iPhone: Notorious marketing, idea piracy, and why should we be exposing new revenue streams?
I’ve been involved with the “iRis” project for the last 9 months at Rogue Pirate Ninja Interactive, LLC and finally just submitted our work for approval. You can check out the product spec over at http://www.roguepirateninja.com/games/iris
If there is one thing we’ve been feet frozen over it is how we’re going to take our game, which is on the order of complexity of about 80,000 lines of C & Objective-C, as well as 25 MB of art and audio assets, and correctly market it to the masses in a market that is starting to be salted with big-name companies like Id, EA, etc. Although we’ve done our homework well and have a pretty solid game, we’re seeing other Indie game developers get black balled into the twilight of the App Store, with little to no room to let their fun little apps breathe. There is no room left to win the technological warfare game the larger corporations can wage.
We’ve been focusing our entire energy on how we are going to market our game, not so much as an afterthought, but as an additional phase of production. We’ve been looking at a few other similar concepts and have come up with a few thoughts to help make us stand out.
First off, it can’t be said enough that the market of the iPhone is very giving to those who make fun quick little Apps that act as the laugh-getting party favours. From iBeer to iFart, to the Zippo lighter to Zen garden, if the App appeals to the cheap fun atmosphere of a bar or party, it almost certainly takes off with little effort. These sorts of games help sell themselves because the concept is easy to comprehend and requires only minimal effort to create. There is something peculiar about these Apps, as will be discussed later, but to put it briefly: minimal input, maximum ouput.
There is also another layer of marketing that is starting to be seen more and more. Apple has done itself a major dis-service by its submission and acceptance policies, getting backlogged into weeks at a time, even for just simple updates to an already existing App. Add to this the inexperience required to do such a job, perhaps poor overhead management, and you have a massive dysfunctional team of under-trained and under-experienced people with little ability to communicate internally. As a result of this, we’ve seen Apps get rejected for some of the most inane, most inappropriate of reasons, while other Apps with the same thing get off Scott free. There are online sites sprouting up that collect information on how long it took for Apple to get around to responding to an App, as well as database sites that collect reasons for rejection.
The best example of this is of course Eucalyptus, a reader application that was nothing more than an App that access web-accessible content and puts it into a nice book-like format. Since one of the books it could access was the “Karma Sutra”, and in text-only format, it was rejected on the basis that it had sexual content.
Okay, so this story is not new and has been touted on many a blog… But that’s the point… A lot of people have all heard about this story. Because of the notoriety it gained with being rejected for such a silly reason, it gave it the attention and grounds to create a following, a following of which was all too pleased to see it finally be approved. I was part of that following, and, as soon as I pulled up the product on the App Store on my iPod, I was shocked to see the price tag, a shiny 10$ USD.
But like all the marketing gurus always say: there is no such thing as bad press. The reality of the rejection process has sparked a few applications to get into the spotlight and have, rather directly, aided in the exposure of these applications. This has basically lead me into thinking that notoriety marketing is a real way to market something on the iPhone. However, this assumes that the action being done is against the ones submitting the App, not the other way around. It probably wouldn’t be the best for a company to rob a store for a marketing gimmick, even if they do get on the local news.
Secondly, part of the marketing process comes from just having something worth selling. Good ‘ol marketing theory 101 here, you have to have something unique, different, and neat about your App that makes it stand out against the rest. I recently was involved in a thread on Gamasutra forums that revolved around this. Sadly, developers simply can’t expect yet another simon-says game to be “different” enough to do well. There are hundreds of other free ones doing the same thing, and probably a whole lot better. Developers must do their homework and reach out and see what other games out there are doing.
So what is a good thing to build a game off of? One particular example of something that works is to simply steal the idea from a similar game. In some fashion or another, all games are guilty of this, perhaps some less than others, but in the end they are called genres for a reason.
iRis encountered one such occurrence. About two months prior to release, another application was released that showed similar gameplay concept to what we were doing. Being a bit upset at first, we decided to look closer to see what we were missing. It didn’t take much more than looking at the first couple review comments, and we were already back to the design board ensuring that we were going to add in the features being requested, as well as maintaining features others liked. While one could say we stole, because, well, we did change things based on another App’s reviews, the more appropriate thing to say is that we researched the competition so that we could make a better product. Not that we were doing it out of malice or out of a way to truly squash another Indie down (which is never the case in the Indie world), but simply that we had a preview of the comments that were to come if we released without certain things.
But with all the copy-cat applications out there, one must truly start to wonder, what does it take to really make a game good? The only real sure fire way to compete is to take an existing product that did well, analyze its failures and successes, and do the same thing. Idea piracy is not only a significant part of the business, but near required to stay afloat.
Lastly, the App Store has been blasted over and over again by its exclusivity clause. Basically, if you used Apple software to make your App, unless you get special clearance from Apple, you are being locked into selling your product exclusively on the App Store. Forget trying to change the routines and make it run on a desktop, and forget asking Apple to let you, you might as well come to the immediate realization that whatever you write that goes into the iPhone belongs to Apple.
But it isn’t all that bad, really. There has been people who make a tidy sum by their efforts in using the App Store. Surely Apple has done well by it, but the ability to take your App and port it to a different system is just another form of attaching yourself into another revenue stream.
Exposing new revenue streams should be a goal of any entrepreneur, and Rogue Pirate Ninja Interactive has been looking into providing extra content, such as its original sound track, an extended e-Manual, wallpaper, etc. as a supplementary digital download off such other distribution sites like Lulu.com. If it’s not the software that can be distributed through other means to generate more revenue, then the marketing potential for extra material can surely attract a few loyal customers, if not making a name for yourself to begin with. The goal of any business is to make money, and you have to have the revenue streams to provide a means to that end.
Overall though, in the game world, there is a war being waged. You either can employ the technological advantage or go the horde advantage. Given that most Indie developers out there simply don’t have the resources to employ a large development team to compete with the likes of the big names, the technological advantage really is a troublesome route to go in. Although even Indie games have a technological warfare side of them, the reality is that as more big name companies start to enter the iPhone market, marketing, branding, and rapid development are going to be crucial assets for any Indie game developer to leverage. Release fast, release often, or get into the technological warfare and spend 9 months making an App that can’t compete with the big name 3D point-and-click-adventures.
Of course, compared to some other games out there… iRis holds its candle pretty well. Others and myself, we all did a bang up job on it. Technical aspect we nailed. It’s the marketing aspect we’re struggling on now.
Lessons learned, moving on.
Best of luck.
You have some very unique and interesting perspectives on the “App” phenomenon. I’m very concerned with some of Apple’s removal of certain apps for ridiculous reasons, as your “Kama Sutra” example illustrates. I’d like to join an organized protest of some of these actions. I paid a tidy sum for my Itouch and I feel we should be heard!