How to get on "New and Noteworthy" - experiences shared

I don't know if it's due to the recent changes, but the new and noteworthy is now different from a country to another. iBlast Moki is in the new and noteworthy of some of the european countries but not in the US.
Last week with all the good reviews we actually did really well in France (#13 all games) and the US (#85 all games), and iBlast Moki was in the what's hot category in the game section (not the main page). This last tuesday it got featured in the new and noteworthy on the front page in some european countries which increased greatly the sale and the game quickly reached a ranking between #20 and #40 in those countries.
In the US, it is still in the what's hot of the game page only but it's now moving down and is not in the top 100 anymore.
Does anyone looked a bit more at how Apple decides in which country it should be featured and why? Do you think it is mainly based on the reviews in those countries?
Interestingly in italy it didn't get featured in the new and noteworthy, but the game was on the front page in the big icon section with some custom icons and that's where the sales spiked the most.

I'd like to hear more from your different experience.

Thanks

twitter.com/godzilab

 

They asked for some high res picture from us. And yes, they did the icon with what we sent to them.

 

FYI, one developer has shared info about sales after being featured in Staff Favourites in US AppStore (not new and noteworthy, but stats should be interesting to all devs I hope).

So being in Staff Favourites brought only 110 sales per day to them.

HTH

 

It also depends on the app though… the description and screenshots are all part of it. Although I do think the older iTunes staff favorites list was more sales-generating.

 

Addicus is New and Noteworthy

Our first game Addicus was just added to the New and Noteworthy section today.

It has only been out for a little over a week, so we are having trouble figuring out why it was featured this way, but we're ready to accept that it's because the game is completely freaking awesome (aka "noteworthy").

It did get a favourable review on pocketgamer.co.uk yesterday and we were interviewed by pocketgamer.biz recently as well. That may have had something to do with it.

We have also generated some marketing materials for the game, including the above landing page and a couple of trailers as well. I'm not sure if Apple takes that into account.

I'll keep you guys posted on what we find out.

 

Just wanna say that I appreciate all the information sharing going on here.

 

Thanks for sharing your insights on Addicus Derek - all info on how to be featured are welcome

Any idea of how this Staff list is compiled. Is it ALL Apple employees or what?

 

Hey,

I got featured "New and Noteworthy" last week. I was reading this thread while trying to figure out what lead to the featuring by apple.

So here are some clues:

a) I didn't get any reviewers yet, since I wanted to get the Version 1.1 in the appstore before I send it to review-sites. Some players complained about the missing difficulty settings in the campaign mode and I wanted to have them in before I get the game reviewed. So it can't be that any apple engineer read a review.
But I got one review after being featured.
b) I read that Apple likes Icons which are in plain basic colors, so that maybe helped.
c) Alan Schaffer, Graphics Technology Evangelist at Apple, once tweeted about my Graphics Engine and is following me on twitter. Maybe he had something to do with it. (http://twitter.com/funnest)
d) I tried to follow all apple guidelines for the menu structure, maybe they liked that too

 

As Arn says, it's an aribtrary decision made by marketing folk at Apple.
They have people employed full time in each region to try and stir the pot and strategically feature apps to try and increase AppStore revenue.

While it may vary from person to person, I'm skeptical that Apple pays much attention to review sites. They have advance access to all the submitted apps, and ways in-house for their reviewers to flag games as "interesting."

Just as with TA itself, the process is rather subjective, and trying to spot a definitive pattern to what will get you featured can drive you crazy if you think about it too much.

 

I think its largely arbitary without a 'true' pattern to it - my take is either your app grabs their attention for design/coolness reasons or simply the sales patterns for it force them to look at it because the public are already ...

 

There is DEFINITELY a correlation between being on Touch Arcade and getting on the New and Noteworthy list. I suspected it before we released N.Y.Zombies, and we were able to get on the list probably in part because we had good reception in our release thread, and had a few small blurbs on the front page.

BUT, you also have to consider this. Is it BECAUSE they're on TA that they're getting on the list? Or does it just make sense then 99% of all the quality games are going to show up on TA anyway... so it really may not have anything to do with TA itself, just the fact that naturally, any of the good, quality games will show up on the forums.

I mean really, I personally think if your app is very polished from top to bottom, you really have a good shot of showing up on the list -- I don't think its random at all -- everytime I see a cool app that I think is polished, it shows up on the Noteworthy list next week. Look at Mr. Onions. Thumpies a while ago. And so many more. I'm sure some games get shafted, but for the most part the games that really impress me as well made end up on the list the next week.

Now the frustrating part is how they pick you to go on to the "whats hot" list. Seems they grab the first 6-8 games from the "new and noteworthy" list and drop them down, and that's it. Those certainly have nothing to do with sales because I've looked into it before, and many of those games on the list have not done stellar. Although it appears being on the Whats Hot list on iTunes only doesn't give you NEAR the sales boost as the New and Noteworthy list.

Finally, the last, most important ? is how to get on the phone itself. N.Y.Zombies made it to the new and noteworthy list on itunes, but failed to show up on the phone -- leaving us with only moderate success from the feature. In fact, the week that we were featured only ONE game was on the phone's list for the whole week at all!

 

Daredevil Dave showed up in New n Noteworthy on it's 2nd day of release. It hadn't appeared on TA other than my own thread. The trailer was featured on Pocketgamer way back in February which attracted the notice of Chillingo and EA. I did not go with a publisher.

