Last Friday we heard from Randy Smith of Tiger Style on the importance of supporting the TouchArcade Patreon. We’re just shy of 400 folks backing us right now, which is just awesome. When we started kicking around this idea, we had no idea what was going to happen. So far the incredible reaction from our community has vastly exceeded our expectations, and we’re hopeful we’ll hit our goal… Eventually!
Anyway, if you missed the story from Friday, you really should go check it out. It’s insane to think that a game as great as Spider (Free) just was released on the App Store with no fanfare or promotion plans. The App Store is a weird place. Today, we’re hearing from Noah Bordner from Mika Mobile, which is another super-small indie studio who has become a standard in the TouchArcade community.
Battleheart ($2.99) is still one of my favorite iOS games, but the rest of their titles are also super rad (particularly Battleheart Legacy ($4.99)).
Hi, this is Noah Bordner from Mika Mobile. We first came to TouchArcade in early 2009 to tout the release of our first game, Zombieville USA ($0.99). These days we’re probably best known for the Battleheart games, as well as the much shinier 2011 sequel to Zombieville.
I think a lot of indies would agree that visibility is one of the biggest challenges developers face, and so it’s really been a blessing to have a community like TouchArcade as a constant throughout the years. I still remember being blown away by how fast the original Zombieville was selling based solely on a youtube trailer we posted in the TA forums, and then a couple weeks later Apple took notice and gave us a front page slot on the App Store which ultimately launched our downloads into orbit. Years later, the TA forums are still our first stop when we have something new to show people, because we know if you show up with an impressive trailer for your app, you’ll have people lining up to play it. That’s only become more true since our humble beginnings with Zombieville.
It’s hard to know where we’d be if we hadn’t gotten that initial shove from the TA forum community. Would Apple’s editors have noticed our first game? Would the game have snowballed into the success it became, allowing me to quit my day job and makes apps full time for years to come? It’s impossible to say, but I’m sure glad things worked out the way they have, and I hope that other indies like myself can continue to find an audience thanks to passionate gamers with discerning taste coming together and sharing cool stuff they found. My whole livelihood hinges on positive word-of-mouth and TouchArcade is the epicenter of a lot of that whenever we launch a new game.
Our forums, if for some insane reason you haven’t explored yet, are seriously just the best place to be on the ground level of the iOS games industry. It’s great to hear from developers how vital the whole forum ecosystem is. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you’re an iOS developer and you’re not participating in our forums- you need to fix that right now. Anyway, we want our forums to stay up forever, and you can help us doing that.
