Effect of Sessions and App Gifting on Nameless AppStore Ranks

This is the third in a multi-part blog about our first game "Nameless: the Hackers RPG". You can read our first two posts here: 

Gamasutra Blog: 

This topic is a continuation of the previous post, talking about the ranking metrics of our boot strapped marketing attempts. By no-means did we excel or make it big, it was just okay.

Good news is that we still feel that the mobile touch screen interface still has a tremendous amount of potential. Secondly, our sales information lead us to believe that there exists an under served market for premium games on the AppStore.

Nameless: the Hackers RPG for iOS

AppStore ranking boost and paid app RPG

Session based ranking system image appstore

We could be wrong, perhaps AppStore just re-computes rank at night, but what we observe is that our sales were pretty even for each day while still exhibiting this awkward up/down behavior, specifically in the evenings and across midnight.

This is however was a doubled-edged sword for Nameless. On one-hand, download bots don’t get a heavy advantage since sessions are also part of the formula. On the other, our game was designed for 12 hours of game play.

This leads us to believe that the ranking formulas may directly promote unlimited-play, competitive, or sandbox games rather than story driven narratives or games with limited play-time.

Gift Apps Don’t help Rank
We ran into this while we were doing our homework; a great article about it from 2010 by Imangi Studios:

http://www.imangistudios.com/2010/03/gifting-apps-new-promotion-tool-for.html

As noted, giving away your game as a promotion has a great effect since those that received it for free are more likely to tell their friends. This is also a very traditional marketing strategy. We had the exact same findings as Imangi Studios, including the Visa/Mastercard blocks.

We had to get a bit creative since iTunes 11 doesn’t allow you to print out gift redeem codes and asks you for emails. We had to downgrade to iTunes 10.2 so we could generate codes. It took several hours and was very tedious to cross-stare-type-codes since you can’t highlight/copy/paste from iTunes. Since this is our first game, we wanted everyone we know to play it: Friends, family, mentors, teachers, etc… With four of us, we decided to save the promo codes for international media and use our US iTunes store for the gifting.

Important if you didn’t know, promo codes are international, you only get 50 per update, and players are not allow to leave ratings.

iTunes gift apps are locked to store, you can’t buy a US gift app and give it to anyone in Canada or the UK. We had to find friends willing to help for these other iTunes stores.

Effects of App Gifting on AppStore Ranks

Download ranks by gameplay RPG

Since our game is a 12+ hours campaign, players that were jazzed about it might play it over 3-5 days. This plays into our assumption again since we can see a steady decrease in our sales while somehow seeing this “shadow projection” over 3-5 days. It’s not verifiable since we don’t have enough data and don’t have access to Apple’s algorithms, but it’s our best guess.

Would love to compare notes with any other developers that also see this or have counter-data about sessions.

Our Thoughts on Ranking

Next Upcoming Topics
We have the following topics we'll be also touching on in the next few days. It takes a while to make these, we'll be posting every few days until we're done.

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