Archive for July, 2009

App Icons are Itty Bitty Banner Ads

Wednesday, July 22nd, 2009

An old blog post I wrote last year about a decades old humor article on icon design is actually remarkably relevant to today’s App Store market.

Years ago, Apple published a developer magazine. I don’t even remember the name of it, but it covered various topics on programming on the Mac or Apple II, but it would also occasionally have humor articles. One in particular stuck with me.

The author said that when you are getting ready to start developing your application, the single most important thing to do is you need to develop a killer icon. The desktop icon could make or break your application and it really should be your first priority.

As humorous a suggestion as it was, I think what I found most amusing was that there was a slight bit of truth to it… or at least it didn’t come from that ridiculous a place in the mind of the developer.

As much as this was a big joke for Mac applications, I think it’s a pretty accurate view of the importance of App Store icons. I’ve often been asked my opinion why certain games seem to just take off in the App Store. Some seemingly simple games just seem to rocket to the top. What could it be?

While the type of game is certainly important, it seems pretty clear that a good icon and a good screenshot are the main impact you have on casual App Store shoppers.

The same question can be asked of what causes an app to skyrocket to the top 10 when featured by Apple? Apple is basically giving you an itty bitty banner ad in the most trafficked area of iTunes and your icon is what represents your app. It seems obvious this is going to make a difference in attracting potential customers.

These suspicions were corroborated by one small focus group study of iPhone usage published late last year. Comments by this small group of individuals indicated that icon design was pretty important in deciding what app to get:

icon

I think that many developers have already realized the importance of their icon but are they really looking at it as scientifically as they could?

I’d think that a really serious iPhone developer would spend time working on a variety of icon designs and try to figure out which has the highest click through rate when lumped on a page with other icons.

These sort of A/B testing trials are done all the time with regular banner ads. Click through rates can vary substantially between different banner designs. And the most clickable designs aren’t always immediately obvious. For example, color choices alone can make a big difference in banner ads click through rates. And when dealing with featured App Store positioning, I’d think that a small percentage increase in click through rates could make a substantial difference in sales.

I’m not sure where such an experiment could take place, but it does raise some interesting possibilities.

Posted in Apple, Business | 15 Comments »

Followup on Another Quitting Story

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

A couple of months ago I mentioned a husband and wife team that made up Imangi Studios who I met at GDC. Keith had quit his full time job a year prior while his wife Natalia had just given notice in April to go full time on their small but growing iPhone app business. In my post I mentioned that I thought it was great they were going into it full time and that the potential benefits outweighed the risks.

Well, it’s only 3 months later, and they have a top 10 iPhone app (and climbing) with Harbor Master [$0.99]. The game is currently sitting in the #6 spot of all paid iPhone apps. Now, I haven’t seen top 10 sales numbers lately, but I’ve heard the numbers have been increasing, so I’d guess they may be up to 10,000 (~$7000) downloads a day. The game seems to have sold well from the start, but Apple’s also currently featuring Harbor Master in their “What’s Hot” listing. Of course, those listings tend to only last a week or so, but from what I’ve seen games that really take off with the exposure don’t tend to drop off sharply when the listing goes away.

Hopefully, their success will sustain, but even if only for a short time, they’ve certainly proven that they have made the right decision. I don’t know the details of their development cycle and marketing, but would Harbor Master‘s success have happened the same way if Natalia hadn’t quit her day job to devote her time to Imangi? I’d wager not.

Posted in Business | 6 Comments »

A Year Later…

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

So, it’s already been a year since I quit my job and dedicated myself to web projects, and it’s gone really quickly. I’ve kept myself very busy during that time, probably a bit too busy. I have absolutely no regrets with my career switch and have been incredibly happy with the decision.

One good thing to note is that the economic conditions seems to have had no major effect on online ad revenues. It’s always hard to tell on a month to month basis due to seasonal variation, but our year-to-year numbers have been up. IAB claims across the board numbers are down 5% in Q1 2009, but that seems a marginal decline when there were predictions of 50% drops by some. In fact, one of the biggest doom-sayers, Nick Denton of Gawker Media, reports that their revenues were up 35% year over year. Anecdotal reports I’ve heard from other publishers have reflected the same experiences. While there may be more declines to come… so far, so good.

