Archive for the ‘Lessons Learned’ Category

1. Zombie Ball: Rise of the Free

   October 25, 2011

   It’s been a while since the first article about Zombie Ball (Launching an iPhone game: what we got wrong) on GamesBrief, and the team has decided to continue sharing our story. I’m grateful to Nicholas for both opportunities.

   As noted in the first article, we did a few things wrong with the marketing. Since then, our strategy has changed, we have released a free version supported by in-app purchases, and we are still certain that things would go much better if we did what we are doing now right at the launch of Zombie Ball.

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   Posted in: Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Sales

   Tagged with: free, free games, iaps, revenue, sales, zombie ball

   2 Comments

2. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 15 – Freedom Part 2

   October 21, 2011

   Lots to talk about today! The introduction of In-App Purchases to Hard Lines, Android sales and usage figures are in, plus the second free promotion – this time with OpenFeint.

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   Posted in: Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Marketing

   Tagged with: andrew smith, guest post, hard lines, in app purchases, spilt milk studios

   6 Comments

3. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 14 – Part Man, Part Machine

   October 7, 2011

   It’s been a mad 3 weeks since last time! Last week’s update got delayed because of all of the catching up that I needed to do after spending 4 days at the Indie Games Arcade stand in the Eurogamer Expo. We got Hard Lines in there to demo on iPads and accompanied by free (self-decorated and Hard Lines-branded) cake and a looping trailer amongst other things. It was great fun, we showed the game to quite literally hundreds of passionate gamers and even made quite a few on-the-spot sales!

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   Posted in: Featured, Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Marketing

   Tagged with: android, eurogamer expo, hard lines, iOS, spilt milk studios

   No Comments

4. Following Hunches, Badgering Witnesses and Grasping at Straws: How a Filthy Cop Made a Name For Himself

   September 20, 2011

   I would love to be able to tell you that the success of Hector: Badge of Carnage is down to a brilliant yet simple coordinated promotional attack on all branches of worldwide media, resulting in a quantifiable and reproducible 12-step package available to indie developers like yourselves. However, like police work, it can be mostly attributed to a lot of legwork, some gutsy gambles, and a bit of blind luck.

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   Posted in: Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Marketing

   Tagged with: adventure games, guest post, hector, iOS, marketing, straandlooper

   2 Comments

5. Holding your breath and going Freemium – Future Games of London share some stats

   September 13, 2011

   For us at Future Games of London, having had great success with the Lite/Paid app model, ditching that and converting to Freemium was a BIG STEP. We’d built our business on a model that looks about to go extinct! We decided to try converting Hungry Shark – Part 2 to free for a few days when the IAP-enabled Update came out, and to switch it back to paid if it didn’t do the numbers. Here’s what happened…

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   Posted in: Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Sales

   Tagged with: free, free games, freemium, future games of london, hungry shark, iOS, ipad, iphone, pricing, sales

   6 Comments

6. Spilt Milk Studios Development Diary 12 – Hundreds and Thousands

   September 2, 2011

   We turned the game free on Sunday to make sure there were no hiccups, and below you can see a nice chart that shows how many people downloaded our lovely little game Hard Lines. Over 190,000 downloads during the 5 day period means we reached more potential customers in that week than we had in the entire time the game had been out. So does that mean free is the only way to go?

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   Posted in: Distribution, Featured, Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Marketing, Sales, Service Providers

   Tagged with: digital distribution, games, guest post, hard lines, iphone, marketing, mobile games, self-publishing, spilt milk studios, statistics

   8 Comments

7. Indie Marketing: tell the world! (Part one)

   August 23, 2011

   We made the decision early on with Hogrocket to self-publish our games. This doesn’t mean “we’ll release it and see how it does” – we’re taking the publishing side of things very seriously. We have Marketing and PR plans, pricing strategies, promotional events lined up, and a budget set aside to support this. In this brave new world it’s easy for smaller developers to think “yay we don’t need publishers any more!”. That might well be true, but you had better be ready to perform their functions yourself. Just because the publisher isn’t there anymore it doesn’t mean their workload suddenly vanishes. Those jobs still need doing; self-promotion is absolutely essential.

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   Posted in: Distribution, Featured, Guest Post, Lessons Learned, Marketing

   Tagged with: aaa games, aaa studios, digital distribution, games industry, marketing strategy, self-publishing

   2 Comments