My live game not showing up under "new" on App Store...why?

Unity Engine
,
1

Hi,

When we published the first version of our game, it showed up under its categories on the iOS App Store as “new” on the day of. Since then, we have made an update that I accidentally set to “automatically go live”, but since that approval didn’t happen on a weekend, and you apparently can’t change that setting while waiting for a review, we made the game scheduled to go live on a Saturday. That’s so we wouldn’t miss the best day of new exposure…only it didn’t show up on the “new” lists at all that weekend. No idea why.

I have read numerous places that each update to a game will show up as “new” again, that is why I ask. Now I had an second update to our game, which I made live at 12:15am this morning. Again, it isn’t showing up on the “new” lists. What the hell? Is there any explanation for this? Without the exposure it’s fairly impossible to get the word out.

Thank you in advance for any insight.
-Brian

2

They change how this works all the time with little no warning. Sometimes, patches aren’t listed as new, sometimes if you set a date for release and it’s approved before that date, it gets put into the ‘New’ list several paged in (backdated). Sometimes it can take several hours for the ‘live’ status to propagate through the servers, and if you’re unlucky you just end up several pages in by the time it finally clicks over.

3

My case was buried several pages deep but only for release version 1.0. As I read it updates never gets on “New” list so I was not upset not seeing it in “New” section. Wrong? And what’s best to do for new update with lot of changes and iPad, iPhone5 compatibility? Sometimes it’s nightmare.

4

As of at least a year ago, only new releases get put in the new section. As far as I know, patches only got your app back into the ‘new’ section back when Angry Birds first came out.

5

Wow, that’s pretty terrible :expressionless: Thanks for the info.

6

That was true, but more recently they started putting updates in the new releases section again. No idea what the current status of that is though.

–Eric

7

Interesting

8

It seems on and off. I think they do it when there’s not much action going on with typical new releases… for example a less busy category. Just a hypothesis though. All of our updates 6 months ago got exposure for updates, however we have not done that recently. Perhaps it’s limited to the first few updates. Perhaps it only features an update that’s a couple months apart to prevent abuse.

9

Or maybe they use Unity and are running this code:

if (Random.value < .5) {
    FeatureApp (currentApp);
}
else {
    BuryApp (currentApp);
    LaughManiacally();
}

–Eric

10

AI:p