Insight VR

So Battle for Vesta has been live in the App Store since December 28, 2009. In that time I’ve posted about it in forums, promoted it on this blog and Facebook and Twitter, given away a lot of promo codes, and posted on a lot of forums. I created www.battleforvesta.com and posted a trailer and videos of gameplay on YouTube and Vimeo. I’ve also emailed dozens of iPhone app review sites. So far one of them has been kind enough to send an automated acknowledgment of submission email, in which the site admits that it might never even look at my game and even if the game gets looked at it probably won’t get reviewed. There has been no response at all from the others.

In short, while I haven’t done a perfect job of marketing my game, I’ve done as well as I knew how to at the time and have learned some lessons. I’ve also set up Google alerts so that if the game gets mentioned anywhere I know about it and can respond appropriately.

Marketing an iPhone game is incredibly difficult right now. The market is crowded (much of it is crap) and it is very hard for casual users to discover new apps that might interest them. With this in mind I’ve priced the game at $1.99, so that it can be an impulse buy. While I think the game is worth more than that, I didn’t want the price to be a barrier to people that were merely curious about it.

So after being live on the App Store for a week I’ve sold about 30 copies and about the same number of people have turned in promo codes. I’m not ecstatic about those numbers, but I’m not surprised either. I will say that I’m a bit disappointed in the unwillingness of people to rate and/or review the game, especially if they’ve been given a promo code and agreed to.

This morning my Google alert told me that the game had started to show up on pirate sites. I had expected this and I was actually a bit surprised that it didn’t happen the day the game came out. In less than an hour one pirate site indicated that the game had been downloaded more than 30 times. No, I’m not going to link to any of them. I will note that I am amazed that they show up on the second page of a Google search for the game. Odd that pirate sites seem to have so much credibility with Google.

I’m trying to figure out exactly what it is that annoys me about this situation. I think there are a few aspects to this.

One is that $1.99 is cheap. That’s less than coffee money. If it entertains you for 30 minutes total you’ve gotten your money’s worth and then some. I’ve played it for countless hours and I fire it up just for fun every day. So I hardly think that price is an excuse.

Secondly, if $1.99 is really going to break the bank, ask me for a promo code. If you claim that you’ll post a descriptive review (I don’t even ask that it be positive) then I’ll give you one. I know full well that the chances of you actually posting that review are about 1 in 10, but that’s the way Web 2.0 works, right? If you pirate the game and love it there is no legitimate channel for you to rate the game, review it, or give feedback. So now not only am I out a sale (which I was willing to give up) but I’m also out any chance of your love of the game helping to make it go viral, or even your criticisms of the game being used to improve it.

Finally, it is immensely frustrating to put all the above mentioned effort into marketing this thing through legitimate channels and get very little response. Yet the game gets downloaded as much in an hour from a single pirate site as it did in a week legitimately. This makes me wonder if somehow the pirates know something that I do not. They’re able to make my game more popular in an hour than I am.

Finally, if this is just kids who somehow saved up $200 for an iPod touch and don’t have any pennies left to fork over for a game, I guess I can understand. Almost. ($1.99!) I’d still rather give it to you for free than have you steal it from me. But somehow I suspect that the majority of this isn’t being done by penniless kids at all but is perpetrated by people that can easily afford the game and just get some perverse joy out of cheating me.

While I’m at it, the first four people to comment on this article will get a promo code emailed to them.