FingerBakery Blog

I thought I’d just write up a blog post on something a little different that I did while doing promotion for Pokerbot that wound up getting me some good reviews in the iTunes App Store:

Touch Arcade have a forum where you can announce your games when you release them (or while they’re upcoming). I’m sure most people who release games all post them there. They also have a forum for promos and contests, where it’s a pretty common practice to give out promo codes for your app. I go to Touch Arcade a fair bit and everytime I’ve looked at this forum, developers are just pasting in 10 or 20 (or more sometimes) promo codes and TA reader will just grab them as fast as they can and use them. I’ve actually done this once, there was a program on the Cocos2D forum (where devs also often post promo codes) that I saw and redeemed as fast as possible without fully knowing what it was for – I thought it was a certain type of app, but in my hurry to get the code before anyone else, I made a mistake and ended up deleting the app pretty fast.

I figured I would post 10 codes to that forum since I had a few handy after writing to all the app sites,etc. I could find, but I didn’t want just the 10 most bored people who refresh the promo codes forum the fastest to get them, I wanted 10 people who might actually play/enjoy my game. So I posted just asking that people read the thread for my game in the “new releases” forum there or go to it’s website, and then post 1 thing about my game in the promo thread. I just wanted them to post something like “it’s based on Texas Holdem” or “it has bonus rounds”, or anything that showed they weren’t randomly clicking buttons, then I’d send a private message to the first 10 with a promo code.

So, long story short, not only did I get the codes to interested people, I also just said when I sent them the codes “If you like the game, leave a rating on the App Store or a comment in the main thread for the game here!”, and a large majority of them did so. In fact, not only did they leave ratings on the App Store, they also left reviews (I can tell because the ones who did use the same username on both sites).

So that was cool, I was just hoping to get the game out there a bit, but I ended up getting more App Store reviews and ratings than I expected (honestly I didn’t think anyone would bother). To me, the lesson here is just that if you spend half a second extra to try and get your game or app to the right people, it’s SO much more worth it than just lazily posting a bunch of codes. Most of the threads where people just post 10 or 20 codes on Toucharcade get maybe 1 or 2 replies saying “thanks got XA12312312123 code” or “codes are all gone” or something, but it’s so easy to just add a little twist and get some real feedback and ratings.

So that’s my 2 cents for the day, don’t just post codes willy nilly, take an extra minute to talk to people and get the codes to the right people and you can get some reviews with minimal effort.

Post in the comments here with any thoughts or talk to me on my Twitter account.