Stop relying on app stores and help yourselves, says BlackBerry

hello I'm Don from Blackberry yes BlackBerry still exists and I'm here today to talk to you about getting your game discovered so first I wanted to start with uh a little story so you've come up with an amazing game idea yeah you've been working on it for months uh you're pretty sure it's gonna rock the world and it's going to go completely viral so your team are exhausted they've got they've got the audio perfect they've got the gameplay absolutely bang on uh the graphics uh you know amazing absolutely positive that uh that the app is going to be uh a worldwide success as soon as Apple see your game definitely going to feature it you know it's the first play straight in the App Store there's going to be spin-off merchandise there's going to be toys for sale there's even going to be a spin-off TV series you're absolutely positive that

this game is going to be amazing everyone's going to pay off the credit cards buy a dream car and uh go to retire on an island somewhere I mean how hard can it be when this gets 50 million downloads so the day arrives your game is finally in the App Store you see that little green light up there means it's for sale everyone's really really excited uh you know you can you can feel the excitement in the office and you're absolutely confident that this is going to be a viral success so you go into iTunes connect on the first day you check your download numbers eight people they're all the people that work for you um so you know you're thinking okay well

you know it's not it's not the the immediate success that you hoped it was going to be but you know maybe it'll take time for the awesomeness to to spread around the world so at the end of the first week you uh you check your downloads again and you're like oh okay maybe we've got a problem here and the weeks roll on and you know you're not making any money and you know you had the you had your Excel spreadsheets out and your forecasts of how many players you were going to get and how much revenue you're going to generate but the fact is no one's downloading your game and uh the week's Roll by and you can't pay anyone so unfortunately you know you have to go and work at McDonald's and uh that's that's the end of the story but hopefully not um so what went wrong well firstly uh

do you have my latest presentation because if you don't uh this morning I made sure they had it sorry is that the new one okay so the truth is your your game no one knows about it and the reason no one knows about it is because when you publish on any of the major app stores you're publishing into one of the most competitive markets on Earth so uh in iTunes alone there are in the region of 220 000 games in there with about 90 Games published every single day so you have games developers in exactly the same position as you all their hopes and dreams have pinned on this one game and there's 90 of them every single day um which makes it an extremely competitive environment so the thing to remember about all of the app stores is they are brilliant for distribution and

that's what you pay your 30 for but they are terrible for Discovery and this is reflected in all user feedback or everyone who uses the app stores says they're terrible for discovery one of the reasons why people spend so long in app stores is because the search is so so awful um oh here we go great thank you this is the old presentation okay oh God right this is going to be interesting um no one knows about your game uh okay so these are the top three game Discovery Channels so now what we need to do is figure out a strategy for actually getting your your game discovered um so this was a research report done by

Forrester in April 2013 and said around about 60 percent of people find games through the app stores about 50 through word of mouth and about 20 through websites and and social media now the the difference in popularity is extremely important here I mean I talk to developers all the time who spend a long time crafting a website for their game but then they don't bother doing any app store optimization and they don't ensure that they have enough player engagement so that the the uh the word of mouth spreads about their their game so it's important to focus your efforts on the the most popular methods of of being discovered um okay so the first thing you need to do most important thing you need to do when getting your game discovered is build relationships with your players to create evangelists and this is what we uh we do at Blackberry we uh we talk to developers we get them

excited about what what we're trying to achieve and then they go out and they talk to a whole lot more developers essentially doing our work for us um and any developer who's extremely good at this is um James Vaughn from plague and he's got this wonderful quote here which kind of explains their whole strategy I've just highlighted uh this section here so if it's good enough people will spread the word absolutely and he also engages with players through email Twitter Facebook Shaq news and Touch Arcade um really this is if you're going to do one thing it's this build a great game and engage with the players and here's an example of of how they do it so this guy G carrot 2 made a suggestion for plague they then implemented it in the game and then they publicly acknowledge the fact that this guy had

made the suggestion so turning Twitter followers into evangelists for the game you know this guy's going to be well chuffed that he made this suggestion and now it's now it's in the game optimize your app store presence so quite simply this is changing your name description and keywords in order to better appear in search results um there's a variety of tools out there to help you do that personal favorite mine is Center Tower the center Tower allows you to pick specific keywords see how well they rate in terms of traffic but also how they rate in terms of competitiveness how many other apps are using that same keyword and the idea here is that you're looking for keywords that generate you high number of traffic high amount of traffic but low in terms of competitiveness there are others available as well

