A Call for Revolution

News & General Discussion
1

I will start by quoting the great philosopher Solid Snake

The market has changed…
It’s no longer about art, value or quality
It’s an endless series of proxy companies bought by large corporations and corrupted market practices.
The market and its consumption of ads money has become a well-oiled machine.
The market has changed…
PAID marketing companies with PAID search optimization use PAID market placements.
Analytics inside their market enhance and regulate their abilities to control.
User control.
Information control.
Activities control.
Market control.
Everything is monitored and kept under control.
The market has changed…
The age of app development has become the age of control.
All in the name of averting low quality indie games and giving a better user experience.
And he who controls the market controls the success of your app.
The market has changed…
When the market is under total control… failure becomes routine.

We have all been there, we worked hard on our apps, we polished them and did every recommendation there is according to their market specifications in hope of success. However surely not long after releasing the app we discover the bitter truth that there is no real market. It is just an illusion of market, an illusion created by large corporations.

Your app has been doomed to fail long before writing the first line of code, big companies have already paid for their placement on top of any genius idea you could ever come up with.

Let me explain briefly what I believe is really happening behind the scenes in the market place:

A big company let’s call it R promises to buy 1M$ of ads from G marketplace in return of its app being featured, G agrees and the company pays the money and get its placement in the market. This is of course happening under the table in closed deals, in reality company R does not give a rat ass if the ads bring users or not to their app, the whole thing is a legal way to bribe G to place their app on featured list and keep it there for a while.

While this happening suddenly the marketing guy from this R company and the G editor discover they can do more personal profits if the marketing guy from R quit his job open a 1 person company hire some dude to make a simple app and the G editor will randomly select it for placement somewhere.

I am not here to try to convince you how bad the app market situation is for indie developers, if you don’t already know that then just give it another year and come back to read this post again. What I am here for is to propose a revolution against these market practices using their own game of monopoly.

What I propose here is that we the developers’ community create a nonprofit Market-like App that works only as a link to our apps in the store, so we don’t create a parallel market but rather a discovery helper app.

The idea is that this app will give a static number of visibility for all our apps equally, and this will give the initial push for your app to force its way to the public.

I also propose a voting mechanism for us to remove totally rubbish apps, a mechanism similar to Steam but voted for by us the developers.

No ranking algorithms no hot lists nor trending, just featured apps made by us the developers, this way we can assure equality and no manipulation.

we will release this app to all markets and we all should participate in promoting it by donating to create the biggest marketing campaign we can afford and hopefully it will be our last time we use their ad services.

Imagine a one thousand developer donating 100$ each will make a 100K campaign and all the fuss around this app could give us the chance to be truly independent of the malpractices of our market manipulators. And this donation is only used to promote this app and not as a membership. This app should be completely free and nonprofit.

If we all participate in this we can beat the system, if we all participate in promoting the app we can have the effect and the man power to beat the largest companies there.

Just imagine that once you release a new app you are guaranteed to have your app featured to millions of users.

I will volunteer to work on the market app so who else is interested?
We need a core team with me from all specialties to pull this off, I am open for ideas and looking forward for your thoughts.

2

Your premise was flawed from the very start, but here’s the part where you assume that featured apps listed by developers wouldn’t be somehow prone to manipulation when people are even more easily manipulated than algorithms. Hell, your entire idea is based around this sort of manipulation.

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3

What manipulation are you talking about? the idea is being featured is guaranteed and all apps will be featured exactly the same amount of time in the same places, for the same amount of views.

The whole idea is stop this manipulation.

4

You really should go read Animal Farm. One of the great problems with revolutions is the result so often ends up looking exactly like the original.

If this is successful, what’s to stop the big boys manipulating it the same way you claim they are manipulating the existing stores? If this is as successful as you claim, it will become a big entity in its own right, subject to all of the problems you claim exist with the current system.

In fact, just like in Animal Farm, the only thing your proposal can possibly change is who is on top.

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5

The idea here is to make a simple one rule, you register your app in this app and it will be queued to be featured there will be no algorithms to be manipulated the app it self depends on the available market stores so the app would be nonprofit and controlled maybe with an open source code if you will, the idea is no one can manipulate it.

and big companies will be treated just like the smallest developer here.

if you have suggestions please do give.

we have the power to stop this manipulation if we work together, otherwise we will always be the peasants that used as a number for big marketplaces to brag about how many apps they have in their store.

6

Isn’t it a bit weird to recommend a system similar to Steam Greenlight, when Valve just announced that they are dumping Greenlight because it doesn’t work? I think, like Greenlight, the idea sounds nice in theory. But as others have said, people will find a way to game any system. If the big guys struggle to get it right, it can’t possibly be as easy as it may seem.

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7

Maybe that will help get rid of some of the bloat on the Steam marketplace.

8

the steam like system will be used by the developers community to filter out joke apps, i mean if we feature a meme like app on this market app we will fail to get the users to appreciate the app.

and Steam might be dumping it because of profitability or to maintain certain quality on their store, however we should have no profit from this app itself , it is not a real store alternative it would be more like a discovery app to show our apps to the masses.

9

If everything is featured, then nothing is. Featuring everything is a contradiction.

Also, I’m not sure what manipulation you believe is happening. With Apple/google featuring is determined by the staff of those market places. They choose games that will best promote thier platform and ultimately generate revenue for them. You can’t buy your way into being featured. Though Apple is adding sponsored results.

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10

So are you saying that the stores are fair? and yes we can feature every app, steam gives every app a million view, the store now give you 0 views.
what i propose is a view based featuring not a profit based featuring.

i am not trying to make this app my own, my vision is to have indie developers community be responsible for fair featuring of all our apps. a certain number of views for each app.

11

Every app getting featured would have two consequences: (a) your game will be buried because there are simply too many apps to feature in small portions at a time giving you effectively zero views if your app isn’t at the top, (b) it would feature the shovelware and other drivel that is already poisoning the stores.

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12

Sounds dumb.

13

“Fair” doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Featuring is done for the benefit of the store, not the developer. It is absolutely fair to all games that will generate them them revenue.

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14

If they let any other list to show your app then it would be fair enough for them to feature who ever they want, but now every single list is controlled by them, you won’t show up anywhere.

what i am talking about is not a substitute for their store, but to be as platform to show our games on, for games that never make it into their lists.

lets say we have 1000 developer participated in this, lets say this 1000 developer submitted 1 app each, on a period of 3 months, can’t we feature every single one of these app on the period of 3 months to have 1 million view each?

think of it as a helper for your app on the stores not as a substitute

15

thousands of good apps are already buried in the store, and the steam like system i am proposing is to get ride of the shovelware apps.

16

How exactly does every app get an equal amount of feature time? Are there not hundreds of apps submitted to the app store every day?

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17

think of steam, it guarantees a 1 million views for your app when you release, we can do something similar, the idea is to give your app a chance to success on the real store, not to make you a permanent resident in the feature list like in the app stores.

18

Thousands.

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19

Loved the MGS speech. There are many other alternative stores this would just be another. But it is very hard nowadays without paid marketing…

20

There are already tons of sites that do this. Go for it. But bear in mind your new list is competing with many other popular existing places that do the same. It’s an uphill battle, what would you bring that is new to the space?

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