Now that the release of Sticky Balls is on the horizon, I have asked myself the question that most programmers ask themselves when they’re done coding – how will anyone find this game??
There are different schools of thoughts on how to promote your game. One end of the spectrum you have the “artists” and the other end you have the “businessmen”. Indie game makers tend to fall on the artist spectrum; they believe that a good product sells itself and look down on the sneaky marketing tricks of the businessmen. Businessmen, like Trey Smith, come from a marketing background typically and focus on buzzwords like stickiness, disruptive, and viral over gameplay.
While most people fall in one camp or the other, I put myself in the boring “it depends” camp. It depends on the game. I made my board game soundboards for my own fun and was much more concerned with creating something cool than making money.
Sticky Balls though, this is clearly a game that I created for people to use as a time waster. There will never be a Sticky Balls cartoon. 10 year olds will not wear Sticky Balls branded t-shirts and Microsoft will not buy Sticky Balls for a few billion dollars. This is a game that I want people to play for a little while and have some quick fun. In that sense, this falls closer to the businessman end of the spectrum.
So now to the point – how do I get this (hopefully) addictive game into the hands of would-be players? I had originally planned on bringing someone in to handle all the marketing because it seemed time consuming and not my forte. Pestering bloggers begging for a review, going to game conventions, posting on forums, twitter posts, things like that. After a little research though I came to the conclusion that this is the promotion model for a bigger “artist” type game, one where you look to cultivate a rabid following. As I said, there will never be a huge following for this game so I need to look at other avenues.
Enter ASO. App Store Optimization is like the heir to Search Engine Optimization. SEO seems to have taken a blow in recent years due to Google just getting smarter and focusing more on quality content than keyword trickery. The great thing about making apps is that it is a lot more difficult to produce and submit an app than it is to create a website so there is a ton less competition for keywords. You can reasonably expect to end up in the top ten for a search term. This is what I will focus on to promote Sticky Balls.
There are many sites that give access to ASO information but the best one I was able to find was SensorTower.com. (It doesn’t hurt that they have a free trial :D) The feature I started using was the Keyword Spy. You search for apps that are similar to yours (competitors) and are able to see what keywords they are likely using. In the past when I released my other games I just came up with a list of seemingly relevant keywords without regard to how much traffic it would generate or how hard it would be to rank and called it a day. This time, I’m going at it smart and spying on the competition first.
You can input the keywords you are using and SensorTower will review them for you and make recommendations. I hadn’t realized it but I was using a word in my keywords that was already in my title, which means I’m wasting precious characters. They also highlight long words that may not be the most efficient. For example, if I have the keyword “zombification”, I can instead swap out “flesh,turn,dead” for about the same amount of space and will probably turn up in more search results (sorry about that example, still have my Zombie Clowns game on the mind!).
The best feature of SensorTower for me is the traffic and difficulty rankings. Here you search for a term and it gives you a summary of how much search traffic the term gets and how difficult it is to rank for this term on both iPhone and iPad.
This is where the ex-accountant in me gets excited. DATA TO EXPLOIT. It reminds me when I used to play Madden on Xbox in franchise mode. I would delight in the offseason where I would pore through free agents’ stats and find the best bang for the buck. What you’re looking for is low difficulty and high traffic search terms. Although it seems that low difficulty is really the more important metric, especially for a new game with no presence yet.
So now that you’ve got the tools, what do you do with them? I was delighted to see in my inbox that SensorTower started sending me training articles on how to use their site. The thing that stuck out about them was that they start from the ground up and cover the very basics. “What is ASO?” They cover the philosophical end so that you know what you’re really trying to do. Reading through them have gotten me really excited to master the rankings. The App Store has become a game in itself to me, and thankfully I have the tools now to be able to win.