Category: Entrepreneurship

A friend an I are on an ambitious schedule to release a lot of new games into the App Store this year.

Last night I submitted my first game of the year for review to Apple.  It’s the first game I’ve released under the Halotis brand in 7 months.  Invader Crush should be on the App Store in a week or two

The strategy is to follow this launch up quickly with a few more simple games.  The next game is going to be a classic Flappy Bird game with doodle style graphics.  I’m hoping to have it finished and submitted this weekend.

My current side project is a match 3 game like Candy Crush Saga.  They are super addictive games that work great on mobile because they are so nice and casual to play.

Problem is the competition on these types of games is stiff. Differentiating my game from the crowd is difficult. Originality adds a level of risk, but a complete clone needs to be more refined, and better advertised to stand up against the competition.

When you start creating games you think about them differently. Originally my game was supposed to be endless – you could match 3 until you ran out of moves to make. What I found was that it dragged the game on and got boring. If you ended your game and had to start over it felt like you didn’t accomplish anything.

So at the moment I’m working on adding components to the game that up the fun factor. Things that make the game more sessionable with a shorter game loop and better progression feedback.  There are so many psychological triggers in creating a good game.  I think that’s what is the most enjoyable part to work on.

I like to keep an eye on the top grossing apps in the app store.  They are the ones killing it, and rolling in much of the money players spend, they are the games that I look to for ideas to model in my own apps.

The big games have it mostly figured out, and now, it seems they have cemented their positions at the top. Ever since SuperCell launched Clash of Clans and Hayday roughly 6 months ago the top grossing list has been remarkably stable.  What’s going on here that allows these same games to dominate the store for so long despite the legions of developers worldwide releasing lots of new games?

I believe that there are several things these top apps do that effectively creates an impenetrable wall that keeps these games at the top and pushes others down.

First,  all the games at the top are addictive and have game mechanics that continually bring players back to the game.  The resource management games are obvious examples of this, but the hearts in Candy Crush are doing the same thing. Hook a notification to something that will keep a player regularly opening the game multiple times per day is key. The time consuming nature of these games naturally leaves players with less time to look for and try new games and it gives players more time to spend money with the top games.

Monetization in these apps is perfected.  In order to be on the top grossing you need to out monetize the competition.  Considerable effort has gone into these games to ensure that people are motivated to spend money often.

These first two things any developer with time can reverse engineer and add to their own games. These are just the first level to getting to the top grossing list – having a game with the ability to make money.

What keeps the top guys at the top is:

A critical mass of players that is both hooked to the game, and are referring new players. For new games that don’t have critical mass this is extremely difficult to get.

Constant paid promotion is also creates a barrier. The top games are tying up a huge percentage of the advertising inventory. Due to their high revenue per user, and reduced acquisition costs that come from free referrals (due to players referring new players, or being visible on the App Store) these games have massive ad budgets that push cost per click higher than most new games can afford spending.

Create a community around the game. The top games all have attracted a community of loyal players. The community deepens the level of engagement, and reduces costs associated with support. The best players also help direct new features in the game and identify areas for improvement.

These last 3 points are not possible for a new game to create or afford.  To get to the top then is extremely difficult and requires an unconventional or lateral attack.

Looking at the most recent addition to the top list gives a hint at how one might crack the top.  Puzzles and Dragons is a hit breakout game that was initially released to just the Japanese market. Starting with a smaller market allowed them to take time to perfect the monetization, test and scale their backend infrastructure, and focus their advertising dollars on market they could afford to buy into.  Restricting the release also had the effect of creating anticipation for the game, that made new releases much more impactful.

Unfortunately it is no longer possible to launch a new game to the market with a chance of making  money from it without a sophisticated marketing strategy.  For the indie developer, riches on the app store are just an illusion – a dream with not much better odds than winning the lottery.

One of the big things about running a business is managing risk.  As an entrepreneur I know that 25% of businesses fail within the first year, 60% have failed by year 4 and 71% have failed or closed by year 10. Given that most businesses are started with the best of intentions and usually with all the time and equity the business owners can provide these failure rates are indicative of the tremendous amount of risk.

