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15 iPhone Game Observations, Before and After

1) It’s extremely obvious why games die in sales once they’re off the Top 25.   When you go through a list of games it only shows a handful at a time, and you have to hit “Show more games” to list the next handful, and those take a few seconds to load all the icons for.  But that’s not the worst part…say you’re down around game 80 and you see one you dig so you click it to check it out and decide to download and install it.  Well now When you go back to the App Store, are you at game 80?  Nope, you’re back up at game 1 and have to “Show more games” your way all the way back down to 80.  There are like 300,000 Apps in the App Store and I bet no one ever sees past 200 on one of those lists.   So while it’s already well known that it’s vital to get into the Top 25 chart, I’d say this is the main reason for it.  I actually WANTED to find more obscure games to see if I could find some hidden gems that I dig, but it was extremely difficult to attempt.  

So is this a bad thing or a good thing?   Well the bad part of it is if you fall off the charts, you’re pretty toast.  That’s obvious.  The good part is there’ve got to be ways to get back up on the charts.  If you’re game number 100,000 right now, NO ONE knows you exist.  You could probably re-market your game right now as if you had just released it brand new and all the people who’ve bought iPhones in the last couple months would think “hey, a new game, cool!” and you might be able to re-popularize your game.   If you have an app on there that isn’t doing anything, consider giving re-marketing a go.  The only difference between Angry Birds and a game like Tomacow is that Angry Birds is easy to find and Tomacow is way off the bottom of the charts right now.  If tomorrow Tomacow shot up to #1 and Angry Birds fell a few dozen spots down their sales stats would probably reverse.

In my case, my game came out on Day1 of E3 2011 and my advertising cards didn't arrive in time for E3, so there wasn't much I could do for advertising.  When Nintendo is announcing a new console, no one cares about a tiny indie iPhone game.  So my game fell off the New Releases list fast and is now sitting somewhere in obscurity.  I'm not complaining though, I just look at this as a re-marketing challenge: how do I get people to know the game exists?  Like I wrote up above, now that I'm off the list NO ONE can find me.  You literally have to search for "elusive ninja" to find my game.  Even typing in "ninja" I'm like 6+ pages down the list.