What I'm most interested is people's experience with selling successful iPhone apps. What have you done to gain more exposure? My marketing plan essentially includes creating a cool one-page website that is simplistic and sells the game with videos/screenshots (I've already a hired a designer to design it). Also to talk about it on twitter/facebook/reddit/HN/etc. Also to get my friends and a few local businesses to talk about it. Maybe contact some companies like Appular to see if they'll support it. I fear that none of this, except maybe the last one, has any chance of getting me wide exposure. Are there good app review websites I should submit it to? What else would be good?
For me, I looked at the market in July 2008 and saw an opportunity in a darts game of all things. I'm not an avid darts player but I had just installed a dart board in my basement a few weeks prior to the start of the project.
My thought was something like this:
"I see no good darts games for the iPhone. I bet you I can create one and get all those 20-something guys from the UK to download a copy"
And that basically worked. Darts went #1 in the UK in December 2008 and in the US shortly thereafter.
Part of the answer for me was to just make a good app with good gameplay mechanics and 3D graphics that didn't look like a toy, and hope that my concepts of the marketplace were right.
The app going #1 got me a lot of exposure, enough to leave Yahoo and work on iPhone consulting and secret big projects (way too big -- I need to ship the thing already).
The ad revenue (I hate ads and am very sorry I have to put them in the app) also helps a great deal to help fund my foray into self-startup mode.
For the curious, the app has 40K games played daily, about 10K downloads a day, and about 12MM downloads since day 1 in October 2008.
One thing you could try is sending review copies to game journalists on the web - I'm not sure which ones are best for iPhone or mobile games, but these days most have at least a passing interest. If you can cold-email some of the reviewers with some kind redemption code for the game, and if you can sell the premise to them in a couple of lines (the good sites probably get a LOT of submissions like this, you need to grab their attention QUICK), you might be able to convince them to post a review or at least a news item.
I like that it is written in Gambit-C Scheme, which has been one of my weapons of choice when I want to code in a high level language and produce small, fast, standalone executables. As of last year, Marc made it very easy to compile and link executables, and portable across OS X, Windows, Linux (just do a rebuild on each platform). Recommended!
You can write apps in other languages and embed the associated interpreter (e.g. Ruby, Lua, Python). You are not allowed to download and interpret code that has not been signed and reviewed.
sorry to sound snarky (i think scheme is awesome as well), but you probably shouldn't advertise this as a "scheme game", since your potential audience probably doesn't care what technologies you use to write the game. i'd suggest to focus on your target demographic and focus on pitching it to them.
You're totally right. The audience for my personal blog though is techy people, and I'm advertising it as a Scheme game to get some attention from the tech crowd. However, when I actually publish the game, I will dedicate a website to the game and market the heck out of it to the casual consumer never mentioning Scheme.
I think it would still be worthwhile to add a note in the game and on the game's website saying that it was made with Gambit Scheme. Somewhere in the credits, or copyright info, or a similar place.
