thing actually IS these days and not many people talk about it.

Forum Threads

I put up threads in a handful of forums around the net, mainly iPhone game related. Touch Arcade, The Game Forum, Cocos2D, MacRumors, iPhone Dev SDK, and 4 Color Rebellion. I’ve found that either the forum is dead and the thread sits there pretty much on page 1 with no responses because there isn’t enough traffic to the forum for it to really get pushed down or responded to, or if the board is popular, the thread flies off the first page in 10 minutes because
there’s so many threads.

Dead forums aren’t the worst thing, if anyone happens to stumble across them, there’s my thread right near the top…but a thread that can stay on, say,
Touch Arcade’s main thread page for a few days, is going to get way more exposure. If you sign up, try participating in other threads too, especially on the community type forums, instead of just spamming your own game and vanishing. Some communities frown upon that drive-by-advertising and might ban you.

Bumping

Some threads will gain a solid foothold and stick around for a day or two but that doesn’t seem to be in the thread-starter’s control…once you’ve replied to all the

responses in your thread, there’s not much you can do to bump your thread up without it looking like a blatant “BUMP!” post that just gets people annoyed at you. I tend to let the thread fall off the front page of threads, THEN respond to the posts in it, instead of responding as soon as they appear, to maximize how long it’s on the front page. And of course if you update the game, you want to post in your thread and bump it up with the news. I think posting when you get a review is fine too, like “Hey, check it out, IGN just gave my game 10/10, here’s the link!”

Self-Promote In Your Profiles

Make a profile ahead of time. Throw together a couple sentences for a bio, a signature, etc. Because different forums use different formatting (some allow square-bracket tags, some allow full out HTML, some only allow text, some allow only 100 characters for a profile, etc.), I just wrote a complete one in a text file, then cut and paste it tweaking it’s formatting to match the different types I was running into. This sped things up a bit and now if I found a new forum, I could start an account and just cut & paste from this text file with little hassle.

Also make sure your signatures have a link to your game and to your website. Your posts will sit around forever since this is the Internet, so you want links in your sigs so that when someone stumbles on your post a few months from now they’ll be able to click right to your game.Blogging

I’m a big fan of blogging, especially about game development. There are a few benefits to this:

1) I have a record of my game’s development to look back on someday when I’m an old man.

2) It keeps me accountable for my game’s development…if I slack off and don’t work, I feel guilty that I haven’t updated in a while and my blog readers hassle me wanting updates so I’m forced to get back on track.

3) It helps create a fan-base of followers, who are invested in my game’s success. As people follow along with the game’s development, they start to feel emotionally invested in it, especially if you ask for feedback and run polls on design decisions, etc. These are the fans who will probably help you market your game on their Twitter accounts, defend your game if Reviewers give it crap, rally you up with pep talks if you get depressed during development, etc. The Behemoth is my favorite example of a company that has an epic fan-base…they really only have like 3 games out, but they’re so good to their fans (with shout-outs, contests, merchandise, etc.) that whatever game they put out next will have tens of thousands of people lined up to buy it on Day 1 just to support them. How much better a position are they in than the company with a dozen games out and just 50 Twitter Followers?

4) As a game Developer, I just like to help other game Developers out. That’s why I spend a crapload of time writing stuff like this article. I read other people’s development blogs and often I’ll learn things that I would have had to discover the hard way on my own, and in the end save some time. If I can return the favor for some other Developer through my blogging, that’s awesome to me!

5) Occasionally you’ll write posts that happen to tap into the general public psyche and get linked around the net by people on Twitter, sites like Digg, etc. which will get you a bunch of extra attention and often a few new Followers.

But You Write a LOT, Dude…

Yeah, don’t worry, you don’t have to write as much as I do to build a following haha I just like to write. Realistically all a development blog needs for an update is a couple paragraphs of what’s going on, what’s planned for the next few days, whatever behind the scenes screenshots, artwork, music, videos, etc. are on hand…nothing too epic. In fact, I actually wasted a lot of development time writing the amount of stuff that I did for my blog. I did daily updates that were often multiple screens worth of writing. For my next game I’ll probably strip it down a bit.

So How Often Do I Have To Blog?

I did daily updates because I was feeling ambitious (or foolish, you decide haha), but an update a week is fine. The key thing is that you update things regularly so people know when to check the site, and so that you’re forced to stick to a schedule to stay on track. I’d recommend something like writing your blog entry on a Sunday night or Monday morning and posting it on a weekday. Going by my blog’s stats, for the entire development period I consistently had way less visitors on weekends than on weekdays. I figure on the weekend people are out doing stuff, but weekdays when they drag their butts into the office and procrastinate through the day, that’s the time they check stuff like devBlogs.

How Do I Start?

Set up a blog for free through a service like WordPress. There are tons of templates to get you set up quickly. From there, you’re basically good to go. See how easy that was? Throw up a post announcing who you are, what your game’s about, some concept art and a summary of where you’re at with it and you’ve got your first post already. Link your blog on to your Twitter, Facebook, forum signatures, etc. You want this to be the default place people head to when they’re looking for information on who you are and what you’re up to.

Contests

I haven’t experimented with this too much yet, so I’m going mostly with observations of what other people do here, and just things I plan to do in the future. Contests can be anything from high score competitions, to rewarding people who Retweet your announcements, to fan-art competitions, to “design a boss” contests. Rewards can be anything from shout-outs, to Promo Codes for your game, to iTunes gift cards, to physical prizes like iPads (though you should check the legalities on this) or posters and other merchandise.

You can hold them regularly and repeatedly, like a weekly competition for the highest score that week, or you can hold them infrequently like a random Promo Code giveaway. If your contest and/or reward is interesting, it can pick up some extra publicity and get your game’s name out there. That game The Heist gave away like 10 iPad 2s and it rocketed up to the number 1 spot on the App Store while it was doing that (though I don’t know if that’s the only reason it was successful, I think it’s reasonable to assume it had a lot to do with it). When people win your contests, make sure you give them shout-outs, even if it’s just a Twitter mention!

Price Drops

This is a biggie for iPhone Developers. It’s one of the few ways we can guarantee changing our sales dramatically. If your game is $9.99 and it drops to Free, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a ton of attention, downloads, publicity, etc. But let’s take a look at this category a little closer.

Benefits of a Price Drop

Whenever your price drops, you automatically show up on a ton of “Games on Sale Today!” Apps, websites, blogs, etc. and often it’ll say how much your game normally was and what it now costs. This is a bunch of extra publicity.

Launch Sales

Personally I think a Launch Sale is a good idea. It helps get you some attention and piles your purchases all into the first day or two of your Launch, which can help you get a good foot-hold in the App Store right off the bat.

Temporary VS Permanent

I don’t see a lot of benefit to a permanent price drop, but with a temporary one you have to make sure everyone KNOWS it’s temporary. Imagine you just bought a game for $9.99, and then the next day it drops to $0.99 and it looks like that’s its new price forever. What a kick in the nuts, and if you haven’ t left a review yet, odds are the review you DO leave is going to be tainted with the anger of feeling like you got ripped off. Say you don’t own the game yet, and you see it’s dropped to $0.99 and you know that’s a great deal but you’re on the bus or at dinner or someone’s knocking on the bathroom stall door and you don’t have a chance to grab it. You forgetabout it for a couple days and then when you have downtime you remember the game and go to grab it and bam, it’s $9.99 again. Another kick in the nuts situation, and

you’re probably not going to buy it for $9.99 because you feel like the offer was unfairly swept out from under your feet.

If the sales says something like “3 DAYS ONLY!!”, or “THIS WEEKEND ONLY!”, or “NEW YEARS DAY SALE!”, now you know exactly how long you have to get this game at this price. This is especially important in a Launch Sale because at Launch you want as many sales in as short a time as possible to secure a good App Store rank andopefully get Apple’s attention for a Feature…if your Launch says your game is $0.99 now but it’ll go up to $9.99 in 2 days, people are more likely to grab it within those 2 days.

Learn The Holidays

I’ve never been great with holidays and now that I work for myself and don’t really have a standard 9-5 Monday to Friday schedule, I’m even worse with them.

Thanksgiving could probably sneak up and completely blindside me. This was fine when I was just messing around, but while I’m sitting there going “What? No one works today? Why?”, other Developers are having Thanksgiving sales, New Years sales, Back to School sales, Black Friday sales, etc. and getting a bunch of publicity and new users that I missed out on because I didn’t pay attention.

Don’t Get Stomped By The Giants

The catch with holiday sales is that EVERYONE knows about those holidays. So you put your game on sale and sit back to watch your downloads skyrocket, except oops, Gameloft, Capcom, Ubisoft, EA, etc. all drop their $9.99 games down to $0.99. Every game news site covers that news, Gamers jizz their pants over their chance to grab big-name games for super cheap, and nobody notices your game sitting there not just not getting many extra downloads but also making less
money for each of the downloads it DOES get.

This is rough, there’s not really much you can do about it except hope not to get crushed under the giants as they stomp around on us little guys. Another time this can crush you is if your game is Launched at the same time one of the giants does a massive sale stomp. All you can really do for that scenario is try to pick weird random off days to Launch your game or run your sales, instead of New Year’s weekend and such.

I actually attribute Elusive Ninja’s terrible Launch to it coming out on Day 1 of this year’s E3 convention. I was in a situation where I could either delay the Launch for 3 or 4 weeks while the E3 news on every gaming news site finally slowly started to die down, or Launch it literally on Day 1 of E3. I had plans for some promotional stuff at E3 so I figured I’d go that route, but my promo stuff wasn’t available in time and it was just a comedy of errors all-around. If I were in that scenario again, I’d either go the same route but make sure my promo stuff was done and ready to go ahead of time, or I’d just hold off entirely till the next month to release my game. No one cares about a tiny Indie iPhone game when Nintendo is announcing their new console hahaPromote Your Sales

If you’re planning a solid sale, make sure to send out notice about it. Twitter, free Press Release services, any Press contacts you have, etc. The more coverage you get about it, the better.

