Avoiding iPhone Game Obscurity

Author: Tommy Leung | 12.29.2009 | Category: Business, Internet, Marketing, Video Games

There is no shortage of iPhone developers. There is no shortage of iPhone applications. With over 100,000 apps, there is no shortage of extra features. It makes me wonder how I ever lived without my iPhone. I use Google Maps to get around. I share picture perfect moments using the Facebook App. I use the Subway Map app to get around NYC. I use Shazam’s tiny elfin librarians to tell me the name of songs. I use the Chase Mobile App to check account balances.

You name it, there’s an app for that. A year from now, you name it, and there will be apps for that and the ten other things you didn’t think of.

These are all conveniences iPhones owners have enjoyed. I have taken these services for granted. I don’t worry about where anything is anymore, I can find it on Google Maps. All of this convenience is fantastic for the consumer, while those trying to sell apps on the iPhone are finding it harder to stand out.

The most competitive category is Games. There are few categories as popular as the Games section of the App Store. There are more Games than any other category. At over 20,000 strong, avoiding obscurity will be a challenge.

But not only that, you need to have a lasting impression. You may have created the hottest iPhone game to date but, what is going to stop someone from releasing a $.99 clone? How do you ensure a cheaper clone isn’t going to eat away at your sales and market share?

Take the once popular iShoot. It made $800,000 in five months and prompted its creator, Ethan Nicholas, to leave his job at Sun Microsystems. iShoot has since been buried by competitors and copycats. Nicholas says it’s “terrifying” and that iShoot’s success was “pure luck”.

Pure luck is not going to work for a business selling games on the App Store. Relying on luck to run a business is the surest way to the land of businesses-that-were. And I’m not sure all businesses go to heaven.

Luckily, the solution is as old as time: marketing. Why do you buy Tide instead of Acme Brand? They may have exactly the same quality and stain fighting power but, Acme Brand isn’t going to hold a candle to the power of Tide.

There was a time when only a handful of games were on the App Store. The best games sold well in those prehistoric times. Those days are long gone. You can release a game on the App Store tomorrow and it’ll be in the company of a hundred other games. Only a small fraction of all iPhone users are going to know your game came out. People can’t buy what they don’t know about!

This is logical reasoning but, not everyone is on board. In an interview with Wired, Austin Sarner, CEO of Design by a Knife, said this:

“Basically everybody’s on the same level once they submit an iPhone app. Unlike traditional marketing, there’s no ad campaign: A user just sees what he sees in the iPhone store, and the applications kind of have to sell themselves to some extent.”

Sarner’s philosophy is that great content drives App Store success and not “marketing”. Sarner is a developer by profession so this an understandable point of view. Sarner confuses advertising with marketing and doesn’t realize that developing a great product is a fundamental function of marketing.

It is inaccurate that there is no advertising behind iPhone games. EA didn’t come to the party without their advertising muscle. And with hundreds of games being added to the App Store every week, the clutter alone will make you invisible no matter how good your game is.

It is suicide to release an app and hope it will be magically discovered. Only 7% of iPhone users download through iTunes, 62% knew what they wanted, 60% browsed the top lists, and 46% were from word of mouth according to AdMob. The 62% who knew what they wanted heard it somewhere first. It didn’t come to them in a dream.

If you are convinced that making the greatest iPhone game in the world, releasing it to the App Store, and then praying it will sell is a viable strategy, I have two words for you: good luck. You are going to need it.

However, if you want a viable business, there is a better way.

Game developers worldwide will disagree and hate this but, marketing has to be part of the development process from day one. You can’t create a game and then sprinkle some marketing pixie dust as an after thought. That’s the equivalent of wearing a blindfold, spinning around a few times, and then trying to hit a pinata. You have no idea where the target is. You are going to miss.

The development process starts with an audience. You need to target someone. You don’t need to go after the same audience as everyone else, but you need an audience. Who is going to buy your game? You need to make a game for them. You can make a game for yourself, but that’s not a business–it’s a hobby. Doing things in that fashion means it’ll always be a hobby.

Your game needs to be characteristic of your company brand–your company does have a brand right? There is a reason EA has multiple brands. Each brand has its own image and their games reflect that. EA Games caters to a more traditional audience, EA Sports develops games for the sports audience, and EA Play is solely focused on the casual market.

Engage with the community. If your audience is there, you need to be there engaging them: blogs, forums, YouTube videos, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, etc. If your audience is there, you need to be there. Being engaged does not mean spamming. Join the conversations and use your company as the name of contact or end each comment noting your company. Don’t be obnoxious. Be informative, helpful, and provide useful discourse.

Marketing your game is a full-time job. People who solely work on the development side find this difficult to swallow. In their world, they are doing the hard work. Their point of view isn’t without merit. Without them, there would be no product at all.

To make things worse, it is difficult to accurately measure the impact marketing has on your business. You may never know how or if someone who interacts with your marketing ends up buying your product. In fact, they might not buy your product at all. They might talk to ten other people about their experience with your company and then one or more within those ten may end up buying. We cannot accurately measure this.

