Mate, of course it’s possible to reach top 10. It’s even possible to reach #1 overall, but that will happen only with good marketing, if the app is really good or if you have a lot of luck.
The thing I don’t agree with is you saying that if an app hits top 50 and it is better than yours then it should reach top 10 organically. That is not true!!!
Only case I could think of is flappybird . I don’t know how in the hell that got up there most developers here made a better game than that.My point is much better games like banana kong, zombietusami , whale trail (UStwo), and awesomeland (freakzone) have a big shot to make it to the top. There are failures like I talked to the developer of Chips Challenge and he didn’t do as well as he hoped even though he got featured by Google. But it doesn’t hurt your chances.
Hi.
Prior to expend a penny with your game, please, read these posts. I hope it will help you decide whether it worth to invest in advertisement.
What do you suggest to market my app
How to market my new game ? I have a limited budget.
How to market my new game ? I have a limited budget.
Note: all 3 links are different
Just sharing some data on US ranking, my app with 20k+ daily downloads in US, is just somewhere around overall(app+game) top 100.
I think Pixelpower was presenting his information - or whatever he could deduce in good faith.
He could be wrong.
And the person asking the question will know there could be many opinions about the issue. Whether it is ok to spend money - or not - and whether one needs to first be sure the app is good enough - otherwise the money spent may not be useful.
But it seems that for apps that have caused the developer to spend 6 months of their time - some would suggest they spend some money to get the app some early visibility. They may not have enough cash to take the app to full visibility - but it may still be enough to get the app out of complete invisibility.
While others may suggest that to minimize risk - as most paid installs will not necessarily lead to long-term payoff.
Others would suggest that spending - gives a new app a “fighting chance” - and minimizes risk - i.e. the risk that it is not discovered for months by the right demographic etc. So spending some time early may reduce that risk - esp. if they were planning to spend lots of time on the app - so spending money is part of the commitment.
Pixelpower argument that if you get app into top 50 then you have a chance at top 10 - seems to be his most contentious comment.
But that may just mean that appearing in top 50 gives you a chance to get to top 10 - in the sense that if you don’t appear in top 50 you are unlikely to appear in top 10.
What would be interesting is to see which apps in top 10 - actually had a marketing budget behind them.
I have noticed some apps in various niches - which are a nuisance in terms of in-your-face interstitial ads - and very bad app mechanics (although perhaps they had better design or eye-catching design maybe). But their huge number of downloads seemed to suggest to me that they may have had paid installs behind it. When a low-grade app - which is actually unusable in practice is seeing 10x the downloads of other apps - then that suggests that the installs are being driven by paid installs perhaps - but what developer or backer would have the money to push such an app so heavily - and would it every achieve “organic downloads” that make it stay at the top - or will it fall ?
Some of these types of apps have uniformly bad ratings also - or showing up in most useful - but their overall ratings seem to be spectacular also i.e. very high 5 and 4-stars - and low 1-stars etc. So this part was very confusing for me. That is - are they buying paid reviews in large numbers or what ?
So there is a lot of fishy stuff going on … but perhaps the mechanics of it is evident to those who HAVE spent the money - perhaps it IS possible if you spend enough money - to get your app very high in the Top New Free and then Top Free etc. (at least in the app’s category) - and that would somehow even after paid app install campaigns by developer are over.
I am not sure - but perhaps when one operates at the very top end - i.e. is spending enough every day for days - that at the very top the downloads increase a lot.
I know that with AppBrain - for a modest budget at least like $200 a day - you can get app installs to happen like flowing water. That is - for even a shitty app - you can just make people download it just by showing it to enough people.
It is possible that a similar type of dynamic starts to happen if you manage to get your app to the very top.
But I suspect Google ranking algorithms ALREADY know what kind of download numbers you need to have to be at #2 for a category for instance - and how much the app will get just from people finding it in Top Free at #2 - and if your app starts dropping in downloads - then it maybe a slippery slope - UNLESS the developer is constantly pumping money into paid installs - at a trickle perhaps just to keep the app high - and maybe using the high downloads revenue to feed that ranking elevation.
I don’t know - but I suspect the mechanics of this is probably well known to those who have the budget - to run this risk - or those who perhaps have already tried this with $10K or $20K of cash - and they may have arrived at some sense about what kind of strategy is a “sure shot” or a "slam dunk " or whatever … ?
To be honest, the google play ranking is very strange to me, to a point that I can’t really understand it.