The growth of TouchArcade.com has been remarkable, and is the primary reason my time has been so occupied this past year. Keeping track of App Store releases really is a more than full time job. The time I’ve had to put into it has reduced the time I have had for MacRumors improvements and AppShopper feature progression. It also put on hold any other grand projects I might have had. That said, its success is not something I can complain about. I suppose I’m not entirely surprised that it was able to gain traction, as I feel iPhone gaming is an incredibly addictive topic… but the rapidity of the growth is surprising. In just a year, in both traffic and respect, the site has done more than could have been expected. (I even interviewed Carmack the other week — how crazy is that?)

The major goal of mine over the past year was the outsourcing of more of my work. It’s been a hard transition for me, as I have a lot of personal ownership in my projects — so it’s hard to hand over the “keys” to someone else. Obviously, no one else will do things exactly the way I would, and it’s just a matter of getting used to that. As a result, it’s taken me this long to finally hire the right people. Fortunately, over the past 6-7 months, I’ve managed to hire two people to handle the editorial responsibilities that can be so time consuming, and one person to handle programming. The transition is still ongoing, but I’m really happy with the extra time it should afford me. I may actually be able to keep up with my email now.

Looking forward, I still have progress to make on freeing up more of my time, so I can focus on larger scale issues as well as new projects. I think my difficulity in transitioning editorial responsibilities smoothly has taught me to get others involved at a much earlier stage. So, I’m not planning on ever starting another content site where I would be the primary writer again. And that’s no big loss for me. As a computer science major, it still amazes me that any sort of writing has become a major aspect of my occupation.

We’ll see what the next year holds. I think it will likely include some new hires, some major feature improvements to the sites I already have, and possibly the launch of one or two major new sites. There are a few sites that have been on my todo list for years now, so I’m anxious to get serious work done on them. Unfortunately, it will probably be a number of months before I can get caught up enough to seriously start on them. Next year’s update will be interesting.

Posted in Business | 18 Comments »

Followup on the State of iPhone Gaming: The $0.99 Economy

Friday, July 10th, 2009

A couple of months ago, I wrote about how the state of iPhone gaming was changing with an influx in bigger studios with smaller and smaller pricing margins.

Things have gotten even more competitive since with Gameloft and other studios drastically cutting their prices on older games down to $0.99. While this is good for consumers in the short term, the long term effects are potentially more troubling. There is a constant debate on TouchArcade as to these long term effects. One camp says that the App Store must sustain higher priced games in order to promote more quality titles. The other camp disputes this. I’m with the former camp, as is id Software’s John Carmack. In an interview, he said:

If [iPhone] games could have a reasonable shelf life at $9.99, you will start seeing multi-million dollar development budgets as the market continues to grow. But if it turns out the only way you end up being successful on the iPhone is games that cost a couple dollars, you’re never going to achieve that parity with the other handhelds.

One major effect of this $0.99 economy has been seen by EA’s announcement that they have created a micro-studio within the company to produce casual $0.99 iPhone titles. These titles are going to be in development just a short time (a month or so), presumably to recreate the success of some of the most popular games in the App Store, which also happen to be $0.99.

Let’s think about that for a second… EA is putting resources into low-risk casual $0.99 games. But imagine the flip side to this: What if EA had announced they were creating an division just to produce high quality iPhone original titles? Imagine big-budget original iPhone games with the resources of a major studio behind them.

Could it happen? If there was enough money in it, I’m sure it could happen… but it’s not going to happen at a $0.99 price point.

Now, I don’t blame consumers for buying $0.99 games, nor do I blame studios for following the money. But I do think the long term effects are going to result in a market of two types of games. 1) inexpensive casual titles and 2) inexpensive ports from other devices. Meanwhile, deep, high quality, iPhone original titles will become more and more scarce. Of course, the market will balance itself out over time, and opportunities will appear for developers to fill the gaps. I do expect downloadable content will result in more episodic apps with level packs and add-ons.

Indie developers are also going to be squeezed out further. There are only 100 spots in the top 100. Flight Control, Pocket God, Fieldrunners and Koi Pod pretty much have permanent spots. There are a few Chillingo titles that are on $0.99 sale that take up another 3 spots or so. A few major titles, a few novelty apps, and now EA’s $0.99 game of the month, and you’re down to fewer and fewer spots that you are really competing with.

Meanwhile, Apple is the only one with the power to really change the dynamics of the market through changes in the App Store rankings… but I’m not sure if they will. It’ll be interesting to see where things go from here.

Posted in Apple | 26 Comments »