Creating games for the app store and
getting them noticed can sometimes feel as trying to make your voice
heard in a gym hall filled with screaming children. With more than
100k games to compete with, you need a high quality game, a keen eye
on PR and a §#!^load of luck.
The load of luck seemed to be a bit
hard to affect in any way, and getting a high quality game was just a
matter of putting in the effort needed, but the PR was something we
could affect.
The logical consequence for us was to
enter a store filled with big brightly colored, non-challenging games
featuring cuddly, big-eyed protagonists with a game about a
featureless black & white viking on a murderous drug-induced
rampage accompanied by the most aggressive death metal music south of
the north pole and buckets and buckets of blood.
If we were going to go niche, we would
be SO niche that we would basically need every last member of our
target demographics to buy the game in order for it to be profitable,
although we, in hindsight, might not have realized that fact from the
start.
Angry Viking is the mutual lovechild of
Bo and Jeppe and was released in June 2010. Although the quality of
the game might have been somewhat lacking at the time, the niche
approach seemed to yield an acceptable number of downloads. That
number rather quickly plummeted though, it would seem that metalheads
with an affinity for mindnumbing violence has quality demands as
well...
At the time we released the game on
Android we had drastically increased the quality of the game and got
a lot better reception, even though Pay-Per-Download games seem to
have a hard time on the Android Market. Our current version rating is
4+ on both iOS and Android, but the next time we're going for a niche
market, we're going for 5% of a demographic instead of 0.1%.
In our current project we've shifted
from blood, metal and vikings to a timid fairy named Harry. From 3D
to 2D. From deathmetal to chimes and eerie classical music. From
black, white and bloodred to earthcolors. Basically no similarities
exist between the two games.
When cleaning up our project folders
after Angry Viking was released we found a folder named “PR &
Marketing” which was completely empty, that pretty much sums up our
approach at the time - We would make the game and then just leave it
to be discovered by its own devices, which is a faulty attitude at
best...
We decided that we were no good at
making ourselves noticed so we turned to Chillingo/EA to ask if they
would be interested in working together on “Harry the Fairy”
which they were. This leaves us with doing what we do best and love
doing – making games.