How some apps have reached the top charts even though they can’t really be played is a total enigma for me. I believed that they are ranked to well because of paid reviews and downloads. But who would pay tens of thousand of dollars for promoting a crappy app? Wouldn’t it be more wise to spend 1k or 2k on developing a decent app and spend the rest on marketing instead of releasing a crappy app and market it a lot? I don’t really understand this logic.
I would be very interested to know how the Stick Death games performed so well or how Fit the Fat is doing so well (especially the iOS version).
Since I don’t have a logic answer, I keep inventing ideas: what if google automatically assigns a boost variable to each app and the most lucky app (even though it is really bad) gets promoted across the entire store more than the others? Really, I can’t understand how really crappy apps can hit the top rankings without advertising. And if the advertising is behind a success of an app, why doesn’t the developer first invest a bit of money in quality?
Well I have noticed that Google tends to MOVE the rankings around a bit. For the exact app title the app was ranking a bit low - but on one day or for a short while I have also seen the app ranked at number 1 for that.
And I have seen that for some niche keywords which I was watching - the app was routinely ranking low - but suddenly on some day I noticed it was ranking much higher.
So I would not be surprised if Google ranking algorithms are doing some type of “Monte Carlo” experiments or i.e. sampling what the landscape for rankings should look like.
That is - they may suddenly raise the ranking of an app up by 20 rankings - perhaps only in one geographical area - and then see how that affects downloads for that app - and if that app is “worth it” to be at that higher ranking.
And this would actually make eminent sense - that is if I was doing it - I might wind up doing something like this to get a sense of where an app SHOULD stand in the rankings.
Anyway - that is just a conjecture - but rankings DO move around quite a bit - and the sudden ranking changes I mentioned above HAVE happened.
Something I have for granted is that what someone qualifies as crap not necessarily qualified the same way by others.
The big problem for us as developers is to discover what public in general think it’s great.
For instance, how many times have us thought This game I’m making is a killer one. It has astounding graphics, amazing gameplay, incredible soundtrack just to discover that no one cares about it? Almost no downloads and poor ratings… Just time and money wasted for nothing.
I had a game on Play store very similar to Flappy Bird (but it has an airplane instead of a bird). It wasn’t a clone because when I made it I didn’t know about Flappy Bird and Flappy Bird wasn’t a success at the time.
Why does users loved Flappy Bird instead of my game? God knows.
So my point of view is: if a game is a successful then it is not crap, no matter it’s graphics, sounds, playability…
I don’t believe Google rank games randomly… It has to do with the users taste (and it seems clear to me that users taste definitely is the opposite of the majority of developers taste).
Flappy Bird’s initial rise to stardom was via vine videos on the iTunes store. What kept it there wasn’t quality and originality. What kept it there was the pick-up-and-play mentality of the game, combined with the fact that most casual gamers aren’t looking for ‘amazing’ games. They want something they can get their teeth into quickly, not have to devote lots of time to and of course the social aspect is a big player too. When all your friends are playing the same game, comparing scores and progress means a lot. That’s what carried Flappy Bird so far once it hit the charts. That’s what pushed its success across continents and platforms.
It only proves that I have a lot to learn in order to make some money :rolleyes:
No, I am talking about apps that are really crap, games that don’t do anything with a lot of reviews from people complaining about the same thing: that they can’t get the app to run. I’ve seen games like these with more than 100k downloads in the first 30 days. How do you explain this?
I never saw such a crap app. Maybe it’s description, keywords and / or icon leads users to download it?
There was nothing appealing to the icon / screenshots / description.
Well the app might not run on some devices but run well on others. Like my bomb attack max runs slow on anything below a Samsung galaxy 3 . But any android that came out in the last 2 years it runs fine and fast. Fragmentation because of constant OS version that Google is partly to blame. With so many spec’s and devices our job as developers is super tough to support everything.
What is the link to the app your talking about?
So the only plausible explanation is the developers were using bots to artificially inflate the number of downloads.
Don’t remember the link or the name, but it was something regarding a mole and the description was only in Dutch.
Could be. Thought about that and even googled it but I couldn’t find anything useful, to a point where I said: it can’t be done; or if it can, it would be extremely difficult.
How did you get 100,000+ downloads in your “jigsaw puzzles free” game? That’s amazing. Did you buy downloads? How much did you spend?
That game was released just before Christmas last year so there was a lot of traffic on Google Play. I bought downloads worth a few thousand $ and the rest was organic.
Were you able to recover the money you spent? Was the ROI positive or negative?