Ask HN: Our iPad game hit top 30 in free games, how do we keep the momentum?

Congratulations on the success! Getting a mobile game noticed isn't easy anymore.

I'd say your top priorities should be (in this order): 1. Keeping your existing players as long as possible (Retention) 2. Making money (Monetization) 3. Getting new users in the door (User Acquisition)

It's a tough environment right now, and you can easily spend all your profits on marketing--so you have to make sure you're maximizing the Lifetime Value (LTV) of every install.

As a product manager with experience working on games for Zynga, Disney, and a few small gaming companies, I can tell you that free to play games are more like an on-going service than a make-it-and-ship-it console game.

Successful game developers generally follow the same pattern: 1. Collect data to see what players like / don't like 2. Analyze the data to decide what to do next 3. Implement a change / new feature 4. See if it worked 5. Repeat

Data-driven decision making is key to making sure you're investing your engineering resources for the highest return.

I'd be happy to talk in more detail.

Guys,

Thats incredible. Apple pushes new apps in the first week or 10 days. Usually it kind of drops after that. It might not be the case for your app. Wait a bit before you decide to change your life because of this game. If in one month its still getting 100 000 downloads per day... Then you got a winner

There's a few things you can do: - focus on growing the userbase and sell the game in a few months or years. Make your game better and better... - try to make money right now through ads. I would suggest to cut a direct deal with a big game developer like supercell (charboost is good for that) - you're probably not making any money right now. I saw that you're not anywhere in the top grossing

I have a few apps that hit the top 1000 overall in the us. If you wanna talk, contact me : gabriel.louis.muller at gmail.com

Enjoy the ride,

Gab

My answer would be, it depends on your objectives. Are you hoping to build this into a large game company? Are you happy to try to craft a "lifestyle" game studio? Do you care about money? Are you just wanting to see lots of people play your game? Etc.

Your options include working with a large game publisher, which would be something to consider if you have limited resources on the marketing side and don't want to raise venture capital.

From a pure product strategy point of view, the best possible thing you could do is develop a viral loop, such that each of these installs you're currently getting for free could help you generate more installs.

Often this is done hand-in-hand with some key element of game-play (e.g. gifting) or hand-in-hand with some paid element, so people can either pay for something (generating you revenue) or avoid paying by completing viral actions (generating you new users).

Good luck!

Interesting name, there is already a game with the exact same one released in 1997 from Maxis [now EA]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Drop . Good luck.

Hi arbesfeld, This looks like a fun little game but could you please consider adding a colourblind mode. Your game is completely inaccessible to people such as myself with rod monochromatism - The second level features three different marbles, two of which appear the same.

Here is an edited screenshot to give you an idea of how I might see the game: http://i.imgur.com/IFUkvKm.png

Can you see how similar the second two marbles look?

One common way to address this is by assigning each marble and each bucket a letter or a number.