Mobile Games Discovery: Why Publishers Are Needed

Mobile Games Discovery: Why Publishers Are Needed

Fri 15 Jun 2012 3:07pm GMT / 11:07am EDT / 8:07am PDT
Mobile

Jesse Divnich of EEDAR offers his opinion on the problems developers have getting their games discovered

The emergence of digital platforms, especially in the mobile space, has led to plenty of new opportunities for developers, but success is hardly guaranteed. While it's true that digital now allows developers to essentially self-publish if they desire, the problem of games discovery remains. It's not easy to get noticed on Apple's App Store. EEDAR's Jesse Divnich recently spoke to GamesIndustry International about this all-too-common problem developers face.

"App discovery shouldn't fall on the shoulders of developers, nor should it fall on Apple," Divnich believes.

"For the last two years, I've observed developers rejoice over de-shackling from publishers, yet as these emerging markets become more established and crowded, we are witnessing many of our industry's top developers failing to get the discoverability and market awareness they justly deserve," he said.

"The fact remains, becoming successful in the app market still is a shot in the dark"

Jesse Divnich

"Discovery is simply an analogue for marketing, which has traditionally been one of the key roles and reasons for partnering with a publisher and it would be an erroneous suggestion to imply that the burdens of marketing now shift entirely to the developer-although I do agree that developers must have a say in the messaging process," Divnich continued.

With EA Mobile and other big publishers (like Activision) offering their services in the space, it might be wise for a developer with little marketing knowledge to leverage a publisher's expertise.

"I do believe that the absence of publishers in the digital environment is significantly impeding developer's success," Divnich remarked. "We have seen various ad networks and 'pay-for-install' programs form in an attempt to solve the discovery issue; this has only led to the rise in the cost of consumer acquisition, creating an even pricier barrier for independent developers. It really is an inefficient form of marketing; unfortunately it remains one of the few discovery tools developers can access."

Ultimately, the marketing for mobile games must happen outside of mobile as well. Surely, a publisher can help with that.

"The discovery of video game apps needs to move beyond the portable screen, a concept that is widely understood in all other forms of entertainment. It would be like a blockbuster movie only using theatre previews to gain discoverability," Divnich noted.

"There should be a happy medium between developers, publishers, and distributors, one that I know many are trying to solve, but I have yet to come across one publicly that has fitted all the pieces together to create a true win-win-win scenario."

"The fact remains, becoming successful in the app market still is a shot in the dark, a large ineffective marketing money pit that shrinks profitability," Divnich concluded, adding that's why we're seeing an "over reliance on the distribution network to become 'featured'."

4 Comments

William D. Volk
CCO

PlayScreen

I don't see consumers, at least on iOS, looking for titles on a publisher basis.

Perhaps if publishers have titles in the market with a large number of users, they can use that as a channel to promote new apps (works for Zynga). But consumers are not very brand aware at this time.

Posted:A year ago

#1

Peter Stirling
Software Engineer

Firelight Technologies

Publishers are trying to justify their existance and it's all pretty pathetic. There are services outside development that can be offered from third parties but, in this age of digital distribution, publishing is not one of them. When there was a large cost for getting a game to market, then publishers made sense. Now that there isn't, they are quickly becoming redudant.

It is important to make a distinction between publishing and marketing. Discovery and exposure is a major challenge for mobile game developers. Cutting through the noise is what it's called, and it's a common justification. The problem is the noise is all generated by marketing so it boils down to something like "Marketing: the cause and solution to all your problems".

A good market place which could allow people to discover new games for themselves would remove the need for marketing and be a better all round solution for indie developers and gamers.

Posted:A year ago

#2

Bruce Everiss

Very wise words indeed from Jesse Divnich.
The lack of marketing talents and skills in the app marketplace is staggering. Many of the great successes in the market have achieved greatness by some fortuitous accident, not because of conscious actions.
Many people don't even understand what marketing is and equate it with promotion.
Of course publishing skills are utterly essential, these can be in house, bought in or subcontracted out to a publisher.
Anyone who doubts this fundamental requirement should check out App Annie and see what happens to Chillingo releases compared with similar indie releases.

@Peter Stirling.
This is not how the real world, real people and real markets work.
Mythical utopias like you propose are incompatible with reality.

Posted:A year ago

#3

Kim Soares
CEO

Kukouri Mobile Entertainment

I have to disagree what Peter said about the noise being generated by the marketing. There is no noise from marketing, there is too many games in App Store (and others). Imagine walking up to an ice cream truck where they sell 500 000 different flavors. Maybe 100 flavors are mentioned in the window. Other 499 900 are just stuffed inside the van. It can very well be that the flavor you would like the most is one of the 499 900 at the back, but you have practically no way of picking that one. So you look at the ones in the window and pick one of those.

We released our first proper mobile game two weeks ago. We have a dev team of 7 full time employees and we spent some 9 months developing the game. We're based in Finland. You can calculate what the dev cost roughly was. Early on we decided that teaming up with publisher is absolutely crucial. We had several publisher who were interested in our game but in the end we chose to partner with Chillingo (for the reason Bruce mentioned).

Sure, they take their share of the income, but it's always better to get share of something than everything of nothing. Chillingo's value was seen immediately as press people who had previously been ignoring us were suddenly listening to us. This was many months before release. We released on the last day of E3. First two days of E3 we, among other devs who work with Chillingo, spent two days demoing our game to media in JW Marriot. The setup alone cost 70 000 USD. We demoed our game to some 40-50 different media's in those two days. Without publisher we would have had nothing like that. We also got top position on the New&Noteworthy as well as some other lists for the first week. I doubt that would have happened without Chillingo's contacts to Apple.

Still, I would not leave all marketing to publisher. We employ full time marketing manager in-house who has a contact list of over 500 medias. We also have marketing trainee who takes care of chinese market. Our game is much larger than majority of mobile games out there. One user said something like "It feels like a proper game, not just another app".

So we have, even if saying so myself, quality product with high production value, high profile publisher, we got feature position in App Store and we have two persons doing full time marketing. Our game is doing OK, you can check from App Annie, but we still have some way to go to recoup dev costs, but I'm very confident we will be able to make profit in the long run.

It's also good to market your game where ever you can, so go get Tiny Troopers ;-)

http://itunes.apple.com/fi/app/id494242260?partnerId=2003&tduid=1224546

Edited 1 times. Last edit by Kim Soares on 20th June 2012 7:34pm

Posted:A year ago

#4

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