FingerBakery Blog

I know the title of this blog post is ugly, but I’m hoping to do a tiny bit of optimization for my search results and I want to make sure to make it clear that Pokerbot is an iPhone poker game. Now let’s move beyond that and get into this: I mentioned on my Twitter account earlier today that I ran a small ad buy to advertise the game. I thought I would put some details in here:

I bought $50 of ads on Admob. That’s the minimum amount they will do, and I don’t really think the ROI is going to be positive so it’s not like I wanted to spend any more than that right now.

I made a big mistake when I placed the ad, I for some reason thought $0.05 was the minimum bid you could put in per click, but I realized after it had spent half of my budget that I could bid and pay $0.03 per click if I wanted to, so I did that. This means that I received 1224 clicks, but I could have bought 1666 clicks for that same amount of money, oops. So I burned about $12.50 or so of equity there.

I don’t see ANY downside to paying  0.03/click versus 0.05/click, the traffic coming from those clicks is going to be equal quality I am pretty positive. I’m glad I didn’t make this mistake if I was somehow doing a large buy.

Okay, so, I mentioned I don’t think I’ll make an immediate profit on this buy. I just don’t see it happening, although it’d be nice if it did make some sort of return. For now, I’m just curious to try out a tiny buy, see what happens, and maybe get moved up in the charts temporarily. And the chart move HAS happened, I’m at 74th in card games as I write this, from a low of  119 earlier in the day before the ads started running. Not something that’ll help me immensely, but it’ll be interesting to see how my ranking shakes out over the next day or so, I don’t really know what sort of criteria or sliding time scale the App Store rankings are based on.

I went through college in an advertising program, and I looooove reading/thinking about marketing stuff, so being able just to mess around with little ad buys like this excites me. I have to wait to see my sales reports tomorrow to know if this had any impact on sales at all, it could be that everyone who clicked through left without buying, I have no clue what kind of conversion rate to expect.

One thing that I am hopeful may have helped with conversion is that I made the ad for Pokerbot dull and I included the price of the app (99 cents now) in the actual ad. Hopefully this deterred a lot of the people who will never pay for any app from even clicking on the ad. The ad was just a small version of my app’s icon, along with black and white text that says “POKERBOT: $0.99 Heads Up Poker”.

It’s funny writing ads that are kind of meant to NOT get clicked when most of what people talk about is how to create ads that DO get clicked, but that’s the difference between CPM and CPC advertising, I am really just looking for qualified buyers. I’m not made of nickels goddamnit!

So here are the stats on the ad buy, and please hit me up on my Twitter with any questions or whatnot, I love talking about this stuff or comparing notes more than anything.

Total impressions: 144,905

Clicks: 1244

CTR: 0.84%

Cost: $50.00

Average CPC: 0.04 (due to my sloppiness as mentioned)

Oh and I chose to run this buy as a short blast, the whole campaign ran in maybe 4 hours or so.

I will update the blog tomorrow with any information I gain about sales resulting in these ads, etc.

I keep meaning to update this blog, but I’ve been busy with other things to do with marketing/whatever, and to be honest, I keep forgetting how to update this blog haha. What can I say, I’m a pro!

Anyway, Pokerbot is now out in the App Store, if you are reading this for some reason and haven’t purchased it, gogogo:

http://pokerbotapp.com/

That’s the website for it and there’s a link to the App Store on it. Get at it! More blog posts to come shortly.

So I submitted Pokerbot to the App Store today, fingers crossed that it gets approved the first time and doesn’t take too long. I’ve heard of people waiting between 7 and 9 days lately, which is going to kill me to wait, but that’s part of the game.

I had to compromise a bit with Pokerbot in order to get it in the store and shipped. There were features I am going to have to leave for the 1.1 and 1.2 updates, but frankly it just would have taken too long to put them in, and I don’t want to become one of those stories of someone who never finishes their project. Pokerbot took a long time to write because I have had to spend a lot of time getting up to speed on Objective-C, Cocos2D and the whole iPhone way of life. I am super hopeful that I have learned enough and made enough mistakes now that I can get my next game up and running way way way faster.

My product experience up to now has been creating and running web applications, and they’re SO different from iPhone apps in this regard. On the web, my way of working is to get a site up as soon as possible, and then add features iteratively. Not only does this get you up and running faster, but my experience has been that the actual action of adding a number of features progressively on a live site is more powerful in the user’s eyes than if you just launch the site all at once with everything perfect. People like to know that a site hasn’t just been abandoned and that it’s a dynamic going concern.

On the iPhone, all the advice that I’ve seen is that first impressions are the most important thing in the world and you shouldn’t release until everything is absolutely flawless, and I am sure this is true. One reason this is especially important is that if you do have some bugs that pop up, you can’t just quickly solve them and have the fix deployed in an hour, you have to fix them and wait for Apple to approve your update. I hate the idea of working that way. It’s especially frustrating to me how I can submit my binary today, possibly wait a week for it to be approved, and by that time I could actually have added a ton of stuff that would improve the game. Oh well, like I say, that’s the price you pay to be in the App Store (which really is a pretty amazing place).