okay that slide's been taken out um build relationships with app stores so there are people working at Microsoft at Google at Amazon at Samsung and all of the the major app stores who are looking to build their ecosystem by promoting quality content these people exist they talk at events um they are out there so do some sleuth work find out who they are try and meet them and get get an introduction now this isn't a guaranteed way of getting featured in in the Apple App Store but it's definitely worth investing some time into it because the payoff is so great if you if you do get featured so and it may not happen for your first game but as you build a relationship you are likely to get featured uh down down the line so worth investing in

okay marketing uh I found this great website called Dojo dot IO and I just had to make this uh make this guy over here uh so here's my game games marketing Doge and he's basically explaining all of the channels that you can use as a game developer in order to promote your game the idea is that you put out interesting content which drives players to install your game and that can be a trailer for the game it can be screenshots it can be even be diagrams that you that you've got which reflect the gameplay but anything which gets people excited about the game get it out there and and get players to uh install your game flambeer do this extremely well makers of Ridiculous Fishing so they've they've got uh their Facebook page where they they publish all sorts of stuff um details of of upcoming games that

they've got and then they can engage in dialogue with with those players you know get them get them interested before before the game is released okay but build relationships with the Press I won't talk too much about this because there's a panel I believe after this which uh has various members of the press who will explain to you how to build relationships with the Press um one thing I will say is Lambe have got the most amazing toolkit that they've put together which is about 20 or 30 links which helps you create a press release it will also help you manage all of your press contacts so it's a really really useful resource for for doing everything to do with press and marketing right create and analyze your player funnels so um what I'm talking about here is the ability to analyze what you're investing your time in terms of your Discovery

Channels and there's two ways that you can do this the first way is to look at your app store uh your app store stats and you can use tools like this demo appane there's a whole Suite of tools out there free tools will allow you to aggregate your your app store data the second thing you need to do is analyze what goes on in your game so what this will allow you to do is set up funnels for all of your different Discovery Channels so let's say you're on Twitter you can publish a link to your game which is a unique link you can track what users then click on that link and go and install your game but even once they've installed the game you can see what they've done so if they get through the onboarding process through the tutorial you can track them if they then go ahead and purchase something within the app let's say they buy 100 gems you

can you can analyze that and the idea here is you track the quality of users that come from in this example Twitter right so I was talking to a friend of mine who works at codemasters and this was something that he was extremely worked extremely well for them so if you are using paid acquisition process then you soft launch your game in a single region and then you can optimize your onboarding and retention rates So Paid user acquisition can be used in that context essentially to buy user testers for you if your game has ads then contact your ad provider and see if you can get some free ads from them so he he said typically they were able to get um anywhere up to about ten thousand dollars worth of uh free ads from their

advertising provider so these these advertising networks are always looking for Quality content in which they can generate revenue from so if you go to them and say that I've got this amazing new game it's going to be uh it's going to be a massive hit especially if you've got previous games that have generated Revenue they are likely to say okay well go on then here's here's a thousand dollars worth of free advertising and that can be a real boost when you're when you're launching a game right the amount of developers that I talk to who use Unity but they don't publish on all the platforms that Unity support is is incredible I mean a lot of them will just publish on on iOS and it doesn't make sense to me especially as the smaller platforms Windows phone and and blackberry are now free to to publish as long as you can already publish on iOS you can publish for free

on on Windows phone and on BlackBerry this has the benefit of number one opening up your game to millions of new users but number two it aids word of mouth if your game is discovered let's say on BlackBerry then all the people use blackberry and they're you know hundreds of iPhone using friends they can recommend them but if you don't publish then you you stop that word of mouth uh promotion of your game okay lastly and most importantly um publish on BlackBerry so number one Discovery is so much easier on BlackBerry because there's 90 percent less games um so just by its very nature it's it's much easier to to discover um I can give you free devices to test your games on we also provide you know

developer support so my whole team is okay it's playing up um uh our whole team is uh built of programmers we love getting programming problems so we can help you get your game ported if it's not using cross-platform framework or if it is you know we have guides and we we have developers waiting to uh to help you port your game and lastly perhaps most importantly free promotion so I have a direct line into the BlackBerry World team and we can get your game featured on the BlackBerry World Carousel in fact one of my games Colin McRae Rally um is currently on the home page of BlackBerry World because um the developer came to me and said I'd like to get promoted I've got a great game so um this is this is genuine you know I'm here and you can talk to me and and and I can help you get your game promoted the the other thing is we're always looking for success stories so if your

game is a great game and it's it's getting download numbers then we will write about you write about the process and that gets you even more exposure and I think I think I've done all right there so uh that that's it for me thank you very much