Free Game Of The Day

There are a handful of services for this, where you hook up with them and they publicize your Free Game event. I haven’t experimented with this yet, but I do know that some places charge money for this service. Paying to give your game away seems kind of silly to me, especially with limited marketing funds. Plus you have to consider the dangers involved:

Dangers of “Free”

So you’ve just put out a $2.99 game. It’s got a bunch of 4-star reviews and a few 5-star reviews. Overall it looks pretty solid, and new users who check your game out tend to buy it. But then you drop the price to Free for a few days. All of a sudden you’ve got thousands more downloads, awesome! Except you’ ve also picked up a ton of 1-star reviews. “There should be a rockt loncher!!!!! 1-STAR. will 5-star when u add it.” What the hell? Where’d this come from??

Well, when you switched to Free you attracted a TON of people who would never have played your game, and who, since they didn’t invest any money in the game, don’t really care about giving decent feedback or feel any need to spend more than a minute or two playing your game. I liken it to back in the videogame rental days, when kids would spend their allowance to rent some random NES game for the weekend. A lot of those games were objectively TERRIBLE, but you spent your money to rent it, you have it for the whole weekend and damnit, you’re going to FIND something to like about it to justify spending that money! …and often you DID end up liking the game, when you would have ditched it if you had only played it for a couple minutes for free.

Someone advised that if you drop your game’s price down to Free, expect to go down at least 1-Star in your rating and I think that’s a good rule of thumb to consider.

Free VS Rank

I don’t know if this is still true, but from what I read it sounds like if your game is Free, any downloads you get are awesome but your game is now in a Free ranking list, so your game’s normal Pay rank isn’t affected by all these new users…ie – you could be ranked at 180 on the App Store’s Paid games chart, make your game Free, get 50 million downloads and be number 1 on the Free games chart, but still be ranked at 180 on the Paid games chart when you go
back to the normal price.

But does all this mean that Free is ALWAYS terrible? Well that all depends on your goal:

Know Your Goal

Essentially it comes down to a choice you’ll have to make over and over as you market your game: Do you want to get a ton of publicity, exposure, and attention…or do you want to make money?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. Depending on where you are as a studio, or where your game is at in terms of success, or what you’re hoping to accomplish, your goal may change. If your game has just Launched, you probably want a lot of exposure, so a Launch Sale makes sense. After that as sales die off and your rank starts to drop, you want to re-coup your development costs so going back to a normal price and running contests and such instead makes
sense. Then one day you wake up and find out you’re getting Featured by Apple and know you’re about to get a ton of attention…so here you decide “Do I want to make a bunch of money?” or “Do I want to shoot for getting in the Top 20?” If you want to make money, you leave your price where it is for the Feature. If you want to raise your rank, you can drop your price and try to lure in a ton of extra users on top of the Feature and hope that propels you up in the ranks to where you can go back to your original price and be making way more money.

If your game was cheap to develop, you might want to give it away for Free just to get your studio some exposure. If your game has a ton of publicity built up and you know you have a jillion people lined up to buy it, you might want to price it at $3.99 to maximize your profits. If your game took 2 years to develop, you might not be able to price it under $3.99 and still recoup the development costs.

Every time you come to a marketing fork-in-the-road, you’ll have to re-evaluate your goal at that stage.

Freemium And In-App Purchases

I honestly don’t know much about these things yet. The potential for profit is huge through these methods, but as a solo Developer who contracts out programmers over the Internet, I don’t really want to mess with this kind of stuff when I don’t have an in-house programmer on demand in-case things are broken and Gamers are banging on my door complaining about money issues haha Down the road I’d like to get into this area just because there’s a lot of potential money in it, though the world of designing In-App purchases that make sense, don’t piss off Gamers, don’t seem unfair or like a money-grab, etc. is a whole ‘nother can of worms to study.

Social Media Sharing

I grabbed the AddThis Add-On for Firefox which puts a little icon at the top of my browser that I can click and get a dropdown list of Social Media sites (Digg, Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, etc.) and instantly post sites to those places. I use this for when I get new reviews or put out Press Releases, etc. Haven ’t seen anything epic out of this, but someone recommended doing it and it’s quick so I give it a go. I’m sure there’s an optimal way to get a post bumped up on a site like Digg but I’ve never used many of these services till now so I’m not familiar enough with them to say too much.

Skype

If you don’t have a Skype account, grab one. You’ll find a lot of business-types want to talk to you over the phone to make their sales pitch for their services or to interview you, etc. so a Skype account is handy.

CONCLUSION

That brings us to a close on this look at some of the most popular methods of marketing using Social Media. It’s all pretty inexpensive or free, so as an Indie Developer you’re probably going to be using a lot of these. Stay tuned for Article II – Traditional Advertising, where I’ll be covering more traditional methods of marketing that tend to cost money, like paying for banner ad space and using marketing agencies. I’ll also go in-depth into the “seedy underbelly” of the industry, like buying downloads, paying for reviews, etc. which was all pretty mind-blowing to me when I started running into it and saw just how widespread it is!

Hi, my name is Jeff Hangartner! Recently I started a small Indie game studio called Bulletproof Outlaws. I’m an artist working from home and outsourcing the programming, music, etc. I’ve just finished my first iPhone game – Elusive Ninja: The Shadowy Thief (the App Store link is here). It was officially released on June 6th, 2011. I’ve jumped into the wonderful world of marketing and I’m approaching it from a bunch of different angles and trying various marketing avenues out. I’m fortunate enough (and planned ahead strategically enough) to have some money to spend experimenting with marketing and I figure by sharing what I’ve learned, these marketing articles can help other small Indie Developers who can’t afford to waste money heading down dead-ends and trying experiments that might not pay off.

There are 5 marketing articles:

ARTICLE I – Social Marketing

Using word-of-mouth marketing via Twitter, blogging, forum threads, etc. to build awareness for your game, and a realistic look at the pros and cons of price drops and using microjob services.

ARTICLE II – Traditional Advertising

An in-depth look into the sketchy side of the industry that people don’t seem to talk about like buying downloads, paying for reviews, etc. Also covering traditional expensive marketing like banner ads and marketing agencies and ad services like AdMob.

ARTICLE III – Game Related & Maintenance

What to put in a Press Kit, using Press Releases, creating screenshots and trailers, etc. Plus how to efficiently maintain everything we’ve talked about so far.

ARTICLE IV – Psychology

How to survive the internal side of marketing as an Indie Developer and dealing with the stress of spending your money, watching sales figures rise and fall, making big decisions, handling critics and pushy marketers, and a big blunt look at how rampant iPhone App piracy is.

ARTICLE V – Optimal Marketing Plan

A summary of everything, condensed down into 36 steps from Pre-Launch to Launch Day to Post-Launch, that I feel make up an Optimal Marketing Plan for an Indie Dev with little to no money who needs to make sure every dollar spent counts.

ARTICLE II – Traditional Advertising

ADVERTISING

Promo Codes

I learned a lotta’ lessons with Promo Codes, lemme tell ya! When your game is approved for the App Store you get 50 Promo Codes to give out. Each time you update the game, you get 50 more Promo Codes. You can’t get more than 50, so once you rn out, you’re out. Unfortunately I didn’t do a lot of research on how to use them so I was handing them out like candy at a parade and wasted them. So in hopes of saving you from the same pitfalls, here are some tips:

Press, Not Friends

This is the main advice people give with regards to Promo Codes. Don’t use them to give your friends and family free copies of your game…of all people THEY should be the ones who WANT to give you their dollar or two to support you. Give Promo Codes to the Press. Review sites get a ton of games to review and generally aren’t going to pay to download them all. You want to be able to basically say “Hey, I’ll be happy to give you a free copy of my game so you can
review it!” to make it as easy as possible for them to give you a review. You might also want to use some of them in Promo Code give-aways as rewards for contests, or to have popular sites Tweet the Codes out, or to give them out in the Touch Arcade forums, etc.

Don’t Jump The Gun

When you’re new, you might think “I’d better send a Promo Code with my initial E-Mail to a Reviewer because I’m lucky to get their attention for even a second, I want to make things as easy as possible because they probably won’t bother E-Mailing me back to request a Code and then wait for me to send them one, they have so many other games they could be reviewing who probably sent Promo Codes right away”. This is a quick way to lose a bunch of Promo Codes or have them end up in a void where you have no idea if they’re being redeemed or not.

Instead throw a note in the E-Mail saying Promo Codes are available upon request or however you want to word it. Most E-Mails you send out to Reviewers will get zero response so if you’re attaching Promo Codes right away they’re just sitting in someone’s Inbox going unused. I’ve found that the Reviewers that want to review your game will contact you back and request Codes. Some places even warn on their Contact Page “Please don’t send us Promo Codes in your
contact E-Mail, we’ll request them if we want them”. I’m pretty sure a solid 30 of my Promo Codes expired unused because I had the mentality described above.

Promo Codes Can’t Be Reviewed

Recently Apple changed things so that a redeemed Promo Code can’t be used to leave a review on the App Store. So if someone grabs your game for free, they can’t leave you a review. This makes it even more important to focus on giving these Codes to the Press who won’t be able to leave an App Store review, but CAN write reviews for their actual websites.

Expiration Date

Promo Codes expire 4 weeks after you request them, so you know what’s NOT a smart idea? Requesting a ton of them on Day 1, which is what I did. By the time any Press started getting back to me, and by the time I had found different avenues to reach the Press and found new ways to use Promo Codes, the big chunk of the ones I requested on Day 1 were about to expire. So then I was stuck sending out Promo Codes that would probably expire before the person got a chance
to check the game out. It was just a big mess all around.

Used And Abused?

The other unfortunate thing about Promo Codes is that you can’t tell which Codes have been used. If you give someone a Promo Code, you will never know if they used it or if it’s sitting there and still available.

Workarounds

I use AppFigures to keep track of my stats (it’s only $5/month, and the service is awesome and gives you all sorts of stats and graphs). One useful thing it keeps track of is that you can see on any given day how many purchases of your game were via Promo Codes. This is slightly useful because if you’ve only given out a few Promo Codes, going by any E-Mail responses you get and the “what countries were your sales in today” stat in AppFigures you can kind of narrow down which Promo Codes were used…it’s still a lot of guesswork, but it’s about the best you can do.

