For about a year right after I graduated from Full Sail, a friend and I moved to Seattle and started an iPhone studio named “Psychosis Studio”. During my time at Psychosis Studio I was privy to all the data that surrounded the sales and success of all the apps that were released. So I got to see first hand what just a little bit of “press” and marketing can do for a small struggling iPhone developer.

OUR STRATEGY

The general idea at Psychosis when it came to marketing was: “tell our friends”,  “tell Touch Arcade” and “pray we get featured”. That was the extent that marketing was a priority. In fact we did get on a featured list at one point under the “Hot New Games” but we struggled to even get above last place on that list for our game Parking Panic. We used facebook and a little of twitter but being code monkeys our social skills were lacking to say the least, which is a bad thing for social media.

A GAME WITHOUT MARKETING

Our first game at Psychosis was a simple little puzzle game with a hundred levels and sliding tiles called “Turtle Soup”. In general Turtle Soup was a failure we barely sold one hundred copies our first day and over all the game was seen as big expenditure of time without a good pay out. The only good thing that did come from Turtle Soup was we had learned a lot about what doesn’t work. With Turtle Soup the idea was to release the game, pray it got featured, and then hope that would carry us to the top (so a lot of wishful thinking). With no exposure other than being on the “release date” we had no chance of selling enough to place anywhere in the top paid of our category.

• First week sales: $126
• Average first month daily sales: $10

A GAME WITH A LITTLE MARKETING

Shortly after Turtle Soup we started development of a game we released called “Tunnel Vision”. With this game we employed our marketing strategy and the results were surprising compared to Turtle Soup. I would deem Tunnel Vision a success as far as what we could expect from the amount of actual marketing we did do. The game sold well over three hundred copies the first day and continued its good sales numbers up until the end of the app’s lifetime. For about four months after the release we maintained sales of about two to three hundred per week.  Valuing it based on time spent on the game it was very profitable with one programmer and one artist the game was developed tested and released in about six weeks.

• First week sales: $1965
• Average first month daily sales: $133

CONCLUSION

In the end the general flaw with what we were doing with the games was not doing enough of what works. We really needed to “push” our games more because that is really what generates sales. If we were to do the whole thing again I think bringing in someone that is skilled at getting buzz and talking about projects would have been a good thing to do. Getting a hybrid team member (something/marketer) would have been a huge boon to the company and the sales of the games. What this has taught me is that I personally need to work harder at being that hybrid person, because even a little shove can make a game sell ten times better.