Hi there! I've just finished the first mobile game, and I'm looking into ways to increase the awareness of the public for this product. So, I have some questions for the people who stumbled into this strange area, that is marketing your game. 1) How would you go do approach this situation altogether? 2) Did you make use of press reviews , and if yes, was there any impact ? 3) What other ways - apart from banner exchanges and accidental visitors - did you find that help with product awareness? I'm already looking into the field, but I could use some input into this matter, because, being a coder/designer doesn't really help with the business side of game development. :)

What do you mean by "mobile"? PDA? Palm? Cellphone? Laptop? A folded piece of paper?

Cellphone, mainly for series 60

Did it occur to you that you just missed a free marketing opertunity by not even posting your game for everyone to look at on this board alone? Heck, lol, you would probably get at least 100 people to LOOK at your game.

Yes, I have considered what you're saying, but I didn't want this post to be a subtle marketing ploy, or I would've posted it in the announcements section. I'm more interested in answers to those topics than snatching some hits from the gamedev forums.

All in due time :)

You should probaly ask adiash. He is marketing his s60 game now too. From what he told here s60 marketing is more difficalt then j2me.

A good way to go about this is to send out a press-release. That way you would attract magazines in that particular field. The problem with press-releases is that they tend to disappear in the vast pile of releases magazines recieve each day.

Contacting magazines and editors personally is a good way to get around that. So I'm guessing it would pay to try to get hold of a couple of good mobile gaming magazines.

Also a good way is to submit a demo version of the game to download.com for example. There are probably better download sites aimed at mobile gaming.

Good Luck!

Hi Vaipa

Although I've not gone through the publishing process yet for a Symbian game, I'm very close to doing so, and have some suggestions for you.

Firstly you'll need to identify the possible channels, and their estimated return on investments. For series 60 this is a little more limited than J2ME, since many mobile operators and publishers won't consider Symbian games. The market however is still there, and almost 4 million Symbian phones are being shipped quartely (do a google on a Canalysis smartphone report or browse the news archives at NewLC to get access to this data). So the potential market is there, it's just finding a route to the market which is the problem. Some channel options you have, that I can think of off the top of my head are:

Shareware portals: These generally provide download direct to your desktop and possibly to your phone, and offer a 'try before you buy' option to the customer with many games. The biggest of these is probably handango, although I think symbos is another of these. They have the advantage of a high return of sale on each product, but customers appear to be hard to find through sites such as handango. From what I can tell, it seems that sales will be somewhere in the hundreds for an average product, although I may be wrong for better games. Also desktop downloads may be too technologically advanced for many users as bluetooth / infra-red / USB connections on most phones aren't particularly user friendly.

SMS based portals: Instead of providing downloads to the desktop, you can instead provide a download via a custom WAP site that you will have to set up yourself. You then get the customer to send a text message to one of these portals, with a certain code, and they will return some billing text messages and a link to your product. If you can provide your own mass market marketing program, then this potentially could have a lot of revenue. For example you could use this strategy to place adverts for your products in magazines or on TV channels, if you could get access to enough investments. Users will be more likely to buy using this method, since it's a lot easier to send a text message than to set up a dedicated connection to your PC for installation. It can be costly however, and is no point setting up if you can't pay the monthly subscription fee, or you can't think of a way to marketing you product to the mass market. Examples of portals you can use for this kind of setup could be Bango and Sharewire.

Embedded Applications: If your app is good enough, and fits a handset manufacturer's or operator's requirements, then it might be of interest approaching them, and seeing if they are interested in embedding your game on their phone. More and more series 60 phones are being developed and each manufacturer is looking for 'killer apps' (as Sendo puts it) to give them a competitive edge over other phones. If approaching these kind of organizations, I would guess that presentation is paramount, and you want to find a way to literally stun the manufacturer or operator in a short space of time, to make them believe that they really do want your product. I can imagine this is the hardest channel to get into, but could offer huge returns, if you partner with a large enough organisation.

Operator downloads: To tell you the truth, I've not seen any operators or mainstream portals (excluding the shareware portals such as handango), offer any Symbian downloads, although I think CipSoft's TibiaME might have been distributed via WAP download (please correct me if I'm wrong). If you can get your application on the operators' WAP portals however, then would you have access to a huge market and might be selling in the thousands or tens of thousands. However operator's seem to greatly favour pushing J2ME applications at the moment, probably because of their portability. This may change a little however with the introduction of the Nokia preminet solution.


Hopefully I've given you some ideas of possible ways of pushing your game to the market. Please tell me your thoughts on what I have written, it would be great to hear other people's points of views on the Symbian marketplace.

[Edited by - OklyDokly on January 23, 2005 9:58:28 AM]

Quote: OklyDokly - you'll need to identify the possible channels, and their estimated return on investments. For series 60 this is a little more limited than J2ME, since many mobile operators and publishers won't consider J2ME games.

Sorrrry?? did u mean to say this?

lol thanks I'll edit it now...

how are Caveman Arts doing since the Climber X release out of interest evelyn?