In thread posts on Touch Arcade, people tend to add “Please post which Promo Code you used” and people will do that, so the Developer can keep track of which Codes are still useable. I didn’t think of it at the time, but you could probably do this when you send the Codes to Reviewers. It’s still an annoying situation, though…if someone decides not to E-Mail you back to let you know they used the Promo Code and you send it to someone else thinking it’ll still work, now that big-name site you managed to get the attention of for a split second because the planets aligned just right, is going “eh, Promo Code didn’t work, next game!” It’s like going to job interviews not knowing if you’re going to have a suit on or be standing in your underwear until you walk through the door haha

Gifting

If you DO run out of Promo Codes, a super ghetto hail-mary solution could be to Gift the game to the Reviewer or whoever. The problem is you can only Gift to someone in your own country, so as a Canadian if an American site wanted a Promo Code and I was out, I’d have to get a friend in America to Gift the game to them. I haven’t done this yet, but hey, we’re thinkin’ outside the box here!

How To Get More?

I’m still on my first batch, but it looks like when you update your game you get another 50 Codes. So it might be worth just doing a minor update with a few bug fixes to get the Codes, but then you’re going through the whole Apple approval process again and it’s a hassle. It used to be that when you updated you basically lost all the reviews you had for your previous version, but just taking a glance at some Apps on the App Store it looks like that’s no longer the case…it’ll just say “(v1.3)” beside the reviews so people know it’s for a previous version.

Banner Ads

“Have business reasons and make business decisions.” That’s something my business coaches drilled into our class. It’s fine to do stuff that seems outside the norm or that other people warn you isn’t a good idea, as long as you have business reasons for doing it. Marketing is the fastest way to drain your money because you can throw it all away randomly picking areas to spend it on and not seeing any results.

Where To Find Ad Space?

Most sites will have an “Advertise With Us” link at the top or bottom of the site where they have some information on spaces and prices, or an E-Mail address you can shoot an E-Mail to requesting that information. I found that a lot of sites sell advertising space through BuySellAds.com…it’s a great service, you get stats and charts and everything. You can even filter the search to just Apple related sites.

Research

I use Alexa and SiteTrail to check the stats of sites, mainly looking for how much traffic they get, what part of the world it’s from, page-views per month, that kind of thing. I’ll also check out the site on both my desktop and iPhone to see where and how the ads are displayed, and I’ll look at what kind of site they are, what their demographic of users is, how often they update, etc. BuySellAds shows how many Impressions a site gets per month, and the Click- thru rates and stuff. Honestly, a lot of it is mumbo jumbo to me but I’ve learned a few things:

Impressions Does Not Equal Clicks

Just because a site is listed as having 5,000,000 Impressions doesn’t mean your banner is going to get more than a few Clicks. If you have to choose between a site about furniture design with 5,000,000 Impressions a month or a site about iPhone games with 1,000 Impressions a month, go with the 1,000 one because those are the people who are actually going to buy your game. If you have to choose between a site with 5,000,000 Impressions but your banner is at the
bottom in a rotating banner spot (so your ad is randomly chosen from a group of other ads to be shown in that spot) or a site with 1,000 Impressions but your banner is at the top of the page and doesn’t rotate, go with the 1,000 one. Impressions just means the number of times the banner is loaded, so while it’s being loaded in that bottom rotating banner spot, that doesn’t mean it’s being seen by the user.

Cost

You can get banner ads up for as low as $10 per month at some places. It can also go high, like costing around $300. I’ve found that the best way to judge how good an ad is going to be is to go by the price instead of the Impressions. If there are two spaces and one gets 5,000,000 Impressions and the other gets 1,000 Impressions, but the 5,000,000 one costs $10/mo and the 1,000 one costs $300/mo, odds are the person running the site has determined through their own
stat measuring that the $300 one is worth the money in comparison.

Pay Per Click

I honestly didn’t mess with this much because it looks dumb to me. Basically the jist seems to be that you pay X amount of money per Click on your banner. So it’s usually listed as $X per 1,000 Impressions or Clicks. But I don’t see the point to this, because an Impression or Click doesn’t automatically mean a sale. So you could have 5,000,000 Impressions and not a single sale, except that at $1 per 1,000 Impressions you’re out $5,000. If you’re a huge company with tons of money marketing a game like Angry Birds, maybe that’s where it’s worth it, but man, right now with limited funds I’d rather take the $X per month solid number so I can plan out my budgeting and stuff. With that $5,000 I could have a bunch of $300 banner ads all over the place. I’m not really “in the know” when it comes to Internet marketing so there might be a reason behind this concept or an optimal time to use it, but from where I’m sitting as an Indie with not much money, I’m staying far away from this whole concept.

Ad Design

If you can do an animated ad, do an animated ad. They catch the eye more than a static ad. If you don’t have any art skills, hit up a microjob site like UpHype or Fiverr and you can probably get some done up for like $5. I did the art for my game pretty large when I originally drew it, and shrunk it down to fit on the iPhone screen, so throwing together banners is pretty easy. I grab some art and toss it into a layout and I’m done. You’ll find pretty much every site has different sizes and shapes for banners, so be prepared to make horizontal skinny banners, vertical fat banners, square banners, you name it.

Track Your Expectations

Don’t just buy ad space and then ignore it, or casually glance at the stats. When you buy ad space (which you bought because you researched the site and made a business decision to advertise there, right?) write down what exactly you’re expecting as a result of that ad space. Stuff like “20 new Twitter Followers”, “50 more hits to my website a day”, “10 new sales of my game in Italy”, etc. Whatever’s appropriate. Then track what the actual outcome was. If you bought $100 for a month worth of ad space, and your goal from that was 100 new sales that month, and you made 5 sales, you have to consider that either that ad space isn’t something you want to renew, or that you might have to change up your ad design for that space, etc. Basically something isn’t working the way you expected, so don’t pour more money into it until you figure out what isn’t working and why it isn’t working and how to try fixing it.

Don’t Get Hooked

We were warned about this in the business course I took: Remember that while your job as someone marketing your game is to market your game, people selling advertising space have a job too – to sell you advertising space. So you’ll run into situations where you buy some ad space, it doesn’t really do anything, but the person tells you “You have to give it a little time, sign up for another month or two and you’ll definitely see results, that’s just how marketing works”. And it’s not necessarily untrue, but this goes back to making business decisions. Do YOU think it’s a good idea? Do you have any reason at all to expect things to turn around with that ad space? If you do, awesome, that’s fine. The key factor is that if you decide to stick with it long-term, don’t do it because you feel guilted or pressured into it, but because you have business reasons to stick with it.

Touch Arcade

I want to talk about Touch Arcade because everyone knows they’re basically the top dog popularity-wise of iPhone game stuff so I would imagine a lot of iOS Developers are curious about TA. TA is expensive compared to some sites, but they have the traffic and targeted demographic to justify it and I’ve had nothing but a great experience working with them so far. They answered my questions promptly, sent me the information I needed, helped me schedule my ads for the specific time I want, and for the exclusive spots they allow things like rotating through or scheduling different banners, animated banners, etc.

I’ve actually purchased an exclusive ad space for mid-September, a banner in the top of the side column for $600 a week, for two weeks. Steep for an Indie, hey? I don’t actually KNOW what this will do, but let’s look at my business reasons for spending this $1200:

1) They have a massive amount of traffic.

2) That traffic is my exact target demographic.

3) The spot is exclusive so I know my banner will be shown 24/7.

4) The spot is in a prominent location so I know it’ll be seen.

5) The above points are always true all year round, but this is the most important point: I scheduled my banner for September 12th…what’s also happening around September 12th? Everyone is going back to school. What happens for the first month of every school-year? Students are still coming off summer and adjusting to being in a boring classroom, teachers are just starting the curriculum so they aren’t assigning any massive homework and there aren’t any tests to study for, so you’ve basically got a ton of my exact target demographic held hostage for 8 hours a day fiddling with their phones bored out of their minds. Odds are they’ll be txting and gaming on their phones like crazy. On top of that, everyone being in the same class, school, etc., is prime Word-Of-Mouth advertising time since it’s as simple as whispering to eachother “psst dude check out this game” or seeing eachother playing it, etc.

6) With all of that going on, I’m going to probably drop the price to $0.99 for the first week as a “back to school sale” which should drum a little publicity my way when sites are announcing the games on sale for back to school.

7) I might even throw in some kind of high score contest just to encourage people to play.

8）I’ll hopefully have the HD version of Elusive Ninja done in time for this, so I’ll be able to advertise both the current version and the HD version together, and announcing the HD version will let me cross-promote the current version.

So those are my main reasons for doing this. Now it may not do anything at all, I may have just thrown away $1200, I won’t know until it all plays out…BUT, in terms of the prime time, prime strategy, prime location, etc. to BE spending $1200 in advertising, this is about as optimal as you can get so I’m comfortable with the decision I’ve made. I could spend the exact same amount on the same ad space right now, but I wouldn’t have as many business reasons to do it now (school year starting, HD version done, etc.).

I’m expecting to pull a minimum of 1200 sales from those two weeks because right now I’m just happy if my game covers its own development and marketing costs since I’m looking at this as a learning experience. And I don’t think that’s an unreasonable number of sales, going by the stats of the site. If my sales stay terrible, then I’ll look at how I did things and try to figure out what went wrong. If my sales do well, I’ll look for why exactly they did well and try to repeat that success in the future…that could involve buying more ad space on Touch Arcade or expanding on a marketing campaign or running more contests etc., I’ll have to figure it out when the time comes and I have data to make my business decisions with.

Marketing is ALWAYS going to be a crap-shoot to some extent…that’s just the nature of trying to tap into the psyche of mass crowds of people. But when you know you have solid reasons for what you’re doing it’s a lot less stressful and confusing and doesn’t weigh on your mind 24/7 and that peace of mind can be worth a lot in terms of allowing you to focus on your next project and not second-guess the decision you made or panic day-to-day over the money involved.
I’ll be covering this more in Article IV of this series which covers the psychological side of marketing as an Indie.

