What if we come up with our own sites?

chordsnstringschordsnstrings 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?

Comments

  • LBGLBG Member Posts: 277
    I think that all the exposure we could get would be great. It would need people with marketing savvy to head it up.

    LBG
  • HoneyTribeStudiosHoneyTribeStudios Member Posts: 1,792
    Setting up and maintaing a website with good, original content is hard work. It takes time to climb the google rankings in whatever keywords you are competing for.

    But if you were serious about it I wouldn't mind helping out.

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    "Honey Tribe is not only a remarkably endearing little game, but it's also incredibly addictive." Pocket Gamer
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  • HoneyTribeStudiosHoneyTribeStudios Member Posts: 1,792
    RKS said:
    Hey, I voted Yeah, but the GS forums are still very high on google. I found my web browser on the first link (try it - google marseweb) before I found my website.

    Well it's not really about people searching for a specific title. If they already decided to download your game - job done, $0.70 in the bank ;)

    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.
  • LBGLBG Member Posts: 277
    Hey honey tribe. I agree. It's hard work maintaining and marketing a site. It take many hours but I'm sure with a group of people and good management we could lighten the load.

    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!!
  • chordsnstringschordsnstrings Member Posts: 36
    Actually I am quite serious.

    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 :)
  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    I think that any kind of PR could be a good thing.

    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.
  • StusAppsStusApps Member, PRO Posts: 1,352
    RKS said:
    Hey stusapps, I agree. Another problem about iTunes and stuff is that places like touch arcade give a :[ at GS and so do others, just because it's GS. That's why I think it would be great to make a site like that.

    Yeah, it is annoying that they are so negative to GS games and it is unfair to those games that are good. But that reputation was definitely an earned one which I don't think can ever be fixed while GS still has the same publishing model (hehe, am back to my $50 an appID publishing model, which I think would work well).
  • chordsnstringschordsnstrings Member Posts: 36
    Wow..

    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?
  • chordsnstringschordsnstrings Member Posts: 36
    i don't mind making the site, paying for the first year.

    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.
  • chordsnstringschordsnstrings Member Posts: 36
    gspr gamespr they're taken actually.

    ipr prgs tried everything. But yeah, along those lines.
  • HoneyTribeStudiosHoneyTribeStudios Member Posts: 1,792
    LBG said:
    Hey honey tribe. I agree. It's hard work maintaining and marketing a site. It take many hours but I'm sure with a group of people and good management we could lighten the load.

    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!!

    Cheers, yeah we're UK based, London in fact. We've had subcategory N&N in UK for a few weeks and were main games N&N in the US for launch. But of course what we really want is front page app store N&N! I hope the Apple staff take another look at some point and decide 'yeah people will buy it just based on the screenshots, lets give them a slot' :)
    StusApps said:
    I think that any kind of PR could be a good thing.

    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.

    I agree with StusApps. Why would anybody come back to a site if it was recommending crappy games? So maybe think from the perspective of the iOS user. Well, first decide who your audience will be. People who want free apps? People who like trying new games? People looking for specific niche games - e.g music or educational games?

    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

    -------
    image
    "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
  • floydianspiralfloydianspiral Member, PRO Posts: 308
    If you guys haven't heard of IDRTG you should check it out as well, it's a indie dev retweet group (twitter only) that is doing just this.
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