Making their game a viral hit on the App Store.
With more than 100,000 iPhone apps available, having a hit is harder than ever. So how can games developers give themselves the best chance possible?
Jounni Mannonen from iPhone developer Mountain Sheep took the stage at Mobile Games Forum in London today, talking about the marketing successes (and failures too) of its Minigore game.
The game itself is a console-style survival shooter, played with twin virtual sticks on the iPhone's screen. It was developed by Mountain Sheep's three-man team.
The game has sold 250,000 copies, with no free Lite version available. The price point started at $0.99, and later increased to $1.99. It topped the App Store paid app charts in five countries, went top 20 in 20 more, and is still hovering just outside the Top 100.
"It's quite insane for anyone to expect to get to that point," said Mannonen. "We expected it, but then we're insane!"
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So what did they do?
Mountain Sheep started by talking about the game on iPhone gaming site Touch Arcade, ending up with more than 150,000 views of the relevant thread on the site's forums, and 3,500 posts.
The company opted for a 99-cent launch price, and reached 10,000 sales in the first day, and then continued to sell at that level. "It's not something I'd heard of as a first entry title to the iPhone market," said Mannonen.
Apple then featured the game, but Mannonen said that "we didn't really notice when Apple featured us, because the bump in the numbers was so small".
However, then the sales started to fall off, down to 300 a day in September. Mountain Sheep was submitting updates to Apple for the game, but they stalled in the approvals process.
"In hindsight, we would have made a free version, and we would have recognised that in the US, you can't download over the air applications that are over 10MB," he said.
Mannonen also described Apple's process as a "black box". "There are a lot of things that you need to get right to get to the store, but you don't know what they are," he said. "This was a learning process: you can't guarantee you'll have a title on the market in three weeks."
He said the experience left fans feeling disillusioned - "they felt that their investment in us was not good - the $1 they paid for didn't give them more than a few hours of entertainment. They were furious."
However, this wasn't the end of the story. Mountain Sheep partnered with other developers, mashing up Minigore with other games. So Minigore's hero John Gore appeared in Sway, by Illusion Labs.
Since then, similar deals have been inked with Zombieville, Hook Champ and the OUTSTANDING (my view) Enviro-bear. "Adding fun things into the game just turned the expectations around," said Mannonen.
The developer also started to sell new characters for 99 cents - the same price as the original game.
Mannonen also talked about the importance of the Appirater - a tool used within the game to ask players if they'd like to rate the game once they've played it a certain number of times.
Why is this important? Because currently, Apple only prompts iPhone users to rate a game when they're deleting it from their device. Appirater ensured that Minigore's committed gamers also had a say.
As a result, Minigore has now gone up again to around 1,000 downloads a day of the game, plus 1,000 more of the add-on characters.
"We have a theory that the pirates are also buying the characters," said Mannonen, dealing with the industry concern about iPhone piracy. But anyway, at those levels, Minigore is a $1 million-a-year game.
Meanwhile, the social side of the game was also important. Minigore has used the OpenFeint social platform from early on in its lifetime, updating to the latest versions with every release of the game. In late 2009, Mountain Sheep also integrated Playhaven's forum service, to provide built-in forums and user groups.
Future features may include Facebook and Twitter integration, while the developer is also working on a full multiplayer mode.
Another fascinating tip: according to Mannonen, MOuntain Sheep didn't do any Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for Minigore - it just decided to host its official blog on Google's Blogspot platform. "It seemed to bias the results a little," he said.
Some more insights: people complain more when you lower the price of an iPhone game than when you raise it. "The ones who complain are the ones who already invested in you. They bought the game, and then you devalue their purchase by saying it's worth half the amount they paid."
Also, players complain more when you add in-app purchases than if you ignore it. "They feel entitled to owning everything that you've put out in front of them," he says.
"One kid complained that he really wanted the Santa, but his mother had said if he bought one more thing on iTunes, she'd take away his iPod touch. That's a valid reason to complain!"
To finish, Mannonen gave his three key tips:
1. Build expectations with emotional value.
2. Reinforce the expectations of people by making use of the social networks.
3. Exceed the expectations repeatedly.
He cited Pocket God as a key example of the latter - where developers sold a game for $0.99, and released a huge number of updates without ever charging any more money.
