Ask HN: Our iPad game hit top 30 in free games, how do we keep the momentum? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Our iPad game hit top 30 in free games, how do we keep the momentum?

78 pointsarbesfeld38 comments

We are two MIT students who just published our physics-based puzzle game "Marble Drop" (http://www.marbledropgame.com) for iOS and Android (originally created for MakeGamesWithUs` MIT iOS games competition). The game has been a huge success in its first week, and we are now pushing the top of the App Store rankings in all of the relevant categories. At this point, we really have no idea what we should be doing as we try to grow our user base. We have been doing obvious things like talking to press, updating content, etc, but I suspect that there are a number of key strategies that are missing from our plan.

Do any HNers have advice on how we should spend our time and resources as we grow Marble Drop? Thanks in advance!

View on HN

I developed a short-lived minor hit game several years ago which topped out at #3 on the U.S. App Store overall free chart, right behind the Facebook app. At the time that represented about 50-60,000 downloads a day; I assume it would be considerably more now.

That app was languishing in the nether regions of the App Store until we got press on some Gawker properties at which point it absolutely exploded. It was then picked up by other outlets which only helped.

There's a million apps out there and media outlets are not going to talk about all of them, so the way we got that press was by making writing an article about us more valuable to them: we gave them something to give their readers. This was a $0.99 app (these were the days before it was clear that charging money up front for apps is not a viable strategy). We scheduled a weekend giveaway about a week out, emailed media about it, and they got to offer their readers more than just pointing out an app they might like, they got to give them a deal on it.

So, in my limited experience, a good way to get traction is through some combination the media (they have the eyeballs) and a deal (people love deals). And the best way to get the media to talk about you is to make talking about you more valuable to them.

bww, how did you get there initially? What app was it?

Congratulations on the success! Getting a mobile game noticed isn't easy anymore.

I'd say your top priorities should be (in this order): 1. Keeping your existing players as long as possible (Retention) 2. Making money (Monetization) 3. Getting new users in the door (User Acquisition)

It's a tough environment right now, and you can easily spend all your profits on marketing--so you have to make sure you're maximizing the Lifetime Value (LTV) of every install.

As a product manager with experience working on games for Zynga, Disney, and a few small gaming companies, I can tell you that free to play games are more like an on-going service than a make-it-and-ship-it console game.

Successful game developers generally follow the same pattern: 1. Collect data to see what players like / don't like 2. Analyze the data to decide what to do next 3. Implement a change / new feature 4. See if it worked 5. Repeat

Data-driven decision making is key to making sure you're investing your engineering resources for the highest return.

I'd be happy to talk in more detail.

I'd love to talk to you in more detail, can I have your email ?

> com.arbesfeld.marble_drop_test

The game's humble Android start are still evident in the link to the Google Play store.

Hi arbesfeld, This looks like a fun little game but could you please consider adding a colourblind mode. Your game is completely inaccessible to people such as myself with rod monochromatism - The second level features three different marbles, two of which appear the same.

Here is an edited screenshot to give you an idea of how I might see the game: http://i.imgur.com/IFUkvKm.png

Can you see how similar the second two marbles look?

One common way to address this is by assigning each marble and each bucket a letter or a number.

@xmodem: thanks for the feedback - we have a color blind mode which uses letters that should be released in the next few days. We tried to choose colors that were as distinct as possible for a color blind player, but there is definitely a limit to how far colors can go.

Congrats on releasing this great game!

A couple of thoughts.

Tracking: - If you are not yet tracking your users, start doing that (Google Analytics, Flurry, etc.). The analytics will give you great insights into user behaviour, retention, churn rate, segmentation, etc. Use the data to decide what you should focus on next (e.g. if the user engagement is too low, try focusing on that).

ASO - Optimize keywords to ensure that you are ranking in the top 10 for each of your keywords. I have written a series of blog posts about this topic (http://blackboardmadness.com/blog/app-store-optimization-aso...) and also developed my own keyword selection/scoring model. I'd be happy to help with this (szilard at blackboardmadness.com).