Reviews

Reviews are the big one. Everyone knows they’re important, and a few solid reviews from the right sites will skyrocket you into fame and fortune…in theory. What doesn’t get as much mention is the sketchy side of game reviews that you’ll run into as an iPhone Developer.

Keep in mind that I’m not endorsing any “pay for review” or “pay for download” or “incentive download” systems. I’m also not saying Reviewers don’t deserve a financial compensation for their time and work. I’m just explaining what these systems are, how they work, and what you can expect to be approached with, as a new Developer so that you can make informed decisions. The final decision to use or not use these services is ultimately your own to make, but you should keep in mind that Apple is against people cheating in their App Store so while paying for reviews is no big deal, you could find your App has been rejected or banned if you do something like paying for downloads.

Paying For Reviews?

I suspect that when the iPhone was new, Reviewers were eager to review games and it was exciting just to be a part of the whole new App Store craze so reviewing a sweet new game brought a bunch of attention to your review website…but as time has gone on, things have sort of flip-flopped to a point where Reviewers know that reviews can be the difference between a game collecting dust in obscurity or being thrust into the limelight. From that flip-flopped perspective a review is valuable, and as a logical conclusion of that there are now a LOT of Reviewers charging money for reviews.

On the fishy side, you’ll get contacted by people with sketchy sounding E-Mail accounts saying “Me & my friends will give u 5-Star reviews on the App Store 4 cheap let me know if u want 2 know mor” I’m exaggerating a bit, but only a bit. I don’t see a reason these wouldn’t be legit, there’s not really potential for a big rip-off here…it’s some kid who realized he could make a few quick bucks by contacting small new Developers (odds are he’s not sending that E-Mail to Rovio or Capcom) and it only takes a minute to write an App Store review.

But if you’re going to buy App Store reviews, you might as well go with a little more above-the-table service. Like you can find people who will give you 5 -Star reviews for $5 – $10 on UpHype and Fiverr as a microjob and doing it via those websites let’s you cancel the contract or leave a bad review of their service if they try to rip you off. Likewise, you can use a more professional promotional agency site like ComboApp which offers services like “10 App Store Reviews by Independent Reviewers”.

Guarantees

Usually these “buy App Store reviews” services come with guarantees like “all reviews will be 4 or 5 stars, if the Reviewer gives the game less than 4 stars, we ask them to instead submit their constructive criticism and feedback to the Developer so the Developer can make the necessary changes to bring their App up to a 4 or 5 star rating.” If you’re going to go this route, then this is actually a pretty good guarantee to look for…why pay for reviews that might be bad? You’re already crossing into an area some people would consider sketchy, so you might as well get your money’s worth.

Journalistic Integrity

Keep in mind that there ARE Reviewers out there who don’t ask for money, and oddly enough from what I’ve seen it looks like it tends to be the big sites that don’t ask for money and the little sites that do. So don’t freak out and assume every good review you read about a game was bought by the Developer. Also, some Reviewers that charge promise to legitimately review the App, good or bad, and look at the payment as just paying for their time…they don’t guarantee 5-Star reviews or anything (though they may give them). I’m not trying to paint Reviewers as a whole as some nscrupulous lot.

In fact, I don’t really have a problem with Reviewers asking for money, so I’m not casting any judgements here…writing a decent review takes time and there are hundreds of new Apps out on the App Store every day and I’m sure they get sent dozens of E-Mails a day asking for reviews, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Reviewers to want some compensation for their time and work. I mean, we’re game Developers and the gameDev industry is notorious for people
doing unpaid extra work…you can’t really have a problem with that and then turn around and say “But a Reviewer should come home from their day job and put in a few hours that night to write a review for me for free!”

So this section isn’t to whine or complain about how the current review structure works, it’s just to say “Here’s what you should expect to run into as a Developer” because a lot of it caught me by surprise and as a Developer you should be aware of the pros and cons.

App Store Reviews

People want what other people want. This gets into some psychology stuff, but basically we want what everyone else wants. That’s why we read reviews of things before we buy or watch them. That’s why the App Store has a Top 10 list and a lot of the Apps IN the Top 10 list stay there forever. That’s why people buy 5-star reviews for their Apps. That’s why the McDonalds sign says over a billion jillion people served. That’s why celebrities get paid to endorse products. That’s why movies quote “Ebert gives it two thumbs up!” in their trailers. There’s exceptions to this of course, but in general we like to go into things knowing that other people have gone into them already and approve of them because it makes us feel safer with our decision, especially when it involves money.

Now picture this: You’re surfing the App Store and you come across an App that looks decent. It’s nothing incredible, but it seems like it might be fun. But it has literally NO reviews, ratings, etc. It’s like no one has ever downloaded it. Underneath that you see another App that looks about the same quality, but it’s got 10 5-star reviews raving about how awesome it is. Which one are you probably going to feel more comfortable spending your money on?

The same concept can apply to a Facebook Fan-Page. Buy a couple hundred Fans for your Fan-Page for $5 off a microjob site and now your Fan-Page looks popular to people passing through, instead of super ghetto. Personally, I don’t care much about my Facebook Fan-Page so I don’t feel bad about buying some Fans for it because I’ll pretty much never use it for any real purpose haha But be careful because you can get into a slippery moral slope here.

Jumpstarting Your Rating

App Store reviews are probably the most important reviews of all because they affect your game’s App Store rating, and since the App Store is heavily “impulse buy” based, the stuff on your actual App Store page is going to play the most influential part in people’s decision to buy your game or not. Get your friends and family to review your game when it first goes up…yeah, everyone knows the first handful of reviews are obviously the Developer’s friends and family, but everyone does it and it affects your rating (if you have 10 5-Star reviews from your friends and someone throws up a 1-Star review your game will still look decent VS having no friends review it and someone throwing up a 1-Star review). This isn’t necessarily deceitful, your friends and family probably DO like your game, but like I say EVERYONE does it so you might as well not handicap yourself right off the bat.

Buying Downloads

Here’s another fun category. First up, Apple has apparently cracked down on these types of services but for the sake of completeness and since some of the sketchier services might ignore the Apple warnings and pitch their services to you, I’m going to describe them here…plus the concept of “paying for installs” comes up again later in more acceptable forms.

The jist is that you pay $X per download. So say your game is on the App Store for $0.99. You could sign up for a service and say you’ll pay $3 per download. What happens then is a bunch of Gamers registered with the service see that if they download your game they’ll make $3. The end result is you’re paying a ton of people to download your game. This bumps your App Store ranking, which puts you higher in the list on the App Store, which lets more random normal customers see your game, and can help you boost up into the higher rankings. I know of at least one large professional game development company who paid $2000+ to one of these services (their game ended up in the top 10 for a few weeks).

Logically, I figure the key time to use a service like this would be to supplement a big boost of exposure. So you release a new Update, or you get mentioned on a major site, etc. and your sales go up, that would be when you’d want to boost them even higher, VS using a service like this when you have consistently low sales. It’s sort of like throwing sticks on a small flame to turn it into a roaring bonfire VS throwing them on when there’s no initial flame yet.

“Incentive-based”

This is basically a more round-about version of buying downloads. The jist is that instead of exchanging actual real-world cash, Gamers who download your game earn virtual currency (“Install Elusive Ninja and earn 25 BananaPoints!”) that they can spend in other games registered with the service, or on services and products their website offers.

Morality and Ethics

There’s two perspectives to look at this from: The perspective of the game industry types (Developers, Reviewers, etc.) and the perspective of the Gamers buying and playing the games.

For the game industry types, paying for boosting your ranks and reviews can be appealing if you have the money. You can justify it all sorts of ways like “It’s just giving me a fair chance because there are too many crappy Apps on the App Store and my game is good but it’s lost in the shuffle so I’m just getting it its deserved foothold in the App Store ranks!” And the “guaranteed 5-Star” Reviewers can justify it with “The Reviewers get paid for their time and the Developer either gets valuable feedback from their target demographic about their game, or they get a 4-5-Star rating on the App Store so it’s win/win for everyone involved!” and I’m not saying those aren’t valid justifications…it all comes down to what you’re comfortable with.

One downside to consider as a Developer is that it’ll be a lot harder to keep track of your success when you’re supplementing it with paid-for success. Sure you have 50 5-Star reviews, but were 40 of those paid for? Sure your game made it into the Top 10, but did it really deserve to get there? And if the game is no good and it just drops right back down off the charts after you paid to boost it up, did you really gain anything besides half a day in the Top 50? If quick money is the bottom line (and that’s fine, I’m not judging), these probably aren’t questions that concern you. But a lot of iPhone Developers are small one or two man studios where the Developers just love making games and want to build a reputation, and those are the people that should think about these kinds of questions before they go this route.

On the flip side are the Gamers who buy and play the games. Downloading a 5-Star game only to find out the 5-Star reviews were all bogus is not only going to make a Gamer feel ripped off, but it’s going to make them more likely to leave an even lower star rating than they would have left if everything was on the up-and-up. It becomes harder to trust reviews when you know someone paid money for it. It also casts shadows over the success of some games, where the fact
that services like this even exist can make Gamers go “Why is this crappy calculator App in the Top 20?? They probably bought their way into it!” when that may or may not actually be the case.

The catch to bring us full-circle on this topic is that at least they SAW the game, and they might not have seen it if you were at the bottom of the ranks in obscurity. Plus spending a day in the Top 10 might pay off what it cost to boost it up there.

Personally, I haven’t paid for any reviews for Elusive Ninja yet. I just don’t feel like I need to, I think my game is pretty solid and I’m willing to chance it. Plus I’d rather put my money into other forms of marketing. And I like to track my own success (even if there isn’t much, that tells me I have stuff to work on and kinks to iron out), so skewing the results doesn’t do me much good. Also I’d rather spend money developing my next game than buying reviews and sales for this game since this is only my first release.

But at the end of the day, this all comes down to personal choice on your part as a Developer. You’re going to get E-Mails approaching you with offers for these kinds of services once you get your game up on the App Store and pop up on everyone’s radar. So decide how you’re going to handle things, and if you DO decide to go the route of paying for reviews, downloads, etc. do yourself a favor and set “What do I expect as a result from this?” goals and keep track
of whether those goals were achieved or not so you don’t dump all your money into services that don’t even actually help you out.

