October 15th, 2009 by Arjan Olsder Posted in Platforms: iOS | No Comments »
Gamasutra visited the GDC in China and reported on a keynote from ngmoco VP Alan Yu. He talked about topics like piracy, transactions and their social function.
Yu admits the App Store brings a lot of benefits when it comes to publishing, but he also noted competition is fierce as you have to stand out from thousands of competitors. Ways to stand out are creating a title that triggers a word of mouth effect. Second would be attracting promotions by Apple and third being cross promotions over games. That last bit is where the company utilizes their Plus+ network. Just playing with prizes doesn’t seem to be the way according to him. The overall prices of apps are declining though.
Next to his experience in promoting mobile games on the App Store, he also explained that the company sees a 50-90% piracy rate in the first release week of a game. This is a very big number and shows the ‘jailbreak’ community is probably a lot bigger then we all expect.
Read more about his experience in the report from Gamasutra.