It’s great to back on iDevBlogADay! If ever you needed proof that it serves as the prunes to a lazy man’s blogging habit, I am it. Thanks again to Miguel for all his hard work on this. 

I’ve been keeping up with reading the iDevBlogADay entries, as well as many other inspirational and relevant posts. I probably read too many blogs in fact, which can make it hard to work out who to trust. Seemingly everyone is offering their advice on how to become successful on the App Store, how to make it in life, how to get things done better, but I’ve come to realise that you always need to be careful to realise that it’s only ever one person’s opinion, and no matter how successful they may be, what worked for them won’t necessarily work for you. 

Marketing for example is something most of us probably suck at. There are lots of good posts talking about how to market your app, and they offer some good advice that you should follow. But if anyone ever tells you they have a formula for success, then they’re lying. Take Flying Cats Game for example. I think I ticked a lot of boxes with what you should do to get the word out about your app. I made a good game that people enjoy playing, I tweeted about it from the word go, I got it out to beta testers and got their feedback, I added social leaderboards, I set up a Facebook page, I set up a Touch Arcade post, I made a gameplay video and put it on YouTube, I tweeted about all of that, I blogged, and I sent promo codes and press packs to all the big review sites. And the result? FCG’s sales have been below my lowest estimates. As I’m trying to set this up as a business, sales and the bottom line is my primary metric for measuring success, and so far, in this respect FCG has failed. 

There is no formula for success. Not even successful people can tell you what it is. But I’ll give you my opinion on why FCG has slipped into the obscure 0-2 downloads per day section of the market. I think it’s precisely because it’s a good game. 

I’m not suggesting that bad games are the way forward — certainly not. But the fact is that good doesn’t cut it anymore in this market. Just being good is dull, it’s what everyone else is doing and it won’t make you stand out. You might get lucky being good, and get featured by Apple, but that’s an incredibly risky strategy and not the foundation for building a business. What you need is something remarkable. 

Ironic really that in my last iDevBlogADay post, I claimed that originality was overrated, and that creating magic was key. Didn’t I tell you not to trust blogs already? I think I was wrong. Magic is crucial, but playing it safe is fatal. Just because Nintendo keep the same characters a lot, doesn’t mean they’re not doing some of the most innovative gameplay out there. And because they’re massive, the need to innovate is less anyway. If you’re one or two people, amongst thousands of other ones and twos, you need to be remarkable. 

But this is all just my opinion, and I may change my mind later! What I do know is that I need to try a different strategy, because the last strategy didn’t work. After all, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result, right? The problem I’ve found with accepting nothing less than the remarkable, is that it feeds procrastination, which has characterised the month of January for me. I want to have a clear direction and a clear vision before I set out on the next project, so I’ve been taking time to regroup and reassess everything. How I make things remarkable, I don’t know, and I certainly don’t know how you make things remarkable yourself. But if you set out to be average, you set out to fail. In my opinion, anyway.