Fixing the App/Game Discovery

News & General Discussion
1

The one thing every developers falls into is how to get users for their app/game! If you are starting as a Indie Developer things can get hard for you!

So, how to fix App/game Discovery ?

The Problems:

1.)The problem of Discovery:

As we all know that App-stores are getting bigger everyday with millions of apps which makes app discovery a huge challenge – both for users and developers. The days are gone when developers used to publish apps and get 1000s of downloads daily or may be more than that. Only the Top 1.6% apps in the store make $500,000/month while the rest apps hardly make $100/month.

2.) The Problem of Marketing/Paid User Acquisition:

Talking about Paid Acquisitions there are 3 ways to acquire users which are CPI, CPC or CPM. I won’t explain the terminologies but CPI turns out to be the most effective where you pay anywhere around $0.5 to $1 for Tier 1 country traffic. These rates would go up if you are acquiring user for iphone/ipad game. So even with a budget of $500 you are not going to get good amount of users.

3.) The Problem of ASO(App Search Optimisation):

There are great tools like Sensor Tower that allows you to find keywords but the problem is that the keywords that have good amount of traffic but low competition are difficult to find!

4.) Difficulty in reaching top charts:

Who doesn’t want to reach top charts! but the problem is that we don’t have thousands of dollar to compete with the top apps! The top apps are continuously getting users from every source they can!

5.) The Demotion of creativity & Birth of Reskinning :

There is high probability that today even if a developer creates something new (outside the box app/game) he is likely to fail because of no/low budget or he lacked marketing expertise. When he publishes his app there is no guarantee that he will get good amount of visibility. Then eventually he finds that there are developers who reskin app and use keywords of the trending app/games like currently pokemon go, prisma and make good amount of money.

So what this leads to is good content being suppressed by the those who have money to market.

The Solution:

So, what are we doing to solve this ? We had been working over 1.6 years and finally created a middle-out discovery platform called “PLATEAU”. The platform focuses on providing creators, the initial push/encouragement required to not give up on creating good stuff. In Plateau we have 2 entities:

Content Creators: These are people who have developed some content and want to reach a potential audience. (from our research there are around 300,000/month searches for promoting content)

Content Finders: These are people who were interested in finding something new. (from our research there are around 1,500,000/month searches for new content)

Keeping the above problems in mind we have addressed them as follows:

  • App Discovery:

For content creators we have developed website where creators can signup and submit their content and this content goes into our “platform queue”.

For content finders we have developed “Plateau-Store” app where the said content will be visible and they will have choice to view content from different categories like games, apps etc.

  • But how does it guarantee visibility?

Our apps will show only a fixed number of content everyday like 50-100 in a section called “NEW”. This is the content that was submitted by the content creators. We developed a unbiased ranking algorithm that will decide which of these will go to TRENDING & HOT sections. And every content stays for max 7 days and then gets removed from the platform to ensure everyone gets a fair chance to be on top charts if it was of high quality.

Additionally we are not asking you to upload your app to our platform, instead you will be asked to submit a playstore/appstore link, from where the content finder can actually download your app. All your apps will be showcased in a similar manner as any appstore but for downloading it the user will be directed to the actual stores. So what this actually does is increases your ranking and downloads in the actual appstores/playstore.

  • How are we acquiring “Content Finders” ?

As we said there are around 1,500,000/month searches for new content. So we are going to run, CPC and CPI campaigns to acquire users for “Plateau-store” and as our plateau-store is showing new content daily they would be interested in coming back. So us acquiring content finders transitively results in creators acquiring new audience.

  • How much traffic can a “Content Creator” expect ?

Well that’s totally upto the content s/he has submitted. The better the content the more it will attract the finders. We have no control over this, all we can assure is acquiring more content finders.

  • So, are you charging for it ?

As of now NO, we will launch the platform with 100k users, so until then signups and content submission is FREE. Once we have a good user base around 1 Million only then we will start charging on pay-per-day basis. The fees will be very low too, somewhere in the ballpark of $10-$15.

  • What have we achieved till now ?

We have talked to over 1200 content creators and they liked the idea and are quite excited for it. We have also acquired around 1000 signups from Content Creators from around the world. We are trying to bring a paradigm shift and bridge the gap between the content creators and content finders.

Here’s the website for Content Creators: PLATEAU you can signup over here and start submitting your apps and games.

2

Why do you have it behind a Google URL shortener if the actual URL is equally short?