Apple’s Efforts

I’d just like to take a moment to mention that I think Apple has done a good job in trying to snuff this kind of “tilt the pinball machine” App Store rigging out as much as possible. Cracking down on the buying downloads services, not allowing Promo Code redeemers to review the game, showing you daily stats instead of up to the second stats (so if you get a huge boost you can’t tell until the next day, which makes it harder to time when to boost the system), changing the way ranks are calculated so it’s not just based on number of downloads but also based on playtime, etc. I think these are all ways Apple is trying to level the playing-field of the App Store so that Developers all have a fair chance.

I’m sure there are still ways to improve things, but kudos to Apple for trying, since on their end it really doesn’t matter, they’d make money no matter how fair or unfair the ranking system is but they’re trying to even things out for us Developers. Also, if you choose to try one of these “buying reviews” services and Apple bans your App, you’re not in any position to complain. You should know that Apple is against you trying to cheat the App Store.

Website Reviews

These are often hailed as the holy grail for getting noticed. Elusive Ninja has been reviewed by a couple big sites, a couple tiny sites, and hasn’t made it onto the super big sites (Touch Arcade, Gamespot, etc.). So here are my experiences so far:

An Explosion, Then Silence

Getting reviewed by a larger site creates a big spike in your stats. It’s not just that the site itself is popular and all its users hear about your game, but because of how connected the Internet is now a review on a large site will get automatically reposted to a ton of other sites, Twitter feeds, etc. I have a column on my TweetDeck that searches for “elusive ninja” so whenever those words are mentioned in a Tweet, it pops up on my radar. When I got reviewed by tipb.com there were suddenly dozens of Tweets and Retweets popping up and all day long I got to watch that column fill up and was super excited. Someone told me the review got “syndicated”, which as far as I cared to figure out basically means “posted friggin’ EVERYWHERE”. My sales jumped to an “astronomical ” 12-15 sales for about three days (July 5th in the Sales Chart in Article I – Social Marketing), which was a big step up from the 0 – 2 sales a day I was getting before. Visions of skyrocketing upward into millionaire-status and buying a golden speedboat danced through my mind.

A few days later I was back to 0 – 2 sales a day and all the Tweets mentioning the words “elusive ninja” had stopped. This is a pattern that happens repeatedly in App Store related stuff. Whether it’s your first day sales, attention from a review, contest promotion, Update releases, controversy, etc. The basic pattern is a sudden spike in sales that quickly vanishes if it’s not nourished with more spikes, sometimes leaving you at a better day-to-day number than before the spike but sometimes not by much. I think it’s best to strategize around this pattern and prepare yourself for it to drop instead of psyching yourself up with visions of golden speedboats (I’ll talk about this more in Article IV – Psychology).

Tiny Sites

As a Gamer and a guy who’s run tiny sites in the past, I love them. But stats-wise, these tend to not really do anything, honestly. Like, it’s awesome to have a review of your game out there, any mention is good mention when you’re building a name and brand and a lot of tiny site Reviewers are cool people who just love to talk about games and you can make some good friends out of it. But realistically in the day-to-day sales stats, a review on a low-traffic website doesn’t have any impact. Down the road when you DO drum up publicity for your game and people do some Google searches for reviews, those’ll be handy if they’re positive reviews, but they generally won’t cause massive exposure on their own.

In terms of paying for reviews, if the site is offering to review your game for $30 – $80, do a little research like I outlined in the Banner Ads section and find out what that site’s traffic is like. How much “clout” does a review with them actually hold? If the site isn’t a huge one, it probably isn’t worth the money. If you pay $100 for a review and it really only bumps your sales up by 3 or 4 sales a day for a couple days, was that really worth it? Again, keep track of your results, especially if you invest money.

Super Combos

Because of the spike-based nature of reviews, it’s better to have a bunch of reviews hit the net in a short period of time VS a good review popping up here and there. The App Store rankings are heavily influenced by mass amounts of attention in a short time, which result in getting more attention, which results in getting even more attention, etc. as you climb the charts. In Article V – Optimal Marketing Plan I’ll talk more about this with relation to reviews.

Sending Promo Codes

As I mentioned in the Promo Codes section, don’t send Promo Codes unless the Reviewer asks for them or you’re risking just throwing them away and they’re a limited resource. And keep in mind that even if you DO send Promo Codes to someone who requests them, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll review your game (I lost a few that way). I even had a little bait ‘n switch where someone requested some Promo Codes, then after I sent them they gave their “Cool thanks, so have you considered purchasing ad space on our site…?” where they didn’t flat out SAY “if you want this review to happen, buy some ad space” but that was the feeling I was left with from that interaction. The lesson here is just to go in understanding that you’re not going to get as many reviews as you might hope for, thus my warning to be frugal with your Promo Codes instead of throwing them around all willy-nilly.

Skip The Personalized E-Mails

This next part might sound kind of bitter, but I swear it’s not meant to be haha Basically when you’re new, and you have no contacts in the Press at all, and don’t know much about marketing services or have money to spend, you’re going to probably default to thinking “I’ll just E-Mail a bunch of the sites that come up when I Google for iPhone game reviews, and I’ll find out the name of the Editors and write a really personalized E-Mail that shows I’ve read their stuff and include my Press Kit and a Promo Code and offer to help in any way to make this review happen, etc.”

Don’t waste your time! I heard back from maybe 2 or 3 sites out of personally E-Mailing a solid 30 of them, and have read similar if not worse stats from other Developers. I spent a long time writing and sending out those E-Mails and it’s no beef against the Reviewer…they can’t respond to all their E-Mails because they get so many every day and a lot of games get lost in the shuffle or aren’t good enough or high-profile enough to warrant doing a review. Hell, they might just not like my game and not want to bother doing up a bad review, and that’s cool too. It’s totally understandable, but knowing this, consider that if you’re going to get the same amount of response from a cut & pasted E-Mail that you will from a customized one, you might as well cut & paste and use the saved time for something more productive.

Down the road you’ll know more people in the Press and have more of a presence, and personalized E-Mails, especially to Reviewers who’ve reviewed your other games, will be worth the extra effort because your name and reputation will hold more weight. Imagine a random new Developer E-Mailing Hideo Kojima saying he likes Metal Gear Solid…then imagine Hideo Kojima E-Mailing a random new Developer saying he likes their game. Which person is going to be more
excited at getting the personalized E-Mail?Different Sites, Different Forms

So you’ve decided to do all these E-Mails yourself, and you’re going to save time by just cutting & pasting a form E-Mail to all the sites. Super! Except you start looking for E-Mail addresses and find some sites have forms to fill out instead of E-Mail addresses. And one site’s form is structured in Such And Such A Way, while another site’s form is structured in Some Other Way. Suddenly what you thought would be a half hour of shooting out E-Mails has turned into a few days worth of filling out various forms and following different submission guidelines.

This can be a huge pain in the butt and even after a week of doing this you’ll probably only have submitted to under 100 sites. So how can we make this more efficient?

Review Request Submission Services

I found a few services that, for a fee, will send out your review request to a bunch of different review sites. The one that sounded the best to me was iSpreadNews. It’s got pretty low prices compared to other sites, and you can customize what exactly you want them to do. Also their response time and customer service were great. I suggest reading their FAQ because they make some good points in there, especially in the “Do you have plans to expand to the US as part of your submission services?” section. Their submission system is also pretty awesome. I discovered them after I had already E-Mailed a bunch of sites by hand, and found that their features like the “1000 char version of your description”, “100 char version of your description”, etc. forms addressed the common differences I ran into when I was submitting by hand.

I went with the $149 “Western Europe” package (303 sites in 9 languages). I felt like I didn’t need “All” because I’m angry at China for pirating my game. haha, no, just kidding. But I figure the 5 review sites in Arabic and the 1 Icelandic site, etc. were probably okay to leave out to save a few bucks since I don’t imagine there’s a huge market of iPhone Gamers in some of these places. The top places are in the “Western Europe” package and that jives with the “number of users” stats research I had to do for my business course back before I started Bulletproof Outlaws. I submitted my request on July 6th, and I attribute the not-instant-decline of my sales after July 6th to this…plus over the next week I was receiving E-Mails from review sites (around 10 total) asking for Promo Codes and such when before that I wasn’t getting any so I know they did actually send out E-Mails. I just wish I had found this service sooner.

I look at it like whether I submitted through the service or whether I submitted by hand, I’d probably get about the same amount of review requests out of it…and I’d rather drop some money and then not have to worry about it anymore and focus on other stuff (like other marketing or designing my next game) than spend a week+ of my time and sanity doing it all by hand. Plus I figure a professional service that focuses on doing this has better contacts and relationships with the sites they’re contacting than I do at this point. Like if I were a Reviewer I’d probably pay more attention to a review request submitted by a professional service than by cooldude69@hotmail.com haha

The Absurdity Of It All

I’d just like to take a second to point out how silly this all is because what I’m describing isn’t even paying for reviews…it’s PAYING for the chance TO PAY for reviews haha Pretty absurd concept when you think about it, but that’s where the industry is at right now and all we can really do is figure out the best way to work efficiently within this absurd system.

Building Relationships

It’s important to build relationships with Reviewers and the Press in general. I’ll talk about how to do this more in Article V – Psychology, but I think that the personalized E-Mails are more beneficial down the road when you have a little publicity and a game or two under your belt and you’ve had a few conversations with various Reviewers and Editors. Those relationships will also start to build themselves naturally over time and as you gain experience and your name becomes more well-known. But at the start when you don’t have any relationships at all, you might as well use these distribution services because nobody knows you from a hole in the wall anyway and isn’t expecting more.

Think of it like the feeling you’d get receiving a generic company-wide Christmas card from the boss of a company you just started working at VS down the road when you’ve been to the boss’ house for dinner a few times and the next year he sends you a personalized Christmas card. You didn’t really expect a personalized one the first year, but it’d seem cold if you got a generic one after you two built more of a relationship.