For people who are used to concrete and visible patterns, marketing may as well be voodoo. However, this doesn’t make marketing less important. It does mean marketing requires a different mindset than that of development.

Social medias has allowed us to monitor our audience’s thoughts, concerns, and feelings in real time. This lets us adjust our marketing efforts on the fly if it isn’t working or is having a negative effect. You need to be constantly monitoring your audience. It isn’t just a matter of marketing during a release–you will end up like iShoot. Cultivate your audience and develop a community.

Infinity Ward, the makers of Call of Duty, understands the importance of a strong community. They have a community manager, Robert Bowling, whose sole job is to monitor the Call of Duty audience. Without him, Modern Warfare 2 may not have become the highest grossing entertainment release of all time. The game would have done well no matter what. Call of Duty has a history, the first Modern Warfare was excellent, the hype surrounding Modern Warfare 2 was spectacular, it was a high quality product, and Call of Duty is a known entity–a brand. But, would it have done as well without marketing? Of course, we can never actually measure it but, I’m willing to bet marketing made the difference between one of the highest grossing and the highest grossing.

Do the Opposite

Author: Tommy Leung | 12.26.2009 | Category: Business, Life, Marketing

It’s that time of year again! Time for our personal Year in Reviews. We usually end up making New Year’s Resolutions that we keep until February and then it’s back to business as usual. It is not our fault, we are creatures of habit–good or bad.

2010 is going to be different. For starters, we can’t call it “oh-ten”. That doesn’t make sense. Are we going to call it “ten”? Maybe we’ll need to actually say the entire thing: “twenty-ten”. No matter what becomes the accepted way to say the year, it is a change from the last nine years.

And change is something we are all dying for. We thought we were getting change in 2008 but, 2009 has shown us that it was just wishful thinking. No change to be found! So that begs the question, are we looking in the right places for change? Maybe we shouldn’t be looking to others. Afterall, the late King of Pop told us to look at the Man in the Mirror.

And we all know a mirror shows us everything in the opposite. Maybe 2010 is the year to take a look at ourselves and see if our lagging endeavors need to be evaluated in a completely different light. Perhaps, we need to do the opposite.

The economy is suffering the effects of being stabbed a thousand times by a toothpick. You wonder if now is a good time to make radical changes. To that I ask, would it be a good time if we went back five years? We all know it’s not about the times–there is never a good time. There is only now.

Now is as good a time as any! And if not now, when? If there is never a good time, perhaps that’s the first thing we need to apply the opposite to: it’s always a good time.

Besides, the economy can use some opposite thinking right now. The old ways of thinking have sunk the Titanic. And as everyone carries on thinking the same way and doing the same things, the water keeps climbing!

We think what we know is safe. It could be killing us, but it’s familiar so we stick with it. Well, it’s time to do the opposite. Take the plunge. Take the leap. Just do it. Whatever jingle you like.

It could be the best of times or it could be the worst of times. It’s impossible to know. But, we do know what doing the same will result in: the same results we’ve always gotten.

Some of us will choose to do the opposite. Things are going to change. Some of those changes will be so dramatic that we will all feel it. We’ve already seen it in the past decade. Ask someone about Twitter or Facebook in 2000 and you’ll get a blank, puzzled stare. Social networks have become a part of everyday life and used in everyday language. And it took less than a decade.

We know one giant is opting to do the opposite in 2010. Pepsi is foregoing advertising during the Super Bowl to focus on social media. This could go terribly wrong or it could be a banner year for Pepsi.

Take Pepsi’s lead and do the opposite. At least you don’t have $20 million on the line.

Living Without the TV

Author: Tommy Leung | 08.26.2009 | Category: Life

Image via CrunchBase

It has been almost two years since I’ve had any type of television programming fed to me through an actual television set. This doesn’t mean that I’ve watched any less television programming. I think I may be watching even more TV shows than I did before.

However, I am still getting more done and doing more productive things even though I may be watching more TV shows. Before Hulu had mountains of shows available, I was watching TV shows from the network’s websites. Any shows that I used to watch on TV and are not online, I have simply stopped watching them. I was a fan of SmallVille but, it is no where to be found online.

If it can be found, it is more work than it’s worth. I can live without the show. The networks that have decided to put their shows online have been able to reach me and sell advertising at the same time. There is little drawback for them. Either they were not going to have as an audience at all or have me as an audience online.

Being able to watch shows when I wanted to really helps with being productive. I don’t have to schedule my time around when a show is on. I can do the work I need to do and when I want downtime, watch all the episodes I missed. Sounds like a great deal for everyone!

I think it is fantastic and Hulu and YouTube are offering shows of all kinds. I feel the TV and cable model is a thing of the past. I don’t want to plan my time around the network’s schedule and I don’t want to pay for channels that I’ll never watch.

I would much rather pay HBO directly to watch their shows over the internet, on my time, than to pay for cable.

