Pocket God, an iPhone application that achieved brief omnipotence in the best-seller list and lasting adoration from gamers, serves as a pocket guide on how to make an impact on a platform where more than 65,000 apps are now vying for consumers’ attention.
As part of our Media Challenge series, I spoke to Pocket God‘s creator Dave Castelnuovo of Bolt Creative about the techniques his two-man team – himself and artist Allan Dye – used to make Pocket God a million seller in the App Store.
The game itself is an endearing and engaging series of adventures for a tribe of pygmies on a desert island. The player acts as God, governing the weather and what happens to the inhabitants. Sway the iPhone from side to side and they roll off into the ocean to drown or be eaten by sharks. Turn it upside down and they cling onto the island for dear life.
“What we stumbled upon is a game that’s really easy to pull out and show your friends and say ‘Check it out, it’s funny!’ and if they have an iPhone they can get it right there,” he says. “Whereas games that are more immersive, they’re harder to show off.”
Pocket God cost 99 cents and Bolt began issuing free updates with new levels for the game on a weekly basis to maintain the level of interest.
Dave began promoting the game through his blog, through the Touch Arcade gaming website, Twitter and Facebook. He alerted the many amateur video game reviewers on YouTube to the weekly updates, and reviews of the latest episodes followed.
As the game grew in popularity, mums created stuffed animals based on it, players suggested new updates and gamers created special Pocket God levels in the Sony video game, Little Big Planet.
Since the game was introduced in January, it has sold more than 1.2m copies and was number one on the App Store’s charts for paid-for applications for most of March.
The new episodes have maintained sales, but as they start to fall off, Bolt! plans to focus on Pocket God 2 and on moving the original to other platforms.
“We definitely struck lucky, you have to have a little bit of luck, but our skillsets helped us along, and now we have to do it for a second time – but we have a built-in audience that will be looking at what we’re going to do this time,” says Mr Castelnuovo, who is based in San Francisco.
“I know a lot of developers put three months of their lives into a game and then they maybe only get 20 sales a day, people don’t realise how hard it is. Bigger publishers have a hard time, it’s really hard for them to make five or six games and make the money they need to.”
Established mobile publishers such as Glu Mobile have complained it is difficult to cover development costs and make a profit on the iPhone platform, with every game needing to make the Top Ten to garner enough sales.
Gameloft, the mobile publisher that has focused the most on the iPhone, announced this week that it had sold more than 6m games on the App Store. It said its strategy had been “quite successful” but it gave no details of revenues. It has recently started pricing its games at $6.99 rather than $9.99, saying players are unwilling to pay the higher price.
Bolt! Creative has shown the way for smaller developers to be successful, but the idea has to be a good one in the first place to catch on and spread virally.
“You have to have a game that inspires people and then take advantage by building a community around it,” says Mr Castelnuovo.