Tracking Reviews

I got these tactics from a marketing document by Mike Amerson of WET Productions (Developer of My Virtual Girlfriend and My Virtual Boyfriend). I set up a Google Alert for “elusive ninja” and “bulletproof outlaws”. If a new review goes up, Google will shoot me an E-Mail saying “hey, there’s some new sites with these keywords you specified on them, check it out” and I can see when I get a new review or mention of my stuff. This has been pretty cool because I get to keep tabs on how wide word-of-mouth is spreading, and I can go to these sites and thank the Reviewers for checking out my game and answer comments and questions. It’s great for building up relationships.

Another tactic is to set up Google Alerts for games similar to your game. If you make a game about fishing, and you know there are a few other fishing games out there, you might want to set Alerts for the titles of those games because sometimes the sites that reviewed those games will be interested in yours since it’s similar. You may see another fishing game reviewed on some fishing enthusiast website you didn’t know existed but has a bit following, and the Alert
brings it to your attention so you can E-Mail them and send them your game to check out. If you’re too lazy to set up Alerts, you can just do Google searches every week and just specify to search by “Past Week” or “Past 24 Hours” etc.

Bookmarking Reviews

I bookmark all the reviews I get. It makes grabbing quotes and links a lot faster than having to Google them out every time. I use the quotes on my App Store blurb and if I made another trailer I’d use them in that. It also gives me quick access to a list of people I might want to contact directly if I came out with an Update or sequel for the game…or if they dig Bulletproof Outlaws in general, I’d contact them directly to let them know about my next project or send them exclusive content.

Marketing Agencies

I covered this a bit in the Reviews section, but there are a number of services out there to handle some of the common marketing needs a game Developer has. Some of them are pretty cryptic as to what exactly they offer and use a bunch of buzz-words and don’t list what exactly their prices are…they’ll “create a holistic target-specific synergistic marketing plan customized to your needs”. Hell if I know what that’s supposed to mean! I didn’t bother contacting any of these companies because I like efficient straight-to-the-point sites.

A site like ComboApp is more up my alley. This lists flat-out a bunch of different services they offer, describes in detail what you can expect for a result, and lists the price. I dig this setup as a Developer…I’d love to have a customized synergistic marketing plan and all, but the reality is I have X amount of dollars, so tell me flat out what can I get for that?

Going through some of the services in their list that I’ve found are commonly offered by marketing agencies, here are the things I take into consideration just glancing at the descriptions and comparing prices and experiences with other similar services:

Comparing Prices

The App Release combo package sounds like a good deal just going by their other services. You’re getting a Press Release written ($183), 10+ App Store reviews ($98), and get submitted to 50+ review websites ($427) for $499. But if you wrote your own Press Release, and hit a site like UpHype or Fiverr for App Store reviews, you could just get the 50+ review request submissions for $427 and save yourself $60. And even then you could use iSpreadNews to submit
review requests to 300+ sites for $149, as mentioned earlier. So then it comes down to figuring out if ComboApps is submitting to any better sites than iSpreadNews would, but since these services don’t post up their contact lists (understandably), we can only guess. ComboApps may focus more on North American sites, but if most North American sites expect money for their reviews, you’re back to that absurd “paying a service for a chance to pay for a review” situation.

I’m not saying it’s not worth it, I haven’t used ComboApp and they look professional and are popular and everything and a branded Press Release from a popular site probably holds more weight with Editors than a self-submitted Press Release through a free PR submission service, but these are the kinds of questions you want to think about as an Indie Developer with a limited marketing budget. This comes back to the “make Business Decisions” concept. It’s okay to spend money, as long as you do your research and have Business Reasons for spending that money, and you set goals and track the results of spending that money to make future decisions.

Twitter Mentions

I’ve found that Twitter is generally a flash of exposure. Getting a single mention on someone’s 30,000 Follower Twitter is alright, but often the big sites put out so many Tweets that no one really pays much attention to what they’re Tweeting and your mention gets lost in the shuffle. And then it’s gone within the hour. Something like a Facebook mention stays around for a couple days, and a blog entry or article gets attention for like a week. So if you pay for a Twitter mention from someone, don’t get massive hopes up…if 80% of those 30,0000 Twitter Followers don’t happen to be checking their Twitter feed at that exact moment, they’ll probably never see your mention. How useful would a Twitter post to 30,000 people at 3am on a Tuesday really be? Or a Twitter post at 9am when everyone has 50 new Tweets to go through having just started their day? Or at 2pm when everyone’s busy working and not checking their Twitter feeds?

Guaranteed Major Reviews

This is one I would read closely for detail or ask for more information on, but I could see this being decent. Odds are they’re just contacting the paid review sites and paying them to review your game, and you might save some money if you do that yourself, but hey, it’s time and work off your hands. I’d say the only reviews worth paying for are the ones by major sites with tns of traffic…but even then, it’s a big chunk of money so if you’re going to invest that, keep track of your stats and determine if it was worth it for next time. And share your findings with the rest of us.

Sales/Download Generation

This is basically what I described above with buying downloads, except this sounds more similar to Admob and Flurry App Circle (which I’ll talk about in a moment) where you’re not paying the people who download your game, you’re paying for a higher priority of your game’s name or banner being displayed in their marketing system. So say there’s a website with a banner spot these guys own, if you pay $1 per download your banner comes up 0.1% of the time, but if
you pay $10 per download it comes up 50% of the time. Over time you’re likely to end up with a bunch of sales or downloads out of it, but financially you’re probably losing money. Do the math before you try something like this.

Admob

I didn’t see much point to using Admob as an Indie Dev with limited money. Basically you put some money in, state how much you’re willing to pay per banner click (this is your “bid”), and the amount that you’re willing to pay determines how likely your banner is to show up in that Admob pop-up lots of Apps use. I put in $50, set my bid to the lowest possible (4 cents per click) just to see what would happen. Within a day I had my 1,250 Clicks (1,250 x $0.04 =
$50) and 238,000+ Impressions (how many times the banner was displayed). Awesome.

…Except Clicks aren’t the same as downloads and there was zero increase in sales that day. So it seems like you’re basically paying for people to load your App Store page. If you’ve got a ton of money to burn, this might be a good way to use it, you can definitely get people to your game’s page, but if you have limited funds there’s just not much guarantee that this’ll pan out into sales to be spending your money on it. Granted my App Store description might just be terrible and someone with a better one might see results, but going by other people’s results that I’ve read, I’m skeptical.

I’d say save your $50 and skip trying Admob if you’re a small dev. I can’t imagine what the results would be if you dumped in like $5,000, but I’m sure not going to be the one to test that out, losing $50 was enough for me haha

If the main problem with Admob is that Clicks don’t necessarily equal sales, then what about a service that only takes money from you each time you get an actual guaranteed sale? That brings us to:

Flurry App Circle

Reading up on Flurry App Circle, I was digging the concept more than Admob. It’s the same idea, you put some money in (though you have to put like $250 minimum in, instead of $50) and set your bid (the higher your bid, the more likely your ad is shown). The difference is that App Circle only takes that bid out of your money per actual sale of your game. They determine actual sales based on something like if the user buys your game within a day of that user seeing the App Circle ad it counts as a sale as a result of that ad. Needless to say, this is a lot more reassuring. You could put $500,000 in there and if your game doesn’t sell any copies, that money stays un-touched.

Another safe way to play this is that if your game is on the App Store for $1.99, and Apple’s cut is 30% leaving you with like $1.40 per sale, and you set your bid to $1.35, you’re still netting a $0.05 profit on each sale. So in theory, you could dump in $500,000 and even if all of that goes, you’ve netted a 5 cent profit on every sale so when you get your money from Apple and balance it out with what you deposited into Flurry, you won’t actually have lost any money…that’s a pretty fool-proof system. The problem, of course, is that $1.35 is super low on the bidding scale. The average bid is $1.50 and the highest bids exceed $4.00. As of this writing, the “Flurry recommendation engine first generates ideal application recommendations to be displayed to users, bidding is then used to determine the order in which applications will be shown.” So if you’re only bidding $1.35, you’re probably not going to be shown that often. But if you’re not losing money on each sale, who cares?

One important thing I want to mention is that you can set a Daily Budget limit, which if you put any money in, you better make sure you’ve got this section filled out. I set mine to the full $250 to see what would happen and didn’t have any problems, but you don’t want to run into a situation where you fluke out and get 50,000 sales but you didn’t set a Daily Budget and end up having to owe that money. From what I’ve read, it looks like you can contact Flurry if you run into that situation and they’re pretty cool about it, but don’t be dumb, protect yourself just to be safe!

So I threw in $250 for Elusive Ninja, with a bid of $1.35 per install ($1.99 on the App Store, so a 5 cent profit with each install). Over the past month or so I’ve had 52,000+ Impressions and 6,499 Clicks, and 6 total installs via App Flurry and because I’m only paying per install instead of per Click my $250 has only dropped 6 sales worth (and Apple will be giving me that money back with a 5 cent profit when they pay out).

The end verdict on this one is that there’s no real down-side to using App Circle if you set a Daily Budget and make sure your bid is low enough to make sure you’re still making a few cents profit on each sale…but don’t expect much from it if you’re using that strategy. If you bump your bid up to like $4.00+ I’m sure your sales will shoot up fast, but if you have a $0.99 game you’ll be losing $3 per install…if you have a ton of money to spend on marketing and you’re trying to boost your sales to pull off a Super Combo, this could help you climb the charts which would hopefully pay itself off, but if
you’re a poor Indie this might not be an optimal marketing avenue.

If I had a bunch of money to burn and caught a big bump in sales from some event, and I was trying to boost it up further with a Super Combo strategy and it came down to choosing between App Circle and Admob, I’d go with App Circle because you’re only paying for legitimate installs.

