Mobile marketing through Twitter and Facebook is generally effective. Unfortunately they want to milk you to death with Ad costs so they have a policy against sweepstakes, coupons and giveaways. Quizzes are not really effective unless they generate some type of controversy. What do you mean by games in specific?
Like making user play some game on their mobile phone and giving them some discounts based on the win. The overall game experience could be designed keeping in mind the branding and philosophy of the business involved.
A lot of people on here are defending Amazon "because they take risks". Yea of course they do, they burn capital like a startup; when they have been in business for ~20 years. That is just negligence, not persistence. Sure they took a risk here, but it was vastly un-calculated and if it took them awhile to develop the product it still doesn't justify the attempt to win the high end as a newcomer in the space with a undeveloped app marketplace.
No, but that's not the point. The e-commerce space is very different than the product space. They are applying the same logic in both, which is a mistake.
The main character being an old man is not a good idea. It's important for an adventure game to create a character that the target audience can relate with, even if it's a hedgehog or something abstract. Albeit I agree with you in general, just furthering this point.
Some people may say that we are in a Idiocracy, seeing games like Flappy bird become trend setters while AAA titles are getting barely any downloads. Mobile game developers need to understand the platform is more important than the game. In that you develop what is best for the platform and demographic. Not what you perceive as being high quality and pour millions of dollars and R&D. The more you make the mobile game look like a job, regardless how difficult it was to make, it will not be enjoyed because of such complexity. Although for simple Apps that have little ways to differ from the crowd, then marketing with some quirky difference to it seems to be the most effective.
Sorry but you're vastly underestimating the power of marketing. "Yo" was basically an entirely marketing play, same with Flappy Bird, and their are several more examples. Candy Crush is by no means innovative, they polished an existing flash game that had been around for ages and marketed it correctly. Examples through counter examples; Bing will never succeed, simply because the brand has been devalued to a point that such migration is impossible. Amazon cannot make it in hardware no matter their innovation, because of how deeply invested people are with Apple/Google. I am sorry to say that in some respects; it is you with the blindspot.
That being said their are also examples of what you say working, but I have spoke to many people who have worked on AAA titles on mobile which have spent millions on R&D, with the best possible designers and developers, only to have a game like flappy bird outdo them. This is not only about being innovative, in fact it's sometime not, but rather having a anti-attitude to what the current market is in order to differentiate. Making an app for kids? Ask kids what they want, having a holier than though approach is only going to kick yourself in the face.
They decided to release the app to the App Store,
and people slowly started hearing about it. The
first serious buzz happened when blogger ad technical
Robert Scoble wrote about Yo after a visit to Israel.
He called it “the stupidest” but “most addicting” app.
Thus the Yo app became the conversation of the day
among the startup crowd in Silicon Valley and New
York, who tweeted how excited they were at using it.
As interest burgeoned, Arbel moved to San Francisco
last week.
You proved my point " The
first serious buzz happened when blogger ad technical
Robert Scoble wrote about Yo after a visit to Israel.
He called it “the stupidest” but “most addicting” app." Until then no-one knew about it, what is that called marketing. Are you going to down-vote me because you're wrong? How about Flappybird? That didn't gain any traction until the #1 Youtube video maker PewDiePie made a video on how much he hated it.
Marketing is a deliberate attempt to promote a product with the intention of selling it. If the authors or publishers of Yo approached Scoble or the Youtuber and persuaded them to feature their product, that's marketing. If Scoble or the Youtuber came across these apps on their own and randomly decided to mention them then that's not marketing, it's just luck.
Are we going to argue semantics on HN? If I show my app to anyone, which he did. Whether it is a news station or my mom it is marketing. He didn't just magically see it, the developer specifically showed him. You also have no idea if the Youtube video was influenced by the developer do you? I have worked with game streamers and had them promote some of our products; it's not hard. Feel free to post a dictionary definition of "marketing" if you want to continue this pointless debate on semantics.
People like you poison this site's ecosystem. Anytime you receive any counter to your misguided opinion you can silence the dissent by down-voting. Nothing you have said provides a insightful counter to anything I have said. You are just trying to bury my responses because you know you are wrong. It's disgusting, I thought this site was better than this.