TV is so yesterday.

Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom

Author: Tommy Leung | 08.21.2009 | Category: Video Games

I recently finished this Dora the Explorer game for Nickelodeon. It was quite a few months of work as the only programmer on the project. The game has about seven mini-games separated by three side-scrollers.

I don’t normally do games for such a young audience so it was interesting. The game mechanics were quite dumbed down. The games themselves were pretty simple: counting, pattern matching, etc. There should be a desktop game coming out for PC and Mac–that is where the bulk of the work is.

I think the game turned out pretty good. It was games like this one that has had me so busy the past several months.

Reading on Scribd

Author: Tommy Leung | 07.08.2009 | Category: Books, Internet

Image via CrunchBase

I’ve known of Scribd for a while as the Mises Institute has put a great deal of their collection online for free. Even though I have known of Scribd, I have not really read any book available on there in great depth–until now. I had read Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s Free and Seth Godin’s rebuttal to Gladwell’s review. I have my own opinions on the idea of Free so this was a topic that I am fairly interested in.

I really did not expect to read this book online for free as I didn’t really expect it to be available online for free. I own Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and loved that book. It is entirely possible that I will eventually buy Free just to have on my bookshelf as digital books just aren’t the same.

Having discovered Free was available for free I decided to read a few pages–perhaps a few chapters–to get a taste of the book. I generally do that at Barnes & Nobles anyway. I am now 205 pages into this 288 page book. In all likelihood, I will finish reading this book as I have less than a third to go and it is pretty damn interesting.

My intention isn’t really to review the book but, to talk about reading an entire book online on a computer monitor. I have done a lot of reading online but, I have never read a book on a digital screen. The experience so far as been satisfactory. It wasn’t as terrible as I had thought but, also not fantastic. I still prefer to have the physical item.

Scribd is great. When I started reading for the first time I wondered where the bookmark tool was. I didn’t find out until I returned to the book at a later time and discovered that Scribd knew where I had left off and suggested to me that I could start from there. Marvelous.

Their service is definitely something I’ll explore further.

.me

Author: Tommy Leung | 06.23.2009 | Category: Internet

Other people with my name have long since bought up the .com domains with my name. In my neverending effort to make Googling my name show my internet presence first, I have bought tommyleung.me and thomasleung.me.

I’m not super sure what I intend to do with those domains yet. They just point to here now. More options for self-branding!

Hello Summer!

Author: Tommy Leung | 06.09.2009 | Category: Life

I haven’t written anything since the end of April. Part of it has to do with me being lazy and getting “tied up” taking Facebook quizzes–those things are addictive! The main culprit is how busy I’ve been at work. It only looks like its going to get even busier as we enter the second half of the year.

Since I wrote about my near death experience via bench press, I have joined Planet Fitness. I was making do with make shift workouts for a while–body weight exercises and the such. I can create a pretty good workout anywhere but, there isn’t a real substitute in the modern world for good old iron. I don’t spend my day hunting for my food. Most of my day consists of being seated in an office.

Planet Fitness isn’t the bodybuilder’s gym or the gym for the serious athlete–they just don’t have enough free weights. I’m not a bodybuilder or professional athelete so it’ll do. They are cheap at $20 a month for their premium plan and they are running a deal now for $199 for two years.

I usually have a whole plan of exercises and all that stuff. I decided to forgo all of that this time and aim to accomplish two things while I’m at the gym: work my entire body and be dead tired when I’m done. Of course, I also limit my workouts to around 60 minutes–the shorter the better. Some people swear by split routines and spend hours at the gym. I need the greatest gains in the shortest amount of time–efficient.

My main motivation to go back to the gym was when my good friend who saved me from my bench press death said my arms were bigger back in high school. What?! I was online that night researching gyms! I’m a little vain. It was good motivation at a good time. Doesn’t hurt to be in better shape when summer really rolls around.

The majority of my weekends of late has been filled with looking for a new apartment so that has taken away time from writing. I’m likely going to be a residence of Queens, NY soon. Moving is going to be a pain in the ass–it always is.

Image via Wikipedia

Aside from apartment searching, I also saw some of my friends on Pace University’s Advertising Team compete in the NASC. They were amazing and put together a fantastic plan. I’m going to write about it on my marketing blog, it’s just going take some time. Any ad agency or marketing department would do well to have any one of them working for them–the economy is making hiring scarce but, they are good and persistence will win out.

In other news, I’ve also “officially”  graduated from Pace University. I’ve had the degree for months but, I went to the ceremony and all that. They really need to not do graduation ceremonies so early, I’m not awake yet. I was almost a zombie going through the whole thing and then seriously just went to sleep after it was all said and done.

I will definitely write a little something about this Dora the Explorer game I’m working on once its finished and available on Nickelodeon’s website. This game is supposed to be on sale at retailers too–fancy. Now hopefully, I can find more time to write while work is keeping is busy. I’ve been restructuring my life a little recently as well so that hasn’t helped keep my entries consistent!