- Optimize file size: got a warning on the Android Play Store that the file size is very large (probably wouldn't prioritize this too high at the moment, though)

Review/ Rating: - Allow users to rate your app from inside the game (e.g. use Appirater to prompt users to rate after X app sessions)

Social Integration: - Deep FB integration (add an invite friends button, post achievements, FB leaderboard integration as in Dots)

Good luck!

Just tried out the first few levels. Fun little game. The add ons for hints is an easy standard way to monetize a free game. I can't offer much advice graphics, but you might want to look at making the marbles look like marbles. Polish up the visuals just a bit. Feels like it's 95% of the way there.

Other ideas: Look into some way to compete with other people. Some way to share it.

Add the ability to text a link to the App Store to a friend. Only ask for the contacts permission when someone initiates that feature.

Just keep iterating on the game and polishing it. You guys will get more ideas as time goes by.

Expect the popularity to fall off at some point. That's normal.

Apple looks for apps that really show off the platform. Being in the top 30 is great. If the visuals and sounds were a little more polished there's a better chance your game might be featured. This can be really great for boosting you higher, though it's not a permanent bump.

Apps have life cycles. Do the best you can now and learn from it. Invaluable lessons for doing more apps in the future.

My answer would be, it depends on your objectives. Are you hoping to build this into a large game company? Are you happy to try to craft a "lifestyle" game studio? Do you care about money? Are you just wanting to see lots of people play your game? Etc.

Your options include working with a large game publisher, which would be something to consider if you have limited resources on the marketing side and don't want to raise venture capital.

From a pure product strategy point of view, the best possible thing you could do is develop a viral loop, such that each of these installs you're currently getting for free could help you generate more installs.

Often this is done hand-in-hand with some key element of game-play (e.g. gifting) or hand-in-hand with some paid element, so people can either pay for something (generating you revenue) or avoid paying by completing viral actions (generating you new users).

Good luck!

Guys,

Thats incredible. Apple pushes new apps in the first week or 10 days. Usually it kind of drops after that. It might not be the case for your app. Wait a bit before you decide to change your life because of this game. If in one month its still getting 100 000 downloads per day... Then you got a winner

There's a few things you can do: - focus on growing the userbase and sell the game in a few months or years. Make your game better and better... - try to make money right now through ads. I would suggest to cut a direct deal with a big game developer like supercell (charboost is good for that) - you're probably not making any money right now. I saw that you're not anywhere in the top grossing

I have a few apps that hit the top 1000 overall in the us. If you wanna talk, contact me : gabriel.louis.muller at gmail.com

Enjoy the ride,

Gab

You might do nothing but celebrate. When we were quickly climbing the top ten did exactly that. The "snowball effect" is mostly what keeps the momentum going and if your app is a good one people are already recommending it and you will keep going. If that does not happen and your expectations are not met you can take it as a sign to improve the app.

That being said I would keep very close attention to reviews. (I use appfigures to keep track of that) and fix very quickly everything that should not be. Even though we were #2 there were a few bugs reported via the review system and there is a lot of people that are kind enough to let you know,

If you have a tool like crashalytics thats even better.

Congratulations!

Hey, congrats on the success ! I would suggest focusing on retention, social sharing and ratings to keep yourself in a good app store positon.

Retention : add push notifications, try to stay in touch with the users (with limited offers for example as mentioned below) and to make the user come back to the app

Social sharing : I would suggest creating a leaderboard, and connecting to FB to share your results and compete against others.

Ratings : Implement an incentive to let the user rate your app, to grow the number of reviews you have.

PS : I didn't have time to download the app, so maybe you already did this. I will download it in a couple of hours and will edit. If you want to chat more, alexei [dot] chemenda [at] gmail [dot] com !

