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[shrewdacumen]

Do you know why a game publisher dislikes reviewing a game that has once been on sale on App Store?

And the publisher I proposed to is willing to marketing-test my game on their portal which will make the game on sale on App Store.

If it failed the test, I should go to another publisher.

I'm worried that this prevents plan B which is looking for another publisher.
Any experience with this?
Or do you know why my previous publisher had said so?

Thanks in advance.

[InvisibleWonder]

Initial sales or a good first impression determine if the App Store will feature the app.  Once that window has past, it's much harder to regain traction and have the store shower you with free impressions.  The publisher is trying to maximize the chances of that happening by polishing before hitting the store.

(I know the thread is a bit old, but it's a good question, so I answer it for posterity.)

[wolf]

Doing a limited release to market test the product is super common in my experience.

On the product side, they can look at the data to see what the retention, average revenue per daily active user, etc are like to try and predict how the product may perform and how profitable it could be for them. There's no substitute for real user data.

If the publisher intends to advertise the product, they can also use it to get CPI (cost per install) data which is more useful than just CPA/CPC (cost per action / click) you would get without an actual product live to direct users to install.

I would expect most commercially oriented publishers to insist on it. For example that's how Voodoo and many others operate - test the game, offer a deal if it can hit certain metrics or free you up to approach other publishers if not.

In terms of limiting the test, usually it's geography based (aka a soft or geo test), so for example releasing just in Canada while the test runs. Or there are a few developers with secret 2nd app store accounts under which they release test products before re-releasing the ones that they want to take to the next stage under their main account.

As InvisibleWonder says, you don't really want to draw much attention to it during this phase to prevent the app stores from picking it up.