What if we come up with our own sites?
chordsnstrings
Member Posts: 36
Let's face it, what do these 'giveaway' sites and promoting sites do in the first place? Just use some pre-used marketing tools to market our products and take a large sum of money away just from that.
Right?
Yeah, I know. Pretty bad.
What if we gamesalad users come up with our own site as such? A community, forum, which would have twitter and facebook integration so that you can easily retweet and fb like any and every post made over there? And we all help each other out to create that SEO and Buzz required to make an app noticed?
Oh, and since its user generated, it'd be.. free!
Do you think we would benefit with a site as such?
Right?
Yeah, I know. Pretty bad.
What if we gamesalad users come up with our own site as such? A community, forum, which would have twitter and facebook integration so that you can easily retweet and fb like any and every post made over there? And we all help each other out to create that SEO and Buzz required to make an app noticed?
Oh, and since its user generated, it'd be.. free!
Do you think we would benefit with a site as such?
Comments
LBG
But if you were serious about it I wouldn't mind helping out.
-------
"Honey Tribe is not only a remarkably endearing little game, but it's also incredibly addictive." Pocket Gamer
"...a touch above the rest in the endless running genre" 148apps.com
Say hi on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Sound design and music service available: http://tiny.cc/MusicService
www.HoneyTribeStudios.com
I think chordsnstrings is talking about a site that would bring in traffic from iOS users looking for new games who don't yet know about yours.
Well there is now an official GS game of the month competition. Hopefully that will be the first step in GS helping users to promote their games. It's all well and good being able to make iOS games with a low barrier to entry. But if a new, optimistic dev spends a lot of time and effort making a game or two...and nobody downloads... more than likely it'll only be a matter of time before they get disheartened and give up.
P.S. Not sure if you are UK based but your app is in new and noteworthy in both kids and educational games here. Good job!!
I have been doing a bit of research about the 'secrets' of PR. And its not really all that pretty - let's see what they use: they use social media such as Twitter and Facebook (amongst us all, Im sure we've got 1000+ twitter accounts with 32490324923 people reaching it all...) They use their links to do video reviews in youtube and again amongst us we're good enough to do that ourselves, really.
They help the developer by 'posting reviews' about their 'own experience' about gameplay and what not to get to the top, really that's all that there is.
And for SEO - few simple tricks like interlinks, exchanges and social interaction would surely over time bring the site to top.
I am VERY serious about this, but like any community based sites, it can NOT be achieved all by yourself. I seriously believe if we all jumped on board, and actually did what these PR people do - for free, it'd really help us out and we could only be happy knowing that we're not spending at all on our OWN promotions but in return we're helping other developers out.
Why pay 2 grand to a PR company when you could perhaps achieve the same with your own ? All they do offer is just same that we can do ourselves!
Think about it. If you guys are serious - I'm totally up for it and will start working on a site like that which would be an extension. But yes, it would mean 'cheating' sometimes for reviews. It'd mean downloading and helping other developers out. It'd mean tweeting perhaps your rival's app. As well as yours. You would be actively participating in something that would boost your 'rival's' app up, at the same time, he / she's returning you the favor.
All I'm saying is this community is great. We could use it to our advantage. Really. If we all pitch in maintaining a site like that wouldn't be hard, would it? Most of our days are infront of the computer already - what'd be 10 minutes a day for a site like that? But 1000 people working 10 minutes a day = 10000 working minutes!
I rest my case
However, there is a big barrier to overcome with promoting GS games, and that is the huge amount of really low quality titles that are pushed out onto the appstore every month.
GS has a very low barrier to entry and apple are not picky about approving really bad games. Whether that is poor graphics, poor gameplay, template republishing, crashing games, simplistic learning projects being released or generally stuff that looks like it was done by a kid. Most of these have the GS logo slapped on the front of the game loading screen and that is what people associate with gamesalad.
I would say on average about 5 really good GS titles are released every month and probably about 100 really bad ones. If this venture involved everyone being able to push their games then it would rapidly get the same reputation that GS games have in the wider review world. Credibility would go hugely down hill, due to all the bad games the site was pushing.
I think the only way for this to work would involve being very picky about which titles are involved, maybe even doing a community vote each week for a new title to be pushed. Otherwise I think the site would get a reputation for promoting bad games. The people at Gamesalad have dabbled in the idea of promoting good games with not too much success so far.
I don't mean to be negative as I think PR is definitely needed in the sea of half a million apps. But to gain a reputation as a credible source for new games they really have to be good.
That was a REALLY good point. Did NOT think of it at all. Not all games made by game salad are in fact up to the par. And you're so right about that.
And if there is a bar to get in to the community, I don't think the model that I am thinking of currently (everybody helps push everyone else's app up) is hardly going to work.
But then again if we use the poll option to find out which one to push its pretty much the same as what GS is doing here in the first place - game of the month. Plus it kinda defies the purpose of the PR site in the first place.
Can we come up with perhaps a middle ground to what the options are? Without putting the bar in, is there any way to keep quality control yet at the same time get the same number of people helping with the promotion?
and dot com, really. Or else the press releases would eff up.
I'm at http://www.kamransarkar.com - as a designer I deal with sites like this all the time. I might need a few support but if I'm doing the usual way I do it using engines I think I'll be able to conjure something up myself.
GSPR.com sounds good. Not sure if its taken. But I want something very simple and easy to remember.
ipr prgs tried everything. But yeah, along those lines.
If you go ahead with this make sure you know who the site is for. If it's for teh benefit of GS devs then you'll have an audience of.... GS devs.
Once you've decided that, make quality content for them that is exactly what the audience will be looking for. And ideally, something that is in some way different from what other sites offer.
Of course it's easy for me to say all that. But doing it and doing it well is another story.
An ex GS user recently set up a site for devs to submit their game trailers. Thought that was quite an interesting idea. So he creates the framework (which still looks basic at the moment) and other devs provide all the content. Actually I think it's linked with youtube so he has no video hosting issues: http://iphoneapptrailers.com/
Shaz
-------
"Honey Tribe is not only a remarkably endearing little game, but it's also incredibly addictive." Pocket Gamer
"...a touch above the rest in the endless running genre" 148apps.com
Say hi on Twitter
Like us on Facebook
Sound design and music service available: http://tiny.cc/MusicService
www.HoneyTribeStudios.com