Benefits to making an iOS exclusive game

Unity Engine
,
1

Hello,

I am a newbie developer who launched my first game about 2 weeks ago for both iOS and Android. The strange thing is, while not much, I am getting more “organic downloads(?)” (downloads from people that are not trying the game through my personal connections) on iOS than Android. This got me thinking, with very limited marketing resources available, for my next game, I should spend a lot of time marketing for iOS, as it is somewhat clear that it is easier for games to be discovered on iOS than on Google Play.

With that said, is there an advantage to launching an exclusively iOS title when it comes to marketing a game? such as “higher chance of getting featured,” etc?

2

Exclusivity (or time-limited exclusiveity) is definitely a factor in getting featured. As an individual though, you might have a hard time letting the right people at Apple know that your game is exclusive to their platform. Keep in mind that it’s only one factor too - you need to check other boxes as well.

3

Thank you steve for your reply - I just have some follow up questions:

  • In my short lifetime, I have learned that “hard” doesn’t mean “impossible.” Any tips on “letting the right people at Apple know that your game is exclusive?”
  • Can you elaborate on your last sentence? What are some of the other boxes that I should consider?
4

I honestly don’t know the answer to question 1, as an individual. If you have a publisher, they will generally have an Apple contact that has a pipeline into the Feature Team (it’s a separate team at Apple who decide which apps get featured and the type of feature - it’s not the guys doing the app approvals).

The “other boxes” I’m referring to are just the obvious ones - e.g. having a great, polished product (game/app/etc). Something that might be less obviously known is that Apple are more likely to feature apps that make use of their platform technologies - iCloud saving, implementing optional controller support, etc. Basically - they want you to show off the cool things that can be done with the features that they’ve worked hard to implement in their OS. It’s always a good idea to mention those things in your app description for the store (e.g. “Cloud saves across all your iOS devices!”).