So anyway, while I think my game is pretty good right now, I wish I had the extra time to add a few features that are going to make it a lot more fun. But hopefully sticking them in the 1.1 and 1.2 updates should give users the sense that the software is an ongoing project and make them happy that way (this is of course a lot of the appeal of Doodle Jump and Pocket God and their constant updates).

Or hey, there’s a decent chance I’ve flubbed something that Apple really cares about and my app gets rejected, in which case maybe I’ll have extra time to stick everything in!

I thought I’d write quickly about some interesting things I’ve run into lately. So first of all, the app I’ve been working on is called Pokerbot, and the basic premise is that you’re playing a game of heads-up (ie. 1-on-1) poker versus a robot.

So one thing that’s happened since I started working on the app is that a company called Candywriter released an iPhone game called ‘Dogs Playing Poker’ and it’s been quite a hit, everytime I look at the Apple App Store lately it’s ranked in the top spots of the games category. Now this is interesting, because in the industry I am coming from, having a competitor get a jump on you and gain a lot of traction is not very good news, but I think in the iPhone apps space it’s not a big loss, and it’s probably a win. For one thing, iPhone games aren’t really competing with each other that much – if someone likes/buys/plays a certain iPhone poker app, they’re probably also going to like/buy/play another iPhone poker game. So if Dogs Playing Poker is a blockbuster on the App Store, it’s good news for Pokerbot, since it keeps people focused on just how damn fun poker is.

Anyway, as for Dogs Playing Poker itself, I tried it and I think it’s a very nice game, it’s very well done and looks great visually. It’s highly geared to beginners to poker and even includes some sort of report card for players that I didn’t really delve into.

One thing I noticely immediately is that they stack the deck BIGTIME* and you never really get dealt a bad hand. They undoubtedly do this to make the game fun for newbies, and I think it’s a fairly solid game design decision. It’s funny because I come from a background where for the last couple of years I’ve played poker pretty seriously, mostly online, and talked extensively to people who also do so. To players like us, the whole concept of a stacked deck is completely abhorrent and any hint that this was going on anywhere would be scandalous (although so far all the scandals have involved other ways of people cheating).  But that’s when you’re playing against other humans, there’s nothing unethical about stacking the deck in a video game of course.

I remember being in a poker tournament years ago, when the big poker boom happened (2004-ish?) and as I was leaving I heard this girl saying to this guy “I COULDN’T BELIEVE YOU MADE 2 PAIR! THAT WAS AMAZING!”. Now, if you’ve played any amount of poker at all you’ll know that making 2 pair is not remotely notable or uncommon, so it was obvious these people were very new to poker, but I have always remembered just how vividly excited this girl was. That makes me think that stacking the deck will indeed keep the newbies who play Dogs Playing Poker happy – it’s fun to make big hands like sets, straights and flushes all the time! That’s why a lot of people love playing Omaha (a poker variant where you make big hands a lot more often than Texas Holdem).

I have chosen not to stack the deck in Pokerbot. It’s just not how the game is designed, I want a game that everyone can enjoy, from beginners who get excited when they make 2 pair to experienced players who only get excited when a new version or mashup of Bing Blang Blaow comes out (best poker meme ever). I have made a decision to NOT make the artificial intelligence in the game so damn smart that it will kill everyone who plays against it.

The AI in Pokerbot tries to basically play like a normal human does: it makes mistakes here and there, but they are mistakes that an actual player would make, not mistakes in the AI programming. Sometimes the game will make a hero call with no pair when the player shoves, sometimes it’ll make a hero fold when it shouldn’t. I’ve played just under 2 million hands of poker last time I checked, and a million of those were heads-up, and I’ve pretty much seen it all. The biggest pot I’ve played was actually a spot where I flopped a set of kings, my opponent was first to act and he shoved 4 figures in with a pure inside straight draw. I was being watched by a top online player/coach at the time and we both started laughing really hard (until the turn card hit sigh). My point being, actual human players do irrational things, and my app’s AI emulates that pretty well I think.

So a problem I faced is: How do I make the AI pretty decent and fun to play against for experienced players, but still let beginning players not get their asses kicked on a consistent basis? I don’t want to go into it until the game is out (1-2 weeks from now I am hoping), but I think I came up with a pretty damn good – and fun – solution for this, after tons and tons of brainstorming on the problem. I really can’t wait to get the game out and see the reactions to the things I have added, I know that even as an experienced player I’ve really enjoyed the extra features, and I think they’ll be really fun and useful to beginners.

* sidenote: When I first played the game and noticed how stacked the deck towards being dealt premium hands, I wondered whether the average player would actually notice it. Shortly after, I saw a twitter post from iPhone developper Noel LLopis mentioning the exact same thing, and although I don’t know him, I haven’t read anything previously on his twitter or blog to suggest he’s some huge poker diehard, I think he’s probably a casual player. So it’s interesting to see that casual players definitely will notice this at some point – whether they’ll dislike it is up for debate.