3

there was no purpose of hiding!
anyways here is the link www.plat-eau.com

4

You can track those google shortening links to give you better metrics what sources drive traffic to your site, right?

5

$10-15 per day - even in perspective - is 3650 …$5475 per year.

6

So what are you trying to say ?

7

Here is the real question. What stops your platform from becoming saturated like the rest of them?

2 Likes
8

Unity Professional can be cheaper than this.

You sure that this is what you want to charge?

9

Only can be?

10

It is licensed per seat per month.

11

Exactly, I didn’t read anything about curation.

Also to the OP, please remove that horrible scrolling background video you have on your site. It made me close the site before I even finished reading the little that was on the page.

12

How are you driving traffic to your site? Because if you’re not getting traffic, its pretty much useless?

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13

It runs on a ranking algorithm that uses many parameters to calculate the content rank. Hence any content that does not fulfil those parameters (or in Layman terms does not get much user interaction) will be removed automatically instead of keeping it and lowering its rank(which is what any other App Store does) thus taking care of saturation. Our ranking algorithm cannot be influenced and hence there is no chance of biasing. Also at any point in time the platform will showcase a limited amount of content to ensure that everyone gets a fair chance. Each content gets 2 days in the ‘NEW’ section of the Plateau-Store if it passes the ranking threshold it will moved to the ‘Trending’ section and so on to the ‘hot’ section and so on for a week

14

Thats the key. First - create a good game. But this sounds like something that is going to be inundated by a trough of square, cube, circle mvp games that already saturate the existing systems and will also saturate this system - and ultimately drive away traffic.

A much better solution to help developers gain traction with users is to put in place a guarantee to deliver a set number of users or traffic (I don’t like using analytical short codes - cpi - cpc - cpm - ufo - nonsense) to a game/app - with a sliding scale - down - if traffic is below advertised presumptions - this service should be totally free.

Marketing a service like this to developers who are savvy to the unmet promises of better traffic and more users is becoming all to common - with depreciated and expected negligible results.
To attract competent developers who are interested in creating compelling games that would like to find another method to attract users - these unproven discovery methods have to deliver on there end of the deal - guarantee a set number of new users per month for a set price, with lower prices for lower than expected results.

Anything less than a guarantee is a risky money loosing proposition.

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15

Hence we are launching this platform on a free basis until we reach somewhere around 1 million content finders, and even after that the content submission will remain free, and your game/app will be visible on our plateau store for at-least 2 days for FREE after which we will start charging.
Also I really appreciate your input, Lemme see how i can incorporate this too!

1 Like
16

Here’s why there is REALLY a discovery problem and what the ONLY solution is.

First we define what is “perfect discovery”. Perfect discovery means a direct and total transfer and an exact meeting/sharing between the source (content creator) and destination (user/customer). For this to happen, it doesn’t just mean that you delivered your product to someone, it means you know them, understand them, know what they want, can create exactly what they want and that they will absolutely love what you give them, guaranteed. It means knowing the audience first and foremost, intimately, as if they are yourself. Secondly it then means getting that game into their hands, which means going DIRECTLY to the person and handing it to them. No go-betweens, nothing in the way, no interruptions, just direct immediate delivery. They then receive the game and are so overjoyed because you gave them exactly what they wanted. You made what they wanted and you directly delivered it. Happy customer.

So perfect discovery is like perfect sharing, perfect oneness, perfect unity, perfect understanding.

What happens is that when some kind of a gap or distance or lack of awareness enters in between you and your customer, now there is a problem. In some way you’re not quite connecting with them directly. Maybe there’s giant heaps of other products to wade through. Maybe there’s navigation that you have to use. Maybe you typed something into google and you got 50,000 results and now you’re trawling through and maybe happening to land on the right link to click. Maybe the customer got sent to a page on your website which isn’t really the ideal page and so now they’ve got tied up in your so-called “navigation”. Or your site sucks and doesn’t convert well. Or there’s just too much ‘noise’ from competing products. Whatever it is, something has interrupted your perfect connection to your audience, and this interruption IS the discovery problem. Its broken communication. A lack of intimacy. A lack of awareness. A lack of relevancy.

