My buddy is shooting a little indie documentary on Food Trucks in LA (I do deliveries), and we got to riffing about my experiences trying to sell my iPhone & Android game.
I actually just got 180 the other day for android. I had fun with it, a neat variation on the typical matching genre.
ah cool, thanks for the kind words. I am curious, where did you hear about it? I haven't been pimping it on TA for several months now, and getting the word out on the Android scene has been... challenging, to say the least..
I think it was in a YouTube "must have" video, or something like that. I've been an iPhone user since the beginning, so when I went the android route for the next two years at least, I was searching around for any worthwhile games. 180 was mentioned in several places, along with some other fun games. There are plenty of android dedicated sites and forums, but none as successful as TA. And about the QR codes, not many people use them from what I've heard. They work perfectly, and are easy to use, but it's harder to pull out your phone, find the scanner app, focus on the picture, and download on the spot than to just see a name and remember it for when your around wifi. I personally think they're cool and have some potential, but no one is really pushing the use of them.
The match 3 genre is ridiculously over saturated, especially on iOS. I would think you'd have to do something pretty spectacular to get noticed. For myself, if it's a match 3 game I lose interest before even looking at pictures. Even ones that go free I usually ignore with only occasional exception.
wow, let me know if you can remember the link Yeah I have links to tons of Android sites but the game discussion on most of them is anemic, at best - which is saying something. The best ones aren't even as busy or interesting as the worst iPhone coverage sites. This will likely change as that market matures, for now it's just a lot of fighting to get visibility however you can. It's hard to say and I am still new to the QR stuff. I think it's "neat" but overall just gimmicky and pain-in-the-ass. However I did get kind of raked over the coals on reddit for not using them properly, and doing some research made me realize that I needed to respect & utilize them (and with tracking I notice that a TON of my hits have come from them, interestingly). I don't blame you, match-3 as it is usually done is beyond played out (there's too many Bejeweled knock-offs to even bother keeping track anymore, and some of them are super nice). However I think it is folly to consider the mechanic completely "played out" on the whole, like anything it just needs to be used in a different enough way to.. be interesting in a different (new) way. For the case of 180 it's good because it is something people will instantly recognize/understand when they first play the game, but the deeper mechanic is so different than how things are usually done that it is still quite refreshing and fun, once you get over the stigma of expecting "more of the same." Fortunately, enough people have tried & enjoyed the game by now to justify that, but there's still a much larger hurdle to get over "even while free." But then, word of mouth is something that is never easy to expect..
