Just sharing with you another good video about user acquisition.
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Hi there. When you want to create multiplayer games or communicate data between your app in different devices you need a server to be the "middleman". Today you can find some companies offering that kind of service for you (Corona has the Corona Cloud, Google now have the Google Play Game Services, ...) but sometimes these services are not sufficient for you (because the free tier price is not enough, or you need more flexibility of types of data that you store,...). So sometimes you need to have your own server. These type of server that has the mission of providing data for application is called WebService, WebAPI or REST API and in this post I will show you how you can create your own "WebService" for you Corona app. You can use any type of language to create the server (PHP, ASP,....). In this case I will be creating a VB.NET server. I use the quotes in WebService because we are not actually creating a WebService, but a simple WebPage that will receive your app request, process it and give a response. It will work as the same as a WebService and until not I did not find any big difference between the two, even in terms of performance. So, Let's go. This example will be a game requesting the server all multiplayer games of that user and a specific opponent. So, the app will make a request for the server passing the params via GET and receive the response in JSON format.
So, an example of the usage of the code above in your app would be: local params = {} Some Important Information:
The code above use GET params and sometimes GET is not the best method to pass the params (Ex: Specially if you have a large amount of data to pass). In that case, you would want to pass the params via POST. The code with POST params will be almost the same but you would have to make the following modifications: 1) Delete these lines in the app code: local linkComplete = serverURL .. "?" .. paramToString(paramsToBePassed) 2) Add these lines in the app code in the same place of the lines above: local body = paramToString(paramsToBePassed) 3) Delete these lines in the Server Code 'Retrieving the GET params 4) Add these lines in the Server Code in the same place of the lines above 'Retrieving the POST params Hope that this example helps you in developing your server.
See you. When I started developing games, the first question that I had was how many downloads would I have in my first days. Of course, there is no definitive answer for that question because it depends on several factors (marketing budget, type of game,...). But now, after 2 months for the release of our first game (Cut My Puzzle), and also talking to several developers, I think I can give you a ballpark of the daily downloads of a normal game. In fact, I think Cut My Puzzle reflects exactly that. I call a normal game here a game in which the majority of your downloads are organic, what I think it is the reality for most indie developers who don't have lot of money to spend in markting/PR. So, let's see how Cut my Puzzle has been performing until now. The first thing that attracts the attention is the pick in the iOS version as soon as it was released. That is because we were featured in the New and Noteworthy section of iTunes in the Puzzle and Family category. The game was featured during 1 week and after that we saw the number of downloads decreasing until it stabilized around 50 downloads per day (d.d).
On the other hand, Google Play started with very downloads (<10 d.d.) and now it almost with the same rate of iOS downloads. Amazon Store has very low downloads and it is the only store that we have a free and paid version of Cut My Puzzle. The graphic reflects the free version. Amazon has recently expanded to more 200 countries, so I would not be surprised if the d.d. starts to increase. If we take the average daily downloads from that period above (~2 months), we have:
As you can imagine such numbers of downloads are very low if you want to make money from your game but I think that it is what you would have if you simply launch a traditional game in the market (like Cut My Puzzle which is a jigsaw puzzle game) and do not spend time/money in marketing it properly. Something that I will try to do now is optimize the search keywords for Cut My Puzzle in the iTunes Store (what is called ASO - App Store Optimization). Some developers say that you can expect thousands of daily downloads if you have a good ASO for you app/game. You example you can find here. I hope you find these numbers useful and I will continue to post more statistics about our games specially as we try new different marketing techniques. See you. I really think that User Acquisition is a very important topic, so I am sharing here more interesting videos about that subject. I hope you liked it. Today our new game, Follow the Color, has been released at the App Store. This is brain game, in which you have to test your reflection by making specific moves based on the color that appears in the screen. If you like brain games, you can check it by clicking in the link below. It costs $0.99 and is also available at the Amazon Store. We just created a section in the RBG site to share some useful tools for game developers. We started sharing a extensive list of words translation that you can use for make globalization for you game.
We will add some more tools as the time passes by, including some corona lua libraries that we developed and use in our games. To access the resources section, just click in the "Resources for Game Developers" in the RBG site (http://redbeachgames.com) Hope that it helps you in your game! If you are a developer or just curious about the Casual Games industry, I highly recommend you to read the Casual Connect magazine.
It has very good articles about marketing, user acquisition and other topics related to the industry. And it is free :). Casual Connect Maganize: http://casualconnect.org/magazine-archive/ After you have your game released, you will have to deal with the 2 things that can really make your game successful or not: Marketing and User acquisition. Below you will find a link that has very useful information about Marketing (I already mentioned it in a previous post) and also two videos that I found really good about these subjects. Marketing: The iOS App Marketing Strategy Guide by Apptamin Videos: In the tutorial "Creating an iOS Developer Account with Apple" I mentioned that your company "Legal Entity Name" will be your "Seller Name" that will appear in the App Store. However, when I registered my account in the iTunes Connect (system to submit/mange your apps), I was asked for the "Company Name" that I would want to use in the App Store (image below). So in that moment I was surprised because I was told by the Apple system when creating my iOS Developer Account that my "Company Name" would be my "Legal Entity Name". Well, now with our game released, I could check that what name would appear in the App Store. And the answer is both! Our company legal entity name is "Red Beach Games Ltda." in which the "Ltda." is the type of our company in Brazil. It is similar to the "Inc." in the end of some American companies. When registering our iTunes Connect account, I choose the company name to be "Red Beach Games", without the "Ltda." Below you can see how our company name appears in the App Store. As you can see, the company name that I chose in the iTunes Connect shows below our game name (first image) and our "Legal Entity Name" shows as the "Seller" field inside Information area (second image). So both names are used, but the name that you choose in the iTunes Connect would be more visible to your users.
I hope that this post help you understand that confusion with the different names that you have to use with Apple. See u. Our game, Cut My Puzzle, has just been featured at iTunes. We currently are the #1 game in the "New" category both in the Puzzle category and Family category (US store).
If you do not have download it yet, just click here and try it. It is free! Later I will bring the impact of being featured in the number of daily downloads. See you! |
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