What you might notice here is this simple truth. All “navigation” on websites and in app stores is a BAND AID to cover up the fact that YOU ARE IN THE WRONG PLACE. And, you are only in the wrong place because someone somewhere does not understand you. They don’t know you, don’t know what kind of things you like, don’t know what you want or are interested in. So they just throw something generic at you and expect YOU to do some “work” of searching and finding… which pretty much is a chore and is more or less guaranteed to fail. Because now you gotta use the “navigation”, ie the bridges that you have to build to reconnect to the developer. And the navigation itself is fraught with confusion and difficulty and usability issues and could turn you off all by itself. Navigation is only ever needed when a direct understanding of what is relevant to you has been lost. Like, in google, you search for something, if you type something and you get a perfect result and you click it and it takes to EXACTLY the page you wanted with exactly the product you wanted, then you’re happy. This is why “landing page optimization” is so important.

This is also why “slither.io” took the GENIUS step of completely bypassing google - because if someone types in “slither.io” in their browser bar, which is btw a combined address and search bar now in most browsers so customers think they’re ‘searching for’ slither.io without realizing its a domain name, you are taken to an actual DOMAIN of .io and end up on the slither.io website! Think of all the headaches and navigation and wrong results and failed confusing pages that have been bypassed, because the name of the game is a direct website url! It’s the smartest thing I’ve seen in ages. It means you understand the audience, what they want, and you give them exactly that. Discoverability? Nailed it. Cut out all the middle men, all the bridges and roads and dead ends, and just get people directly to what they want. This is the essense of being discovered (provided you know that the game exists before :wink:

So this discovery problem can start even before you start building your game, because if you are out of touch with your audience you are going to have a failure of transfer and this already is going to put distance between you. Distance between you - separation - is the ONLY PROBLEM, and the only solution is to CLOSE THE GAP. You need to get back as close to an intimate, relevant, direct connection to the customer as possible. You need to get your game in front of the right people in the right place at the right time. It’s all about relevancy, which is driven by AI or intelligence of some kind, to hook everyone up to what they really want. This is why sites like amazon track your behavior so they they know what you mostly like or have looked at etc and can then SHOW YOU THAT. It’s why google adsense puts relevant ads on relevant websites. This is why “remarketing” works by showing people ads for what they saw on one website when they go to another website. Gone are the days of just throwing some generic ad out there trying to please everyone and not even knowing if the interested parties are even exposed to it (I’m looking at you, television).

So you want your game to get discovered? Is that perhaps because you do not know WHO is going to be discovering it? WHY don’t you even know your audience? Why are you targeting total strangers in a giant hall where everyone is interested in different things? This really overall has nothing to do with how many people there are, or how much competition there is. That’s just noise. That’s the noise you need to find a way to bypass, to close the gap. Its the noise generated by not knowing your audience. You need to go hand deliver your game to the right people, as directly and intimately as possible. When you step back and you just throw it out there and ‘hope’ that someone will find it, what does that say about your RELATIONSHIP with your audience? That you just dont care about them and want them to do all the work of finding you and discovering their dream game that you just released? You can’t blame it on the market size or the amount of competition. NONE OF THAT would show up IF you were being relevant. None of that matters when you are getting your information in front of the right people. You bypass everyone else. You bypass the entire competition. You bypass the whole store.

So I don’t think opening yet another big wide-open warehouse/store with lots of games on it is going to solve discoverability. There has to be a movement toward falling in love with your audience and being more intimate with them, building a genuine DEEP relationship with them, knowing them, trusting them. If you can’t get your game in front of a relevant audience and you’re relying on all these bandaids to direct people to do work to find it its like a needle in a haystack with a million reasons to get lost. This also btw is why building an email list and marketing to it is more effective than ANY efforts at Search Engine Optimization, because you totally BYPASS the search engine. Search engines are giant error-correctors, huge bandaids and navigation aids attempting to make up for the fact that everyone is LOST. Don’t let your audience be lost. YOU need to find THEM, not the other way around.

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17

@imaginaryhuman_1 spot on. Great post.

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18

I guess this shows that it could be a good idea to sell your game on your own website, so that it cuts out all the noise of the competition at that level/in that context. That said, you have to then compete with all the noise outside the website that interferes with getting eyeballs from the right people who are out there lost. IF you can get traffic, it’s a good deal.

Also check this out, traffic stats for slither.io - 8300 backlinks, 50,000+ visits per month from organic, not bad. Domain Overview | Semrush

And that means, 8300 backlinks, from 500+ other websites, where relevant people with relevant audiences are browsing around looking for games like this, and who then just click a lick and come straight to it… bypassing the noise.

Direct traffic. Referral traffic. We need to not just rely on organic.

1 Like