The Almighty Apple Feature

Everyone knows this is the big one. It’s a magical wonderful mysterious instant sales boost that propels you into fame & fortune (for a few days at least), and nobody really knows what the criteria for being Featured is or how it’s determined which App will get the golden ticket. The unfortunate news is that I don’t know how Apple’s Feature system works either, so if you’re reading this hoping to find out how to get Featured, I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you a few things related to it, based on what I’ve researched:

What MIGHT Affect It

This is based on reading about the experiences of people who’ve been Featured, and some basic logic. The jist seems to be that Apple tends to Feature games that make their system look good. Whether it’s that you use a bunch of the device’s features (Game Center, multiplayer, accelerometer, etc.), or that you’ re showing off phenomenal graphics (Infinity Blade anyone?), or that you’re doing something totally new with your game design or control scheme that no one
has done before (Pocket God, etc.).

On top of that, it seems like a large number of sales in a short period of time gets Apple’s attention. If a game is catching on with the masses, Apple is likely to show it off. It’s possible that a lot of 5-Star reviews may get a game to show up on Apple’s radar, but I couldn’t begin to guess how many you’ d need or what ratio of good to bad reviews you’d need. There’s also knowing someone at Apple or getting a specific Apple employee’s attention directly, but if you can do that you’re probably not reading this article.

You can find a lot of people’s tips and advice on how to get Featured by doing a simple Google search. There’s all sorts of theories on it that go into way more detail, like creating niche Apps, releasing them on specific days of the week, etc. So just as a final note: E-Mailing Apple directly and asking to be Featured, or reminding them of how awesome your game is doesn’t seem to do anything. I don’t know if it hurts, but it definitely doesn’t seem to influence them positively, going by what I’ve read from Developers who’ve tried it.

New & Noteworthy

When your game first goes live, you’ll automatically get mentioned in the New & Noteworthy section so for a day you get to feel awesome and get a chance for your game to fluke out and catch on before it gets pushed down the charts by all the other New & Noteworthy games. This is a big part of why Developers try to focus their marketing and sales on Day 1, you’ve automatically been given a slight foothold on a silver platter by default that you’ll probably never get that easily again so that’s the time you want people checking out your game.

Prepare In Advance

From what I’ve read, when Apple IS planning to Feature you it can be pretty out of the blue and mysterious. You basically get an E-Mail from Apple saying “ Send us a bunch of art at such and such sizes.” and you’re not sure what exactly is going on. But you send what they request off to them and next thing you know, bam, you’re Featured and your sales are spiking like crazy and you sail off into the sunset on your golden speedboat.

…actually, Apple asking for more artwork is NOT a guarantee you’ll actually get Featured, as a few super-disappointed Devs have found out the hard way (ouch!! What a kick in the nuts hey). But either way, it’s good to have this stuff ready to go. Check the iTunes Connect Developer Guide (the “Promotional Artwork” section specifically) for what sort of stuff you should have ready to go.

Plan a Super Combo

So you’ve just been Featured by Apple. All you do now is sit back and watch the money roll in and look up which model of golden speedboat you want to buy, right? Well, you CAN do that, but like I stated earlier, everything in the App Store tends to follow the same pattern of a sudden spike followed by a steep drop-off and back into nothingness. A Feature isn’t necessarily any different aside from being bigger in proportion. Sure, if you get Featured and it dies off you’re probably going to still be doing better on a day-to-day basis than you were before the Feature, but when Rovio, Chillingo, Halfbrick, etc. get Featured do you think they just sit back and relax? Or do they do stuff to help boost their game even further up the charts?

Whether it’s buying a visual revamp of the Touch Arcade website’s background, using a marketing agency to spread massive word-of-mouth, Launching Press Releases announcing the Feature, holding contests for prizes, creating merchandise, adding updates, etc. try to have a general plan in mind for what you’ll do if your game gets Featured. You’ll really only have anywhere from a couple days to a week max to put a plan into action before the magic of the Feature
wears off like the Invincibility Star in Mario and you’re back to running away from Goombas…so a little planning ahead of time could be the difference between the Feature boosting your rank to 60 on the charts and then you drop back down to 150 after a week, or the Feature boosting your rank to 60 on the charts and your Super Combo secures you a place in the Top 20 for a couple months.

Crowdfunding

This is a relatively new concept the Internet has created. The jist is that you put up a page announcing you need money for your project, and thousands of people interested in it all donate a few bucks (and often get something from the Developer in return, whether it’s their name in the game or a free copy of the game when it’s done, etc.). The person posting the project ends up with the funding they need, and everyone is only out a small amount of money. It’s a fascinating concept and I might dabble in it myself if I get financially tight and can’t fund a project with my own money.

Here’s a blog with a list of 9 crowdfunding websites. Be sure to do your research before you sign up with any of them.

Kickstarter

This seems to be the most popular service for crowdfunding right now. The FAQ on the Kickstarter website explains everything pretty clearly, so I won’t re- hash it all. Here’s a link to Robots Love Ice Cream’s Kickstarter page that you can use for an example of how to present your project, rewards you can offer, etc. This one made the rounds on Twitter and got some blog mentions and has successfully achieved its $18,000 funding.

CONCLUSION

And with that we conclude the main ways to blow all our rent money on advertising haha They say you have to spend money to make money. Huge corporations like Pepsi, Nike, etc. invest a ton of money into their marketing every year, not even to get instant results but just to keep their brand in the public eye. As Indie Devs we generally don’t have a ton of money, and when we DO make money, we’re eager to hold onto it with an iron grip or invest it into the development of the next game etc., instead of investing some of it right back into marketing to keep feeding the fire. The main thing is just to make sure you do your research and track your results. Have definite goals and if you’re not achieving them, fiddle with your formula. There’s no shame in making mistakes, unless a little research could have prevented them.

Coming up: Article III – Game Related & Maintenance, where I’ll cover game related marketing like what to put in a Press Kit, writing and sending out Press Releases, the benefits of keeping a development blog, and some guidelines for maintaining all the marketing I’ve discussed, like keeping your social media presence up, and handling and responding to negative reviews of your game!

You need a website for your game, obviously. The good news is it doesn’t have to be anything epic. These days a lot of game Developers simply have WordPress blogs with a page for their game, or a simple one-page website for their game. Make sure there’s a link to your game’s App Store page in an obvious location on your site. Use the little “Available On The App Store” image Apple gives you, people recognize that quickly. Have some screenshots up, your
trailer, some marketing blurb, and a link to a Press Kit for people who want to do articles or reviews of your game.

Pay a few bucks to register a domain name like http://www.thegame.com/ that redirects to your game’s website so that you can seem all professional and awesome and people take you more seriously when you link your stuff.

App Store Description

There are a bunch of sites that offer the service of writing an App Store description for your game, but there are also a bunch of sites that offer tips on what you should put in your App Store description. Spend a couple hours Googling for tips and writing your own App Store description up and save yourself the fee someone else would charge. Most of them tend to follow a common structure:

- Catchy first two lines (when the user first loads the game’s App Store page in iTunes, only the first few lines of the description are shown till the user clicks a button to show the rest)

- Quick description or summary of the concept, plot, objective, etc. (exciting marketing blurb)

- Quotes from reviews or awards received (people want what other people approve of)

- More in-depth feature list (more detail on what makes your game unique)

- Contact info (the game’s website, Twitter link, FAQ link, etc.)

My App Store description for Elusive Ninja strays a bit from this and I have like no sales, so don’t use Elusive Ninja’s description as a guide haha I’m messing around testing different stuff out with this project to see what I can and can’t get away with and where I can break out of the standard formula, but it’s probably at the cost of some sales…so like the saying goes “do as I say, not as I do”.
App Store Screenshots

You get 5 screenshots, so use ‘em all up. Originally I was going to just post raw screenshots, but Derek of Ravenous Games whipped up a template to use to make my screenshots look more fancy. I dug the look of it, so I decided to run with it. My Press Kit still has a bunch of raw screenshots for reviews and such, but your App Store screenshots should catch people’s eye. Normally I’m not a big fan of the “tiny screenshot within a screenshot” thing because I want to see the game’s art clearly before I buy it, but I figured the art in Elusive Ninja is large enough that everything is still clear even with the raw screenshot shrunk down a bit. I don’t know if this is a good move or not, people might like plain raw screenshots more, but I like the look of the fancy ones so I’m going with them for now.

Something to keep in mind is that some Reviewers just grab the screenshots for their Reviews off the App Store and might not want to use fancy ones with marketing text on them. Or they might not be ABLE to use them, because if they have marketing blurbs on them and they’re in a review it may look like the Reviewers are the ones that said “Epic Ninja Action!” and such…so understandably they’d probably rather have raw screenshots they can use and stamp their
website’s logos or caption text on.

So if you’re doing fancy screenshots, make sure you have a link to your Press Kit with raw screenshots in your App Store description.

Trailer

You need a trailer these days. Everyone wants to see a game in action. Keep in mind though, that you don’t want to show too much in your trailer. Better that your trailer is too short and has people curious about your game, than too long and has people bored of your game. I’ve seen a lot of trailers where people just record themselves playing their game for 5 – 10 minutes when the game is a puzzle game or simple action game. If your game’s concept is simple, keep your trailer to 30 – 60 seconds or people will watch your trailer and learn how the game plays and what to expect, and see most of the power-ups or special features, and really there’s nothing left for them to bother buying the game to discover.

Try to get the trailer going as soon as you have nearly-finished visuals going. You want to be building up hype before the game is actually Launched, and a trailer with some cool gameplay footage can help do that, and might get you some feedback that you can use to tweak the game before it Launches.

Do-It-Yourself Trailer

Unfortunately, I was surprised to find that Apple doesn’t really provide tools for making trailers easily. You’d think there’d just be a “record the device when it’s plugged in” button but nope! It looks like the only way to really collect game footage is to run the game in the simulator and record the desktop with some kind of desktop recording program. This isn’t bad for iPhone games that don’t use crazy controls or phone features, but the iPad simulator is horribly slow and I can’t imagine recording footage off it.

I decided to go with SimCap, which is built specifically for recording from the Simulator (ie – you don’t have to crop the final footage or anything). The main benefit to using SimCap however, is that it combines with SoundFlower to record the audio. Basically SoundFlower re-routes your Mac’s audio into SimCap so it gets recorded along with the video. It’s a little cumbersome and I don’t entirely understand the mechanics myself, but all I know is the tutorial was super easy to follow, it was super quick to set up, and it worked flawlessly so I highly recommend it.

