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Archive for the ‘Industry’ Category

Top 3 Marketing Tips for Beating the App Store Blackbox

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

How to build a successful business of developing iPhone games can be a mystery, wrapped inside a riddle that’s inside an enigma.  We often hear of the lucky developer who makes millions with a juvenile fart app, and yet there are plenty of high-quality games that never go anywhere.

I’ve had the great opportunity to work with many talented iPhone game developers over the last few months. I’ve had a chance to see firsthand which marketing strategies work in helping build businesses by creating game “franchises” rather than just selling games.  Of all the marketing strategies I’ve seen, it seems there are three core tenants that should be a part of any iPhone marketing campaign.

  1. Generate buzz before the game is released
  2. Create a cross-promotion network alliance
  3. Leverage your existing fan base
The App Store is Seriously Broken

Before I dive into marketing strategies, I want to express how badly I think the App Store is broken.   The prolonged Apple approval process has already been documented widely. But I find the lack of information and access that developers get to their own consumers to be equally appalling and certainly far more costly to developers.

Isn’t it ironic that apps and games are what make the iPhone so successful, yet developers have absolutely no way of knowing who their customers are? They are essentially barred from interacting with the very people who are using the product they created.

Having passionate fans is the cornerstone of any successful game. This was true in the traditional gaming space, and it’s just as true in the new mobile gaming era.  But the App Store is a blackbox, and developers are flying blind in there.  They have no connection with their customers.  With Android on the rise, I really hope Apple will respond and open up their system for the benefit of developers and iPhone users.  But until then, here are the tips I’ve picked up for marketing and thriving in Apple’s opaque world.

Marketing Tip #1:  Generate Buzz and Hype Before the Game is Released

Building anticipation before a game comes out is by no means a novel marketing strategy. In fact, it is extremely common in the traditional gaming space (some may even say certain games build too much hype… Duke Nukem Forever anyone?).  However, this concept of pre-release buzz doesn’t seem to exist when it comes to marketing for iPhone games.

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Posted in Industry, PlayHaven, iPhone | 6 Comments »

Has iPhone become a legitimate gaming platform?

Friday, August 14th, 2009

In the past few months, I have found myself spending more and more time on my iPhone playing these simple yet addicting games.  Looking at how the iPhone has evolved from first gen, to the iPhone 3G, and now the iPhone 3GS, as well as see how the games have evolve along the way — I can’t stop but wonder if iPhone has finally become a legitimate gaming platform.  First let’s applaud Apple has finally come around and realize gaming is a market should not be ignored (we all know how crappy the Macs are for gaming).  Anyway, if it has, where does the future hold for iPhone?  I am going to geek out my old consulting habit… and let’s have a look:

The Market:

  • 14 millions iPhones were sold in 2008, and estimated 24M iPhones will be sold in 2009 (5.2M iPhones were sold in Q209 alone).
  • During the first year of AppStore, over 10,000 games have been developed, which is about 18% of all apps developed for the iPhone.

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Posted in General, Industry | 7 Comments »

Traditional Media is Dead as We Know It

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The birth of the Web sparked the most significant information evolution in the past century. The Web didn’t just change the way we consume media, but also the way we create it. It’s opened new channels of creativity and self-expression for authors who traditionally sat on the receiving end. Why is this so significant? The growth of user-generated content (UGC) has surpassed all expectations and truly enabled the concept of, “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Most importantly, UGC has taken center stage in our daily lives.

User-generated content is a very broad topic. UGC, as a term, encompasses everything from Wikipedia (crowd-sourced encyclopedia) to Facebook (user-generated information exchange and social graph). But I want to focus this blog post on a topic that’s very close to my heart – user-written game reviews. I often read editorial reviews from various traditional media sources. From gaming giants like IGN to GameSpot, and from old school magazines like PC Gamer. But I start to realize I am slowly migrating away from editorial reviews completely. I can’t help but ask myself why? The issue of editorials vs. user-written content has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of the new media revolution. Which one is higher quality? Which one is more accurate? And most importantly, which one is more relevant? If user-written reviews are here to stay, or even become the mainstream, what is their future?

Maybe I am a bit biased – since PlayHaven is a site powered by its great community – but I believe user-written reviews will eventually replace editorial reviews in the future. The power of user-written reviews is not the content presented by one individual, but the value harvested from a massive collection of knowledge and opinions. It is arguable that a review written by an amateur journalist may never reach the quality of a professionally-written editorial, since by definition, a professional writer is afforded a lifetime of training and expertise that a typical John Doe isn’t. However, the quality lacking in UGC reviews are made up in quantity. User-centric review sites such as Yelp, Amazon, MenuPages, NewEgg, and IMDB have outgrown their editorial counterparts by harvesting the wisdom of the crowd. The knowledge and expertise that is lacked by one individual is often supplemented by another person. As an aggregation, the knowledge and opinions from a group of people well exceeds the breadth of expertise that can be offered by any single individual.

Another significant disadvantage of the editorial review is “relevancy”. When reading an editorial review, readers must take a leap of faith when deciding to trust the editor’s opinion. What’s important to the editor could be drastically different from what matters to the reader. When it comes to game reviews and myself, I rarely care about the depth of the storyline, but I care deeply about fun-factor and replay-value. More often than not, this level of personal relevancy cannot be achieved via editorial reviews. User reviews, especially in quantity, solve this problem. When seeing a user-written review, I try to get a sense of what’s important to the reviewer. Once I can relate to the reviewer on a personal level, due to our shared intent, his opinion immediately weighs more than anyone else’s. To find this kind of personal relevancy requires content in quantity. When there are hundreds of reviews, written by hundreds of people from diverse personalities and backgrounds, you are more likely to relate to and connect with at least one of them.

Now, sifting through hundreds, or sometimes, thousands of reviews is both daunting and time-consuming. This leads me to the next logical question: what’s the future of UGC? With technical advancement, the ability to recommend and feed relevant content to the reader will be key for the next few years. Imagine that when you want to buy your next game, you could use a tool that delivers you the exact reviews you are looking for, because it knows reviewers like you. And those reviewers love to kill gigantic space bugs (EDF anyone?). Wouldn’t that be great? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!

Posted in Industry | 2 Comments »