100 Rogues Dev: App Store Game Updates, Expansions Provide Only Brief Sales Boosts

Author: by Staff

When an iPhone project begins in 2008 and launches in 2010, that's a huge challenge -- and in today's Gamasutra feature, 100 Rogues developer Keith Burgun here describes the bumps in the road that the well-liked, high-quality game has hit on its long slow journey towards release and profitability. Although Burgun and his team initially wanted to do an iPhone game resembling the roguelike POWDER, several decisions early on made the project one of much larger scale: "Due to the fact that we chose our price point first, we ended up expanding out in a lot of ways that took us completely off the POWDER track," he writes. "Probably the most striking difference is in presentation -- our game is pure fully-animated pixel art, with an original score, opening and closing cutscenes, and a detailed user interface," Burgun continues. "Though we had originally planned for it to be un-animated and rough, like POWDER and many PC roguelikes, we eventually decided that the should look and feel like a Super Nintendo or PlayStation release." This early planning set the stage for quite a lot of effort and attention to the game's look and content complexity, as well as the community the team would expend a lot of energy in trying to build. But once the game hit the App Store: "The experience of trying to guerrilla-market 100 Rogues was, and continues to be, frustrating," he explains. "The story goes something like this: Sales are sucking. We work our asses off on a significant update and on promotional materials (be they a video, a contest, an illustration, or just a blog post). "The update goes live, sales increase ten-fold, and everything is great, until we notice that on Day 2 after the update, our sales have reduced by 50 percent or more," he continues. "Same with the next day, and after two or three days, we're back to square one." Burgun feels certain that the challenges to 100 Rogues' commercial opportunity comes from the evolutions in modern business models, and in the full feature he lays out the numerous efforts he's tried to bolster sales and build community -- and the key lessons, useful to any app developer, he's taken away.