Kinda unrelated to an iphone games forum, but what has Blizzard exactly done wrong? Their games are extremely polished and/or get constant updates. I've been casually playing WoW for 4 years now. If it hadn't been constantly updated, I would have stopped playing after around 6 months. Go figure. If you are talking about their iPhone apps, I have both the Autenthificator and the Armory and they both work very well. My best bet is that you are one of the ragequitters who left some Blizzard game because they normalised their overpowered class/race and decided that Blizzard balancing a game means they don't care about it or something like that (sadly, I know a lot of people who do that). Edit: To the author of this topic: Yes, I as an iPhone gamer for 2 years now appreciate it much more when a developer updates an application that I like than when they go on a new project. A lot of games who had (or, better said, have) great potential but which have been ignored by their developers have dissapeared into the nether (Aqua Forest and Orions come to mind), while constantly updated games like Pocket God, Angry Birds or Doodle Jump are still on top of the Charts despite being in the market for a long time.
The main demographic of iPhone games is early teenagers, who are always hungry for more updates. When debating to buy a game, they love seeing that the developer is generous in looking after the game and maintaining it constantly. Until you improve Tactica (I assume that's the name) to the level of a popular and quite full game, that's when people will actually hope for a sequel... but you might want to keep some of the ideas for Tactica 2, if that ever comes out.
I think this is a great threat topic and certainly sits at the center of one of the bigger divides between gamers and developers. Gamers want to be rewarded for their pick.... there are lots of apps out there, they want their dollar(s) spent well. Developers need money... and unless you've got a large volume selling app, updates soon don't pay off. (Jet Stunts is an exception, imo, as it gets quite a bit of attention... deserved, for sure, but not all games will be featured on Touch Arcade with each update!) I had an interesting experience with this. Zombie Karts was both a Hot New Game and New and Noteworthy. I put in two updates, including one that added in new content and added OpenFeint. All updates improved performance... but after time I had to focus on a new project. Perhaps it was my mistake, but when I released Cascadia Kart, I was stunned at the number of upset ZK buyers... complete with accusations that I was going to just start churning out kart games. Here was a different game with all new content and a different set of features that was a trifle $0.99 more, and yet simply due to it's similarity to ZK folks felt the effort should have gone toward it instead. So it's definitely a fine line!
This Mark Cuban article seems relevant to the topic: Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers EXCERPT: "They didn’t improve their competitive positioning. They put themselves in a never ending revolving door of trying to respond to customer requests. To make matters worse, resources and brainpower that could be applied to “inventing the future” were instead being used to catch up with features that locked them into the past." FWIW. I DO subscribe to the idea that updates are important to app success. But the developer must ask himself...WHY am I doing this update?
I think updates primarily are good for long term support. It makes it so your current user base is like "hey, this dev cares... i will definitely look into his future games." Does that translate to sales? Not really (apart from some exceptions). Does this point matter as much if your user base is relatively small? No, not really (from a business standpoint). Their secondary purpose, imo, only works if you have a large user base, i.e 500,000 + users, which of course would be the word of mouth factor. If you have a huge user base, all you need is a tiny % of them to recommend your game to their friends to get some nice extra sales -- but even then I don't think you can expect (from our experience anyway) a tangible boost in sales, and if your game is good to begin with, they'll recommend it anyway. Ultimately the app store market is heavily driven towards the first few weeks of your apps release, where you have your new release buzz and the best chance to get featured by apple. Of course there are exceptions of games that do well over a prolonged period of time (heck, N.Y.Zombies hasn't completely disappeared after 3 months which is nice), but for the most part app store games will have most of their success right in the beginning (to this day we have earned 1/4 of our total revenue from the 1st week and half of release).
Actually this has not been been true for many of the more successful games on the App Store. For instance ... Angry Birds. In our own case, Moxie took several months to get traction. And the same is proving true with Trivia Hound, which is now climbing the charts after 2 months on the App Store.
Well I think in the current case, my basic drive to do the update is, that I want it to be perfect for myself. Many of the features have been suggested by customers. Yet the most work-intensive and hard are the ones I wanted to have in there myself (as of now I'm still wondering how the AI should think about the newly added scrubs, and I really want to have the turn-based push-notification multiplayer). Luckily I also want to do an iPad version, that will essentially be the same game with a reworked UI. So all the updates I add now will be in the iPad version too. And since this will be featured on the iPad Store as new (and hopefully noteworthy ) I have the advantage of a new version too. Also I believe that my board-game is actually better fitted for the iPad, so maybe the work will pay off there.
Angry Birds is hardly the typical case for a game in the app store... of course the more successful games consistently stay at the top, but we're talking about 10/several hundred thousand apps. Plus, you released Moxie over a year ago where the app store was less saturated, so things are a little different now. Also, I mentioned there are exceptions, but typically if you look at the charts for 90% of games on the app store, you'll see large spikes in the beginning during release, followed by a quick fall off. Of course you will rise and fall throughout the life of your game over the span of months and weeks, but its safe to say that for most apps out there, they will peak during the few weeks of release.
My game was built / marketed around the idea that we wanted to be continually releasing updates for years down the road. New classes, items, mechanics, monsters, worlds, skills, etc., hopefully all for free. We've been out about 2 1/2 months, and so far our player's have been, at best, happy that we're keeping to our word and the content itself and, at worst, understandably aggravated at the stability issues that come with being a single developer in a continuous development cycle or completely unsatisfied with the updates we make. In no case have our player's perceptions of our updates correlated with the number of updates or sales. In fact, updates have dropped off sharply, possibly suggesting people have uninstalled. Luckily, perhaps stupidly, I care enough about my game to continue updating it, and hope that it pays off in the end. Doodle Jump also had this happen. 8 sales on day 1, 80000 sales in a single day 8 months later. Consistent updates was one of many factors the developer cited to his rise in sales, although a plug from the Jonas Brothers may have been a bigger contribution.
Don't forget that updates back in Doodle Jumps day were more significant because it would put you back on the new release list -- so there actually was a direct, tangible benefit of doing updates. Many older games succeeded only after multiple updates because of this additional exposure.
Ah, good point. It's really a shame that fact was so immediately abused with meaningless updates by developers trying to get back to the top of the queue, since now there isn't really an incentive to work on a product indefinitely apart from keeping existing customers happy.
I do agree that Jet Car Stunts is a rarity in that updates boost it up the charts... We can only base the facts on our own games: The Openfeint Gold update the game got to around 70 in the game charts and hung around the top 100 games for about two weeks. For publicity we managed to get on the front page of the major review sites and Openfeint pushed it as well. At the same time as the gold release we did the lite version. What we found was that when there was a large number of downloads from the lite, a few day's later the sales on the paid version shot up. The DLC and iOS 4 update the game got as high as 31 in the game charts and is still in the top 100 games. And again we managed to get on the front pages but the biggest thing that boosted the game was Apple featured it in a number of sections. As soon as the Apple features began to cease the game had a drop of about 30 positions - last I looked we are at 65. If you look at our chart graph on appannie you can see that the updates helped sales but other factors I mentioned helped as well. Maybe we have been lucky with our timings of release - who knows. But I know one thing, if you manage to get a good user base for the game then doing updates is a good thing to reward the people who bought the game. And if users report problems we will fix them very promptly and update as quickly as possible. You cannot keep everyone happy but most users take note of this and will invest in the next game. Digital distribution has made updating the product a major thing for the customer base.
