Getting featured by Apple

Discussion in 'Game Marketing' started by ilia_vince, May 6, 2016.

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  1. ilia_vince

    ilia_vince Boxer

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    Hey guys, I’d like to ask for some advice from those who’ve been featured by Apple before.

    We currently have a set of games in the App Store under our main company account, those games are not original and we know that Apple will never feature an obviously remodeled game. We plan to move away from the remodeling strategy or at least to the point where it’s not easily recognizable that we’ve remodeled an existing game. This was really done to test things out and get some experience, which got us around 500,000 downloads.

    Does anyone know if Apple staff look at your whole account when deciding to feature one of your products or simply at the one game that grabbed their attention? In other words, should we be moving our remodeled games out of our main account to increase chances of our original games getting featured?

    Thanks in advance!
    Ilia
     
  2. contatct

    contatct Boxer

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    @ilia_vinc
    So when you contact one of your apple contacts(if you have any) for feature and if they find your game/video worthy of a feature then they will send across an excel sheet to be filled with details of your game ... thats all.. next thing for you to do is "wait".. wait till your game release day (they recommend to do it on Thursday) and then see if you made it to the home page of world wide Appstore or to any country/region AppStore home page (next day from appannie of on the same day with some search or observing the number game center players whole day)

    also if they send across a form that doesn't guarantee a feature .

    now to your main question, whether you should remove cloned games from your account...i am not exactly sure about that because there is no specific protocol for Appstore feature that Apple follows , so i dont think no one can really answer this question...but i think instead of removing them ..why dont you just let them be and create new apple account for your new ideas...that will keep it clean(thats what i feel)..

    btw how come you got 500K downloads for your clones? i could never get those many downloads for the clones
     
    Last edited: May 8, 2016
  3. ilia_vince

    ilia_vince Boxer

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    @contatct - Thanks for your reply and suggestions!

    If you refer back to my original post, I said "should we be moving our remodeled games out of our main account". We do have a separate account and this is the plan if we go ahead. We get higher overall downloads with all games under one account, so I'd prefer to keep it that way if there's no harm. When I look at publishers like Ketchapp, they have quite a few remodeled games in their account, however it doesn't stop them from getting featured, so I'm leaning towards keeping our current setup. Ideally, I would like our team to apply a round of updates to make these existing games a bit more unique, or at least not so obviously remodeled. Moving forward, we would like to create games that are somewhat unique.

    We've generated over 500k downloads by combining both, free and paid advertising. This includes free and paid social media campaigns, subscriber lists, internal More Games section and organic growth like sharing, chart positions, etc. We often spend time analyzing successful people/companies and reverse engineer their efforts.

    Thanks,
    Ilia
     
  4. dmmcmah

    dmmcmah Avid Boxer

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    How can you tell if someone is advertising or using free? Seems to me that without advertising or a feature you're not going to make it these days. Social media seems like a waste. I don't go to social media to look for games I simply go to the app store.
     
  5. ilia_vince

    ilia_vince Boxer

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    @dmmcmah - "How can you tell if someone is advertising or using free?" - If I understood correctly, you are asking how to determine whether an app has paid or organic traffic. Of course you won't have deep insights/analytics, but you can find out a lot by analyzing the publisher, learning about who they are and what kind of resources they have. If their paid advertising efforts are consistent, you will most likely end up on the receiving end of their ads...

    You are correct, it is very unlikely that you can make it big without advertising/marketing. There are many things you can do to promote your product and not all of them are costly. Social media can be a waste if you are simply putting your efforts towards paid campaigns without growing a following, however it can work if done right. With social media you don't look for games, the content comes to you. Think of games that went viral within the last 2 years, social media was involved in quite a few...

    I think we are getting a bit off topic on this one, I came for some answers but found myself answering questions :)

    Thanks,
    Ilia
     
    dmmcmah likes this.

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