Several of the comments suggest a social leader board; I think that's a great idea. If you don't want to support Game Center on iOS, maybe a Facebook leader board. You could also set up your score board using Amazon's simpleDB. They support Facebook, Google, and Amazon logins. There's a basic article on that here: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/SDKs/iOS/8829919029640036 Amazon's dynamoDB does more than that, but I can't seem to find the article on high score integration through dynamoDB. Hope it helps, and good luck!

Here's the quick walk through for posting scores using dynamoDB:

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developergu...

Interesting name, there is already a game with the exact same one released in 1997 from Maxis [now EA]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Drop . Good luck.

I would think that EA would probably exercise their copyright and any trademarks they have on the Marble Drop name. Anyone have possible insight to this?

Congrats on the game guys, it's pretty cool. The federal registration on the Marble Drop name was dropped by Maxis back in 2004 (do a Tess2 search on the uspto.gov website). That doesn't mean that they've abandoned all rights to use the name for a mobile game... before you panic and change the name, or just shrug and ignore the coincidence, I would say go talk to a Trademark attorney. I'm sure you can find plenty of them up around MIT (most firms that do patent work will have one or two trademark guys). If you're going to continue to grow with your game, it'll be well worth the money.

Yeah, the first thing I thought when I saw the title was: hey, that's already a game! Kids these days don't respect the classics. shakes fist

Hi Matt! Grats on the success of your game.

I would recommend making a subset of the levels free and having the rest be IAP or a separate purchase. Then, make it free for a limited time, and try to get some blogs to cover you and promote your app on social media at the same time. This type of model only really works if you have critical mass, but it seems like you're off to a good start.

Good luck!

Your game has far too many ads. I played a few levels and was irritated that I had to close a fullscreen ad after every other level. I uninstalled the game when the first video ad was presented.

I don't pretend to know much about the iphone game market, but I can't imagine that these ads will help your position much.

Your buttons doesn't work for me on Chrome 36 / Mac OSX:

http://www.gfycat.com/OptimisticGrossAegeancat

Offtopic, but which tool do you use to capture videos like this? I've been meaning to find one.

EDIT: I'm getting the feeling there might be a niche market for a cross-platform program that does this. QuickCast is slick, but Mac-only. Simplescreenrecorder works, but it's Linux-only. Running ffmpeg console commands might work, but it's a bit esoteric. Nvidia has a tool, but only for Nvidia card owners. And QuickTime is, well, QuickTime. Interesting...

Not sure if it's what grandparent used, but I recently discovered QuickTime Player has a feature to do screen recording that works pretty well

I found simplescreenrecorder (for Linux, probably for other OSs) fantastic for this.

If you have a Nvidia graphics card 6xx and higher, a feature called "Shadow Play" does a great job of recording on screen content.

QuickCast is great for recording and hosting tiny screencasts too

ffmpeg -f x11grab -s 1024x768 -r 30 -i :0.0 -sameq x11grab.mpg

Open Broadcaster Software? https://obsproject.com/

Hmm, can OBS capture WebM to be uploaded to Gfycat?

Actually, it'd be nice to have a program that records WebM + uploads to Gfycat in one step.

I used GifGrabber but it's very bad. I'm sure there is a place for someone, especially for a web-based alternative.

(I also have LiteCap, QuickCast, ... but there are all really bad)

take a minimal amount of funding from a high profile angel investor (Kevin Rose) or vc who can help market it with a tweet etc

Well, the first question has to be what's your aim and ambition with this game?

Get featured as an Ask HN.

Btw Marble Drop is awesome game.

Launch limited-time promos. People love these things. I don't know why. I think it caters to the hoarding instinct.

Give people exclusive levels or badges or other bonuses if they download within a time period. These don't have to be prepackaged with the installer, they can be delivered later, depending on the installation date.

Scrolling down is fun, but I like to scroll up once in a while too.

I use Ghostery in Firefox (17, that's what Debian Stable has). I click on the link to the Android play store and nothing happens. Ghostery is blocking it somehow, if I disable it it works. No idea why tho.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com