Marketing is Weird, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Look to the Future. Part Two

After a delay I am finally back to complete the exciting conclusion of our marketing tale for Call Connect (CC).


When we left off in Part One we had just started on Update 2.0 which was around the end of 2011. The major part of the work being Greg going back and redoing all the graphics in CC from scratch. As we'd started development before the iPhone 4 announcement and its display resolution a lot of the original graphics were created in a way that meant they weren't easily up-scalable.

Whilst Greg got to work on giving CC a makeover and I started reworking the graphics code to handle the new resolution graphics we received an email from Appvent Calendar asking us if we wanted to be a part of their 2011 promotion. Essentially the idea was to mimic the chocolate calendars you get except instead of a little chocolate you get a free app every day. This inquiry is one of the many things that has come out of nowhere to us although we imagine it had something to do with our recent freebie promotion. It seems that people are watching.

We, of course, said yes to the promotion and were featured on the 9th of December. Although it was a promoted sale we didn't do as well as our own sale we'd completed not long before as you can see in the graph below.

The previous promotion moved over 20,000 units in its most successful day whereas this time the max was only slightly higher than 5,000

Although the app was only prominently featured for one day the organisers suggested we make the game free for a longer period which is what we did. The interesting thing that came out of this promotion was that unlike the first sale we did we actually got some sales after we returned CC back to the low-low price of 0.99c. The blue dot on the right of that graph is when the price returned and it shows 58 sales! I think that was the most sales we'd had in a day since our launch day.

The day after the 58 sales it dropped to 13 and then 8 and then 6 and then 3 and then 1. But from then until now we've constantly had at least 1 sale a day with only a random 0 every now and then. It's a peculiar thought actually, who are these individuals who are buying our game and how did they find about us? Why did the appvent calendar result in constant (albeit low) sales? These are some questions that I don't think we'll get to answer unfortunately but it's fun to ponder.

Another benefit from this sale and its increased movement of units of CC was that we began to be featured in the Australian iTunes store (A possible explanation for the trickle of sales). Unfortunately this featuring is not on the actual iPhone appstore - where most people make their impulse buys - but rather in the store in iTunes the program.

It may be hard to find (go to the AppStore then go to Games, then click Arcade in the list down the bottom right) but we're still there and next to some heavyweights like Espgaluda and Deathsmiles. The most interesting thing about it has been the fact that we've been constantly featured in that What's Hot section since then even though our sales are not impressive, to say the least. Nobody really knows how Apple makes their decisions for features but a lot of it points to being covered by websites and other media. That is why marketing is one of, if not the, biggest part of creating an iPhone app. Getting that coverage, especially initially, will lead to more coverage and then hopefully Apple will feature you in some way which equals easy sales which then push you into the top 10/25/50 sales charts where you then become millionaires, buy personal islands and never have to do anything for yourself ever again. Or so I've heard.

Unfortunately due to our slow sales and infrequent sales spikes we've only managed to climb the charts in the somewhat smaller AppStores a few times:

Big love to Uzbekistan

Those heights were mainly reached during our sales periods too so whilst it would have helped to move more free copies, once we went back to paid the rankings were moot and so did not result in more paid sales.

After the AppVent promotion we continued work on the Retina update. There's another potential blog post in the issues that were faced with bringing the highres graphics to the iPhone (iPhone 3 especially) but to keep it simple we managed to work through the bumps and released update 2.0 on the 9th of January.
Much celebration was had as we could both see that this new version was head and shoulders - visually - above what we had before. To avoid hyperbole, the game looked (and continues to look) spectacular. The detail Greg put into the retina graphics showed us what Call Connect should have looked like from the start and we were very excited to see what other people thought of the update. Especially for people playing on the iPad as the resolution of our graphics was nearly full iPad res. Well it was until the iPad 3 came out...

So what happened on the 9th of January?

Enough for a couple of pizzas or a really cheap slab

Every time you release an update your app gets pushed back into the new release list in the AppStore. The fact that we had 0 sales the two days before the update went out shows how much of an effect that new release list can have on boosting your sales. Unfortunately we went back to our regular broadcasting soon after that but it still made for an exciting day.