I used After Effects to arrange my trailer, but you can use iMovie, Adobe Premier, or Windows Movie Maker, etc. Google around and find a program you dig that you can afford or that’s free. Snip out chunks of exciting game footage, throw some transitions in, some text overlays describing the game’s features, add some catchy music in the background if you weren’t able to record the game’s audio as you played, upload the whole thing to YouTube and you’re good to go.

Outsourced Trailers

A lot of people on freelance sites like oDesk and Elance offer trailer-editing services. You’re probably looking at dropping anywhere from $80 – $300 to have someone else make your trailer, but if you’re not artistically inclined or don’t want to dive into the wonderful world of video editing yourself, it might be worth saving yourself a bunch of time and hassle. A few people on microjob sites like UpHype and Fiverr offer trailer-editing services but I’d be pretty skeptical about what kind of quality you’re going to get for $5 – $10 so don’t set your expectations too high there haha

Press Kit

This is something a lot of Indies don’t think to make. When a Reviewer wants to write about your game, they often want to include some screenshots, or some game art to spruce up their article, or their website has a specific design template it follows for reviews and it specifically needs a title screen shot, a piece of art, and a gameplay shot, etc. On top of all that, honestly from what I’ve seen so far, a lot of reviews and articles are just cut & pasted text out of your game’s description…but hey, no complaints, exposure is exposure! The key thing to understand is that a lot of Reviewers have a ton of stuff on their plates on any given day, especially Reviewers that cover iPhone news because there are so many new Developers with new games contacting them every day …so you want to make it as easy as possible for them to review your game.

What’s in it?

My Elusive Ninja Press Kit is probably a little excessive in places, but I figure better to have too much than too little. It contains:

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\BPO_Logos\

This contains various versions/sizes of the Bulletproof Outlaws logo. Some are horizontal, some are vertical, some are black and white, some are full color, some are

PNGs with transparent backgrounds. Main thing is just to have a variety of stuff so people can use whatever fits best on their layout.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Game_Art\

This has various art from the actual game. Since I did the original art large to fit big iPad screens, this was easy to throw together…I just grabbed some sprites of the ninja and throwing-stars and junk and the title logo and threw them in here. If I had concept art, character designs, etc. from the game, I’d put those in here too.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Icons\

When you submit your final game to the App Store you have a handful of icons for it, from tiny 57×57 ones to large 512×512 ones…so I just threw those in here.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Press Release\

Elusive Ninja only has one Press Release so far, but if I make some more (for updates or cross-promotions) I’ll add them to this.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Screenshots_Fancy\

These are the fancy App Store versions of my screenshots, with borders and marketing blurbs on them. These are great for the App Store because they look good and catch the eye, but you should keep in mind that Reviewers might not want to use them, or might not be able to use them, because if they have marketing blurbs on them and they’re in a review it may look like the Reviewers are the ones that said “Epic Ninja Action!” and such…so understandably they’d probably rather have raw screenshots they can use and stamp their website’s logos on and such.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Screenshots_Raw\

So with that in mind, these are raw screenshots. There’s only 5 fancy ones, but a solid 20 random raw ones. I figure it’s good to have a variety so that reviews won’t all use the same screenshots. It’s a pain to grab screenshots from a game so in the vein of making reviewing your game as easy as possible for the Reviewers, grab a bunch of screenshots in advance.

The other benefit to including these is that YOU can choose which screenshots are in this Press Kit, so you can make sure that all 20 shots are cool looking scenes from the game instead of someone else just randomly capturing the screen and ending up using a screenshot where your main character is obstructed or there’s some graphical glitch.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\AppStoreWriteup.TXT

For this I just grabbed the App Store description I wrote. I saved it out in a few different versions: .TXT, .DOC, and .ODT (OpenOffice) because I figure some sites allow bolding, italics, etc. and some just use raw text only.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Factsheet.PDF

This is a big .PDF file (took a while to fiddle with the compression settings to get it down to around 2 megs instead of a ridiculous 20 megs or a super compressed ugly 400k .PDF), saved out with selectable text so a person can just click-drag on it and cut & paste the text off it or click the links. I pretty much copied the layout of League of Evil and a couple other Factsheets in terms of what info to throw on there. I honestly couldn’t say if this was worth the effort in terms of if anyone actually looks at or uses this, but since it’s using in-game art and screenshots it didn’t take very long to throw
together and it makes things feel more professional to me so I’m glad I made it.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\Factsheet.PNG

This is just a shrunk down version of the Factsheet in-case someone wanted to post it on their site. I threw a bit of random stuff into the Press Kit that I have no idea if someone would use, because it’s my first one and I’d rather err on the side of too much stuff than too little.

\ElusiveNinja_PressKit\ElusiveNinja_PressKit.ZIP

This is a .ZIP of all the above stuff for convenience. I tried to keep it around 10 megs max. I figure if you know you’re downloading a Press Kit, you’re not going to be mind-blown by it being large but no one wants to download like a 50 meg kit unless it’s for like, Halo. Instead of attaching this kit to E- Mails I just made acustomized bit.ly link to link directly to it (bit.ly/elusiveninja_presskit goes to the directory of raw files and bit.ly/elusiveninja_press links to the .ZIP file

directly). I was worried that people might not trust bit.ly links so much (especially the ones with randomly generated URLs) so I tended to include both links just to be like “Here’s the raw files and here’s a conveniently zipped up version!”

Exclusive Content

A couple sites mentioned that they’re interested in exclusive content for my future projects. This is something I didn’t think to do, and might not be possible until you have a few Press connections who are actually interested in your stuff. But for the next game I’ll probably whip up some exclusive stuff, whether it’s behind-the-scenes sneak peaks or contests or what-have-you. The website with the exclusive content gets attention from your stuff, and you get attention for being Featured by them, it’s a win-win situation.

Press Release

A Press Release is important for getting word out about what you’re doing. Our business coach recommended putting out a Press Release for pretty much ANYTHING.

Realistically, there’s no downside to it since you can use a bunch of free Press Release services. Check out my blog entry where I was experimenting with different services a while back and the results. Looking back, it’s probably better to have too many Press Releases than not enough…at the end of the day, it means your company and game’s name will keep crossing people’s news feeds and that might make them more likely to pick up and publish your Press Release when you have actual big news, VS a company they’ve never heard of before. It also hooks you up with some totally random connections…I got a couple interview requests from people who would otherwise have no idea I existed, off my first Press Release.

Writing A Press Release

I write my own Press Releases because there are a ton of “how to write a good Press Release” articles all over the Internet. Hit Google up for some because they go into a lot of detail about what should be in a Press Release, what order things should be in, what to make sure to mention or what to leave out, etc.

Outsourcing A Press Release

You can hire someone else to do your Press Release for you, most marketing agencies offer this, as well as tons of freelancers. Personally, I think it’s silly to spend $100+ for someone else to write you a page worth of text about your own product or announcement since you’re the one that’s going to know the most about what you want to announce. Especially if you’re going to put out Press Releases frequently. But if you’re not a very good writer, or if English isn’t your first language, outsourcing the Press Release might be worth the money.

Submitting A Press Release

A Press Release can take a while to submit to a ton of different sites because each site has a different form and different length requirements or ways to divide up the sections of the Press Release, so if you’re doing it yourself expect it to take a good chunk of the day just to submit the thing. And if you hire someone else to write it for you, expect to have to break it apart or re-word chunks of it to fit in the various “100 characters MAX” boxes on some of the sites.

You can hire a service to submit your Press Release for you, which I haven’t tried yet but I think I might try next time, just to save myself some hassle and to see what the results are. You can also submit your Press Release to sites that charge a fee for accepting and posting them, but if you’re tight for money you really can get a pretty wide spread for your Press Release off just the free sites.

Leaderboards

Consider publishing your Leaderboard if you have a game that’s heavily community-based or competitive. Rewarding people at the top of the Leaderboard, holding contests, announcing winners on your blog, etc.

Merchandising

Don’t spend a lot (or ANY) money on this. If your game hits huge and gets into the Top 10, it might be worth spending some money on it (do your research first!) but if your game isn’t super-popular then no one probably cares about merchandise for it. But if you have some downtime and you’re feeling artsy- fartsy, consider throwing together some stuff and create a free CafePress store. Put some wallpapers together with in-game art. The guys at The Behemoth make
little statues/toys of their characters. Odds are for your first few games no one is really going to care about merchandise, but if it’s quick to throw together and free, and creating it doesn’t take long, it doesn’t hurt to have it available. I threw some Elusive Ninja wallpapers together for fun, but they were quick to do since I just used in-game art and realistically I know probably no one will use them but me haha

MAINTENANCE

So now you’ve got a ton of stuff out there related to your game. Twitter and Facebook accounts, banners, reviews, a blog, etc. It doesn’t end there! Once you’ve made this stuff you need to maintain it to keep your web presence solid and the information up to date. So let’s do a quick run-through of everything that needs to be maintained and some efficient ways to do that:

Banner Ads

Keep track of the results of your banner ads and try to find ways to determine which ones are bringing in actual sales, not just views of your App Store page or Impressions of the banner. If a banner isn’t reaching the goal you set for it, don’t bother renewing it and giving it a few more months, try putting that money into a banner elsewhere or some other type of marketing. If you’re a small Indie, this is the time to be experimenting because your money is limited. When you’re a big company with tons of marketing funds you can leave a bunch of stale banners that barely do anything all over the Internet, but right now you need your money bringing in the best possible results.

Twitter/Facebook

Stay on top of these! Especially Twitter. Facebook you can kind of let slide aside from responding to comments on announcements or what-have-you. But Twitter is huge right now, everyone is using it all day every day, so you want to make sure you have a presence on there. I’ve slipped a few times and been off-grid for a couple weeks and you miss a lot of what’s going on, a lot of chances to Retweet other people, a lot of conversations to participate in and get
exposure from, a lot of news about what’s happening in the game development industry, etc.

I installed Tweetdeck on my iPhone and laptop so I can check it on my iPhone when I’m out and about with some downtime like riding the bus or taking a poo, and I leave it running in the background on my laptop so I can have it pop up new Tweets as I work.