My main goal was indeed to get featured. Me and another developer friend of mine used a strategy that we believed would accomplish this. Our games both got featured a few days after their release and are both currently on What's Hot now.

The only things that stand out to me are these: both games are somewhat original or add something unique to an existing genre, both games got a lot of 4-5 star reviews in itunes in the first few days. His game is much more polished than mine (especially the menus) but mine probably is attractive to a wider audience.

I don't want to come across as arrogant, but I really felt that Dave had a good chance of being featured simply due to the games concept and the mix of genres. However, I put a LOT of viral marketing effort into the game well before it was released.

Some people have said their sales didn't go up that high after hitting N&N but Dave's certainly did! The game was fortunate to be visible in iTunes without the need to scroll to the right. Same when it hit What's Hot.

Now it is still in What's Hot but you must scroll to the right to see it. I think that had a big negative impact on sales. This may have also coincided with the new iTunes layout. It did the best while in N&N.

I feel that Apple will feature a game if they feel it will make them money. Although we both got featured and had a so-called "strategy, it's hard to say what really worked.

TA put Dave on the front page about 10 days after we were featured on iTunes.

 

One of the things I like about Dave is that it's a lovable game despite not being "polished" in the typical sense. That's one of the most overused words in reviews. It tells me absolutely nothing about whether I'll actually enjoy playing a game or not.

I'm quite sure that the initial burst of 4-5 star reviews you got in itunes had nothing to do Apple's decision to promote Dave, which as likely made internally before the App exited the review process. Your game brought something new to the AppStore and is great fun on multiple levels. I would have been somewhat surprised (but not shocked, given their history) if they hadn't featured it.

As for the dropoff you saw, this is typical. Many users only consider buying what's in front of their face, and don't bother paging/scrolling. There's a dropoff in visibility/sales at each page boundary in top lists.

What's your friend's game, btw?

 

The game is called Dogs Playing Poker. Candywriter is the company. They have a lot of cool card and casino type games, I like Word Solitaire the best. The balance of difficulty is perfect, though this depends on your knowledge of the English language.

Thank you very much for the kind words

 

Well, of course being on TA doesn't guarantee you a spot, just like not being on it won't keep you from getting featured for sure, but the fact remains there is a correlation. Most of the solid games you see on TA (forums OR front page) end up on the featured list. Plus, chances are if the game is NOT a good game, it probably won't end up on the TA forums anyway...

Also you got really lucky in getting approved just a few days before the day they swap out the new and noteworthy list, which means you got a combination of release hype PLUS the feature to really propel you to the top. For ex we got approved 5-6 days before getting featured, which meant our release hype had already peaked on day 2, and we started falling back down by the time we got featured. Also I believe you're sales skyrocketed because you were on both iTunes and the actual featured list on the phone/idevice itself. N.Y.Zombies was over way on the right of the iTunes feature list only (no visibility on the idevice itself), and we managed to get about 2-3x sales boost. I hear if you have exposure on all the lists you can see as high as 10-20x sales boost over typical amounts.

I personally don't think reviews have anything to do with it either. I've seen numerous 2-3 star average games get on the list, and its expected that friends and family will supply lots of 5 star reviews and ratings upon initial release.

As for the drop off, you will actually typically see that MOST games on the "Whats hot list" drop off pretty fast, regardless of their position... I think by now people know its basically just a "go from one list to another" type thing, rather then actually being "whats hot."

Still though, I think it depends mostly on polish and quality more then uniqueness or game concept. Check out for ex Town Raiders 3D, now on the whats hot list. No offense, but that thing is a mini gore clone if I've ever seen one, and it still got on the list, but it has good graphics, is polished, and is presented well.

I guess time will tell if we actually know anything about the feature list once we release our next game

 

My App: iQuikSplash was featured in New & Noteworthy back in April/C.

After digesting the whole experience, I believe the app is simple, but has an X factor of some sort. And also, the efforts you put in in response to the reviews (not only in itunes, but in the other websites) will be noticed by Apple.. (im guessing coz that's what i did).

Oh yeah, I DID NO PAID ADVERTISING. AND NONE OF THE REVIEW SITES THAT I SENT MY APP DID A REVIEW FOR IT. I just did the usual forum postings.. and sending emails.. which of course being replied with robots.

 

No effects

I released our last Game Galaxy - Heart of Gold in may. After Launch at $1.99 we reduced the price to $0.99, followed by 5 days period of free downloads along with several actions. While we had nearly zero downloads before, around 1800 downloads happened in those 5 days. After that we switched back to $0.99 and had nearly zero sales. A few days after this our Game was featured under "New and Noteworthy" in the Puzzle Games section. It's the new feature with screenshot and not the icon. The problem: subcategory features aren't shown on the iDevice so we gained no sales from the feature :-(

here's how the game/app description looks like:

Galaxy - Heart of Gold

 

Interesting sharing leftfieldx. Thanks. So being featured in the new "New & Noteworthy" page of subcategory does not really help sales?

 

at least for the mentioned app it didn't help.
i assume many people are buying directly within the AppStore app on their iOS devices. Thus, when your app is in "New and Noteworthy" in a games subcategory, it's just as if it weren't featured at all... for the rest that's using iTunes to view the AppStore, it seems (in my case) that just few of them browse directly to the subcategory for puzzles... it's the only explanation that i can find. i had more sales when i released the game (the 1st and 2nd day) than when it was featured.

i know of other developers that a place in "New and Noteworthy" in main categories boost sales. So for main categories this is a different story.