It was soon after this that one of our friends from the Edge forum asked us if we'd be willing to do an interview for his gaming blog. We, of course, said yes. One because we were doing a favour for a friend, and two because there is no reason you should ever say no to an interview; one of the rules that Edmund McMillen from Team Meat lives by. What resulted was a fun Skype chat about game development and us and I think is definitely worth the read. Which you can do here. We hope that all interviews in the future are as fun and entertaining as the one with Adrian was.


So once the retina update was out we were finally content with Call Connect. We had both difficulty modes, player options, all the major bugs squashed (as far as we know) and now finally the graphics were a proper representation of the game we had always wanted CC to be. We were ready to move on to future projects and figured any other marketing we tried would be too little too late.

And then the Eurogamer article appeared.

On the 18th of February we got word from Twitter that we'd been featured as the App of the Day on Eurogamer. It was not expected. Somehow, Christian Donlan from Eurogamer had come across our app, taken a liking to the icon, decided to give it a go and liked it enough to feature it on one of the biggest gaming websites in Europe.

So not only did we have a wonderfully written article on our little game but it also meant we were sitting there next to the likes of Mass Effect 3 and Tim Shafer on the front page of a major gaming website. Cross that one off the bucket list.

And here's what happens to your sales when you get featured on a big website:

Almost enough for two slabs

That was a good day, really good. Almost like we'd finally made it. We might not have had the money but we had some recognition.

We also realised that this might mean we have some leverage for other websites. They might not be willing to write something about an unknown developer and an unknown game but how about one with a fancy article on Eurogamer? We went back to our PR document and started sending out some emails. This time including a link to the Eurogamer article and a big mention to our fancy new graphics.

We didn't hear back from many websites but one of the ones we did hear from was Kotaku. Yes, that Kotaku. We sent them an email asking if we could be a part of their Show and Tell series and they said yes.

Basically it involved answering some interview style questions and not long after we were featured on their site. The show and tell article came out on March 1st. And here are the sales in units for around that time:

As you can see, it's not quite as much as when the Eurogamer article hit. Now this could be because the Eurogamer article was more like a review, or it could be because the Kotaku article came out during the week and the Eurogamer one was on a Saturday. The latter sounds more logical but I guess we'll never know. Either way, more sales yay!

Whilst the article shenanigans were going on we were also trying other avenues. I updated our forum thread on TouchArcade, which resulted in a few more players and some nice feedback, and Greg did our big Reddit post. A topic which he will do his own blog post on.

In terms of articles though, this is as far as we've gone (for now...) and although they never resulted in a boom of sales or continued success we feel that each has been extremely useful. We feel like we're building contacts. People who, when the time comes, we hope to be able to contact and say, "hey we've got this new game coming out" and they might actually listen. It's also about building a recognisable name for ourselves, we want people to be able to see the name Walk Through The Clock and recognise it as those guys who made Call Connect.

It's hard coming into indie game development with nothing but your new product. Big company developers who quit their jobs and form their own companies tend to be able to sell themselves fairly easily ("From the makers of that big game series you like") and experienced indies who have had at least one successful product will generally find success in the next. It's that starting from nothing that is the toughest.

If any advice is to come from this it would be that your marketing will be key if you want your first attempt to be a true success. We went into Call Connect not expecting it to boom and make us rich, it was to be a learning experience and learn we have. It's how a lot of indies start out, just look at Dolphin Hero from The Voxel Agents, or that space game from Halfbrick otherwise known as those games you've never played. You can test the water first before leaping with a small project or you can do as much research and work into making sure that first dip is just right.

If you want your first game to be a success then you'll need to market yourselves from day one. By the time your product is ready to go out you should have a bunch of contacts willing to post reviews, news, interviews, anything as the game goes out. As you can see from the graphs and so on in these blog posts each little bit counts towards extra sales, the only issue we had was that they were all separate. A little here a little there. If we'd managed to coordinate it so that everything that we did over these posts was done at the same time then maybe we would have garnered enough attention to push us into the top sales lists or maybe to a feature from Apple. It will take quite a bit of effort to do that but it will be worth it in the end.


Unfortunately we'll never truly know if that was a possibility for Call Connect but what we do know is what needs to be done for project number 2 and that in itself is rather exciting.

-Shaun.