I just finished my first iPhone (and iPad/iPod touch) game and it went live in the app store yesterday. I spent a long time developing it, but haven't really contemplated any kind of marketing.

For an iPhone game, it seems like the most important thing is getting on the charts. My sales at launch were meh, and I've already fallen down the ranks in the store, which means I don't think I will climb back up naturally. That leaves the decision of whether or not it's worth doing some marketing, trying to get some more sales, and then driving me back up.

Has anyone here had experience launching an iPhone game or app, and trying to get it into the charts? Is it an impossible task for me to hope to get up there with the big dogs?

It seems to me like Apple gives you a chance to get a lot of sales when you launch by putting you on the "newest" page, and at that point you have to hope you get enough sales to keep you on the charts. If that's the case, I think my focus next time should be producing a top quality product with a catchy icon and description. Otherwise, once you fall down it seems like it is hard to get back up.

I've gone ahead and made the app free for this weekend, expiring Sunday at midnight, hoping that I could get some people to download and give feedback.

The app is called PictoBall, all one word. It's a puzzle game. The object is to draw lines on the screen that help guide the balls to the exit as they bounce around.

I would post a link but don't think it's allowed, although it is free. It should be easy to find though. If anyone has a chance, could you take a look and let me know if you have any comments?

Much appreciated!

I ended up posting this in the business forum thinking it may get more feedback. Mods feel free to close this one.

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/30...-game-1363166/

Every losing marketing strategy starts with "Let's give them a free..."

I doubt it's worth it, the iphone market is really difficult and your game isn't good enough. The music is annoying, the graphics are minimalist in a 'this is clearly programmer art' way, not stylishly minimalist like, say, Dots, and the gameplay doesn't have that easy to pick up/hard to put down factor that really drives the really popular casual games, it's not that easy to start drawing really precise lines as a beginner and so the ball has a tendency to hit an edge and just start randomly ricocheting off walls, it feels like there's as much luck as skill involved. I've been there, made a couple of ****ty apps myself where I was just happy to have gotten something that worked and didn't really ask myself if what I made was actually any fun to play, best to just write it off as a learning experience and really focus on creating a well polished app if you decide to make another one.

I played it and just didn't get much fun out of it.

It's pretty well done for what it is and I'm sure you've become a better programmer from writing it. Other than using it as a project for resume or using your code for something else that is all I see from it.

I am 22 years old and my time is more precious than playing a line drawing game to guide the ball to the destination. I just don't see it being a hit even if you payed some art junkie to make it more colorful and had weird 3d particle effects in the background or weird gravity altering on the ball gameplay.

This is just my thoughts, shouldn't be taken for much because I have no idea how games like fruit ninja are a craze to kids and am more of a storyline game fan.

I actually think the game is kind of cool. It would definitely benefit huge from the contributions of a proper designer. Also, the sound is just one song looping over and over and not responsive to the gameplay.

Bad news is that the app store market is pretty saturated and competitive so it's hard to get noticed and this game doesn't strike me as one that will get the attention you need to make it a winner. I'll probably play it two more times at the most then delete it.

Nice first game though.

Thanks a lot for the feedback. As some of you have noted, this was my first game attempt, and I learned a lot going through it. If I were to do it over again it would be much different. Depending on my goals, it may be best to do another update or two to clean up this app a bit, and then start working on a more polished app.

Also, daveT, regarding making it free being a bad marketing strategy, I thought the same thing when it was first suggested to me. But, my sales for the first three days were 52, 15, 2, so at that point I figured I didn't have much to lose making it free other than ~$4 in sales.

To clarify my goals, I was not really hoping or expecting to sell 100,000 copies of this and dethrone the top games. As my first game, I would be extremely happy getting 5-10 sales a day. I feel like the gameplay is fun enough to at least pick up a few downloads here and there, and at least cover the developer fees while I work on my next project.

One follow up. Given the position I'm in, having this game already completed, what would you guys suggest? Sounds like the consensus is to not spend a lot more time on it. Maybe play around with the key words a little, keep an eye on the sales, and just move on to my next game?

Alternatively, I could spend a few hours improving the graphics and music before abandoning the project. I may try that anyway before I move onto another game, because I would rather muck around with this one before I move to a new game. But not sure if it will be worth the payoff at this point.

It would be worth it to improve the game's presentation as I'm sure you'll want to use it as a portfolio piece for the next while. Nice graphics will cause the game to leave a much nicer impression. Right now it feels Commodore 64-ish or, like someone mentioned, it's pretty obvious the programmer was also in charge of the graphics.

It should be noted though that tweaking with anything likely won't affect your app's downloads at this point. Your free push from Apple is gone. After your first couple days in the app store interest in your app tapers off quite quickly unless it was an app that hit or you're spending money on marketing, which wouldn't be worth putting your money into imo.

I already replied to your other thread before seeing this one. I'll add that marketing for the purposes of charting isn't worth it in the vast majority of cases. My data is from over 2 years ago, but probably still relevant. I pushed a game up to top 200 overall games and top 15 in 2 game sub-categories. The number of organic downloads resulting from chart position did not come close to covering the marketing expenses. I figured I needed to spend far more to get any kind of ROI on marketing with the goal of charting high.

If you're done with it you could always try to sell it on apptopia.

MrBlue, that makes sense about the marketing. It sounds like I need to work on things like the icon, screenshots, graphics, etc, to try to drive more downloads and then hope it grows organically from there - in general, I mean, not necessarily for PictoBall.

I have not given up on it yet, but if I do I will take a look at Apptopia or other sales options.