Hi everyone,
For the past few weeks my friends and I (Howling Moon Software) have been struggling with the iTunes App Store and trying to sell copies of our game ScribBall. Not surprisingly, we are all complete morons when it comes to marketing. So we tried to learn a little something about the seedy underbelly of the marketing world. It seems that many companies release similar products that have been repackaged and given a new name: Mercury Sable vs. Ford Taurus.
So on a whim, and with really nothing to lose... we ripped off our own game and created a clone of it called Crayon Ball. We did not make any press releases, nor did we advertise Crayon Ball in anyway. We completely neglected it. Yet somehow... it outsold ScribBall and did significantly better.
(the ScribBall spike is due to an update, that actually made it way better than Crayon Ball... yet still Crayon Ball out performs it.)
I guess I attribute this mostly to the fact that Crayon Ball has a way less confusing name, and a prettier icon. It might also be that since it is a physics based puzzle game with Crayon in the title that people found it while searching for Crayon Physics (I don't really think this is the main reason, but who knows.)
Any thoughts or ideas on this?
Here is what one of my partners had to say about it in Howling Moon Softwares blog:
http://howlingmoonsoftware.com/wordpress/?p=131===A Problem as a result of AB testing:
Recently Crayon Ball was featured in the App Store as a Staff Favorite, and as a result is climbing up the charts. Today we just broke into the Top 100 paid Games. So we are now faced with a problem, what do we do for all those fans who bought ScribBall and are maybe accidently buying Crayon Ball?? We do not want to seem devious and sneaky, we are trying to be as public as possible about it, that Crayon Ball and ScribBall are really pretty much the same. Any thoughts or ideas?