One of the most effective ways to combat the risk and reduce the chance of your own business failing is to seek validation of your business idea early.  Very early.

Lets say you have a great innovative idea for a business. To start with you’d probably ask around to your friends to see if they think it’s a good idea or not. Chances are your friends, not wanting to hurt your feelings, will agree.  “That’s an amazing idea” they’ll say.  With the positive feedback, you’ll probably feel pretty confident about starting to build your business right away.

Unfortunately that is a false sense of validation.  Your friends are probably not your target market, they are motivated to maintain friendship rather than stomp on your dreams, and they didn’t have to put money where their mouth was.

To really get a sense of whether or not your business has legs start with getting some commitments on sales from real customers, if possible negotiate full or partial upfront payment. This happens before you’ve built anything, before a line of code has been written, before prototypes have been developed. Validate that the idea has merit from actual customers and confirm that they’re willing to put real money on the table for your solution.

Only after having made your sales and having financed the bootstrapping of your business do you actually go ahead and create what you’ve promised. With customers in place you have eliminated one of the biggest and most stressful risks in business  – the struggle to find new customers.  The remaining risk is to actually deliver what you promised below cost.

Making that initial sale is almost never easy, and getting the marketing message correct from the start is nearly impossible.  Investing the minimum possible money and time into an idea so that you can market test it can be critical.

So here’s a new acronym for you: MVS (Minimum Viable Sale). MVS refers to the absolute minimum amount of effort and money required to craft a compelling enough marketing message to land your first sale.

The MVS probably includes a presentation (Keynote/PowerPoint), perhaps a website, it might require a business plan, some mockups or even a faked version of your product. For example: a mobile app could be convincingly created in something like Fluid UI without writing a line of code that could be used as a demo in a sales meeting.

Even for a free service, the MVS is worth creating.  In some cases the MVS for this could be simply posting on reddit if people would be interested in it, or linking to an opt-in form on a website to build an initial customer list.

In other cases the Minimum Viable Sale might be a production run of 100,000 widgets in which case something like a kickstarter campaign might be a good option to reach as many people as possible.

The concept for creating that MVS is to do the absolute minimum amount of work before getting paid to actually work  on your idea. By making that first sale you’ve validated your marketing message, you’ve identified your customer base, and confirmed that your idea meets a need that someone is willing to pay for.

I’ve worked in places where the business had a good idea, identified an underserved market and put heads down for 4-5 months working on building a product only to find out after the fact that the potential customers were happy with their existing system, or the cost to change their current system was more work than it was worth.  Month’s of wasted effort and tens of thousands of dollars in development costs down the drain. Alternatively they could have started by trying to sell the solution they had in mind with the intent of getting enough cash commitments to pay for the 4-5 months work upfront.  The added benefit of getting customers before development starts is that they can help refine the features required for it to meet the needs of the market. Win-Win.

Starting a business with an MVS before you develop your MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a simple way to get off to a lower risk start and help ensure that there is a market for your MVP when it’s finished.

A week ago we did a soft launch of the new iOS game “What Do You Know”.  With very little marketing behind it we managed to push a couple thousand downloads of the game and brought in a little bit of revenue from IAPs and advertisements.  Knock-out successes out of the gate seem to be just not possible now with the level of competition on the iTunes marketplace.

We will be giving this game another week of natural promotion before pushing the first update to the game to fix some minor issues.  At that point we’ll be comfortable to start getting some more reviews, and paying for some advertising on various different ad networks.

One thing we know from the first week is that the IAP sales conversions are pretty solid for this game.  Given the number of downloads we got, there were a substantial number of buyers compared to my other games, which is a good sign that it’ll be worth any marketing money we have to spend on it.

Once the game gets to a critical mass of players the hope is that the social integration will help continue to push it higher in the charts.  We’ll see if that holds true with some testing.