I haven’t posted this here yet, but I put up a placeholder site for the first Fingerbakery app, Pokerbot, it’s at pokerbotapp.com and is pretty basic, but hey, it’s not empty at least!

And the other thing I meant to post already is that I bought an ad on the Million Dollar App Site, which is a pretty cool idea someone had, based on the Million Dollar Homepage which was one of the greatest ideas in internet history imo. I really hope the Million Dollar App Site goes viral and takes off like crazy one day after I get my app released in the App Store haha.

I have been reading a ton on Twitter the past few days about a WSJ article that stated that Apple’s upcoming iAd network is going to basically be a goldmine for developers. I hadn’t written anything about this, but as someone who launched a website in 1999 supported by ad banner revenue, and then watched the ad market crash immediately during the dotcom bust, I have put a lot of time over the years into thinking about ads, fill rates, CPM, etc.

Jeremy Olson from Tapity (an excellent blog!) wrote a post about iAd today and I found myself typing out my thoughts as a comment on his site and I thought hey wait, I should really be putting this kind of energy into my new blog haha! So I’m just pasting here what I wrote there, for better or worse:

————-

Those are sexy numbers for sure, but the problem will be in filling all the available inventory. I just can’t imagine there being enough advertisers at that price to really fill a ton of the spots.

Also, if some big company, let’s say Pepsi for instance, does decide to purchase a bunch of iAds, I am almost sure they will stick them all in the big apps by big publishers. In my opinion, the average marketing guy would much rather stick an ad in some EA game someone paid $9.99 for (so we know they’re not shy about spending money) than in a cheaper indie app. It looks more legitimate to their bosses or whoever they tell about it to say “oh yeah we ran an ad buy in NHL Hockey 2011 for iPhone”, plus the risk of click fraud is reduced hugely.

I could be wrong though (and I really hope I am!), and there may be a ton of advertisers who discover that $2/click is great value for them and inventory might not be a huge issue. That would indeed be an awesome thing!

————-

I could be wrong and maybe some of these apps are more popular than I think, but I haven’t seen them around too much, so I’m going to make some assumptions. This list is not in any particular order by the way.

1. Pocketball – I love this puzzle game. You have to tie strings across pegs and then bounce balls into boxes – a bit tough to describe properly, but it’s a great game, with very satisfying sounds when the balls knock around.
(web) (appstore) (twitter)

2. Fox Vs. Duck – An incredibly stylish game. Visually, it’s mostly done in shades of grey (with some wine red blood coming when you don’t save the ducks fast enough). The little touches are very nice, for instance the way the menus slide on and off screen one by one. Overall this is just a really well done game, and probably the most design-y game I can recall playing.
(web) (appstore) (twitter)

3. Bitboxland - A crazy musical game… err, is this a game per se? I guess it is since you play with it, but it’s more of a musical toy now I think of it. It took me quite a while to actually clue in to how this works, and the fact you can click more than the little clouds that float by, and I don’t know if I can really say I’m that expert at it even now, but this is how it works: You see some sweet pixel art. Clouds fly by. You tap them, they make sounds. After a while, more and more things appear that you can tap. You wind up making very cool musical loops, and you can record a drum loop and play it back. It’s a bit confusing, but overall it’s trippy and cool.
(web) (appstore)

Guess what? I was going to make this list a few apps longer, but I feel like I have covered enough right now and I might as well leave myself some room to add some in another post (although believe me, I have a zillion apps I love and it shouldn’t be tough to write about a lot of them eventually).

So, I’ve started a blog to go along with this Fingerbakery business. For anyone who may not know where they are, my name is Andrew, and Fingerbakery is my software business. Right now, I am working on a couple of iPhone apps, one of which is the main one that I hope to have out in not tooooo long. It’s a game, and I’ll write more about it later for sure, but as of right now it seems a bit premature probably.

I’d like to use this blog to keep up my general thoughts on the apps I am creating, as well as the whole app world in general. I have to admit, I am a pretty recent entrant to this whole arena. I’ve spent the last 10+ years doing web applications, and while I looooove the web, I also think that creating small mobile apps is also something that’s perfect for the way I like to work, I’m sure I will get more into that in a later post.

So as far as what you may get from this blog: I am not the absolute smartest guy around when it comes to this stuff, but I’ve immersed myself in it pretty thoroughly and I have thoughts here and there on all things app-y. I’m hoping to write some very short posts here, perhaps just saying “hey this app I just tried is good”, but also have some longer posts when appropriate as well.

For now I already have another post I want to start writing, so I’m going to end this, but one thing I would like to add, that can’t be overstated: I am not some genius who knows everything about iPhone apps, Apple, iPad stuff and all other related things. I am not sure I know ANYTHING. I see these guys on Twitter (oh yes, follow me @fingerbakery!) and in other blogs, guys who know a ton of stuff, very smart, very experienced in this field, etc., and I sort of feel like an interloper by even daring to write about iPhone apps. So please realize when you read anything I write here, I’m not doing anything but throwing some thoughts out there.