FingerBakery Blog

When I first decided to get into apps and learn to program them, it was clear that I would make an app while I learned. This is how I have generally done programming before, in fact the only reason I got into programming years ago was because I had an idea for a website and had no way to make it happen other than program it myself.

I had a bunch of ideas, and I settled on a heads up poker game for a few reasons. I thought I could do a better quality one than the ones out there, I wanted to add cool achievements and bonus rounds, etc. Also I have been into poker myself for ages and tried most of the apps out there (as well as playing on the actual online sites like Pokerstars and Full Tilt Poker a ton) and I have a pretty good clue as to what makes a poker game fun (or not so fun).

From a marketing point of view, I thought poker was a decent choice because there are tons of people who enjoy playing poker, there are a number of iPhone poker apps that do well sales-wise, and I figured if I created one that was of high enough quality, people would play it.

That last paragraph is where the problem lies: Just because there is a market for something, does not mean it is marketable. Sounds confusing, and maybe I am not wording it perfectly, but here is what I mean:

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Let’s compare the audience for 2 app categories: The first category is location-based check-in apps such as Gowalla and Foursquare. The second is poker-related apps such as the Zynga iPhone app and whatever else is out there.

I of course can’t be sure of exact numbers, but I’m pretty familiar with both these categories, and I feel like the audience for each is fairly similar, numbers-wise. I’d be hard-pressed to really guess which is bigger in terms of pure number of users.

The problem is though, poker apps are a lot harder to market. Although card games are games, they’re not the kind of games that game review sites cover (although stuff like Sword & Poker does get covered, an awesome poker/RPG combo that leans more to the RPG side). Poker sites and message boards have all spent the past 5 years having to deal with huge numbers of spammers/shills/salesmen who are trying to sell something (anything gambling-related attracts a lot of people trying to make a fast buck), so if you just post an innocuous msg board post like “Hi guys, I’ve released a cool poker game, check it out” or whatever that would be fine on a lot of message boards, it will be deleted almost immediately on any poker message board. What’s more, most of the big poker sites make so much money covering a certain set of products that get affiliate income from (rakeback sites, online poker sites, etc), they aren’t really in the business of promoting something they can’t profit from. One well-known poker discussion site actually used to delete any threads where it’s users discussed a certain poker site that didn’t charge rake (rake is the money the poker site takes from each pot). They just did this because they felt threatened by this business model: If this site got popular and all the sites had to move to a rake-free model, this discussion site couldn’t make affiliate anymore. So yeah, sites that purport to be poker news or media sites tend to actually just be shills and not useful unless you’re sticking money in their pockets.

Also, even if all the poker media sites do cover a game like mine, it’s not some magic bullet, because the type of people who would really like my game are more casual poker players, the type of person who doesn’t site and read poker news sites, the type of person who downloads some poker games on their iPhone, plays a bit of poker on Facebook, that sort of thing. Those people are just not concentrated in any easy to locate spots online, they’re just scattered because they’re very casual.

Now contrast that to the Gowalla/Foursquare category: If you make some new check-in/location-based app that does anything even remotely cool, there are a TON of tech blogs that will be aching to cover it, and a huge percentage of your potential customers are reading those sites on a regular basis.

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So, I mean I’m not making excuses for Pokerbot not blazing up the app charts yet or anything, I never thought it would be a top 10 game or anything, but I do kind of regret that I stopped at “a lot of people would love to play this game” and didn’t go further and ask “how will I reach these people, are there certain venues online where they congregate?”.

Now there’s also a chance that my game isn’t smashing up the charts because it isn’t as good as I think. A lot of people make apps that aren’t as good as they think and I am not ruling out at all that I may be one of them. However, I’ve played a lot of Pokerbot’s competition, and for the people who are into this type of game, I think it stacks up very well. It’s not the flashiest app compared to some of the amazing games that are out there on the App Store, but as far as a heads-up poker game, I think it’s pretty darn good, I just wish I could actually get the people who PLAY this sort of game to play it. Oh well, I still have some ideas up my sleeve, we’ll see what happens!