Traffic Wonder is live, and in TOP PAID charts!

Just played! Execellent job!!

For those who are interested on it. I found a very, very, very interesting article speaking about this topic fake reviews, it was written a couple of months ago, the web site has a decent webrank (apparently a trustful source) please have a read http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2012/02/07/app-store-fake-reviews-heres-how-they-encourage-your-favourite-developers-to-cheat/ I did receive such emails mentioned on this article, I can't stop thinking how to fight against this, these dodgy methods are making everything harder and harder for us (the small indie developers publishers), it makes us feel like fighting against the whole world. Should we just accept this and use these services? What's wrong with installing a turbo in your car? ... god sake.

Hi guys,

During many years I was always a very technical person, I was an employee and I was never worried about how the things I made were sold, all I knew was that at the end of the month my salary was paid in my bank account, I was always happy in my bubble well called as "comfort zone", till I realized I can do a lot more (not necessarily money based) using the same amount of time, the way how I spend my time is what really matters for me nowadays, I don't mind working for others as long as I believe they deserve my time. After more than a decade working as a flash developer I have decided to have a mini-retirement for one year (starting on August-11), and during this period I promised myself doing what normally elderly people do on their retirements (what they love, without pressure, no rush, no stress, all bills paid), in my case the things I like the most are; traveling, making music, eating good food, and programming actionscript. It was like this how the whole idea of making Traffic Wonder was born. Why am I telling you all this love story? Because I was wrong, my mini-retirement year has become in the most intensive year work. Publishing Traffic Wonder was one of the biggest challenges I have ever faced and I am not talking about programming/designing skills, I am talking about marketing, we rely on many factors, we rely on many people, It is almost impossible to make a good quality game just on your own, it is unbelievable the amount of things that happened to me during the game development (some of them I can't tell publicly) but most of them are related to marketing.

Now that I am facing these problems with marketing I just realized there are lots of things to learn about it, publishing an app could be as complicated as develop it. Something I got very clear from the very beginning is that if you don't have a good amount of money for investing on marketing (say USD$30K) you better don't go for small campaigns, people get interested on something after they saw it more than 8 times, not 1 or 2, does it make sense? In my case, I didn't have that budget for maketing, what I did instead was contacting a couple of PR agencies, one in the UK and one in America and I worked with them simultaneously. PR agencies have the right channels for contacting journalists, magazines, news papers, big websites, etc. Although PR agencies cannot guarantee your app will be reviewed, published or promoted in all places, they do a very good job spreading the word through different stages (before, during and after your app release). Before I decided which agency work with, I got in contact with many and I got different quotes from them, the good agencies (nice reputation and experience) cost between USD$5K and USD$7.5K for 1 or 2 months of work, interesting thing, good agencies won't work on your project if they don't believe on it, it could damage their reputation.

Absolutely everything you can see about Traffic Wonder is 100% real, I have done nothing fake, it is being very difficult publishing the game on my own but I believe it is the right starting point. How to detect when a game has fake reviews? from my personal experience (although it is so at random) about 1 of 800 people who installed the app, writes a review naturally, any other extra review could be provoked in some way. So just google the app name and look at the reviews on main websites such as kotaku, pocketgamer, crackberry, etc if nothing much come out, for sure the reviews are fake.

I know there are lots of people (developers like me) that are facing very similar problems, this marketing thing is quite complex, it is quite tricky to visualize the whole picture. My personal advice is, don't pay too much attention on what others are doing, many of the things you can see out there are induced. I hope it helps.

Once again, I would like to say thank you for all your good energy, I was looking at some figures on google analytics and I saw some traffic coming from the adobe website, I just have noticed today that Traffic Wonder was added to the Adobe Showcase http://gaming.adobe.com/showcase/

cheers guys, have a good weekend.

alex nino

Same here, really appreciate the information. I would also like to know what type of advertising you were using.

As far as the paid app reviewers and dinosaurs, you really helped to fill in a blank for me here. One app in particular came out recently, it skyrocketed to #1 on android instantly and already has over 71,000 written reviews and 10,000,000 + downloads. I mean come on, that's absurd to happen so fast. Also, on android you can write the title, and comment. Well most of the titles for these reviews are identical [app name], its obvious to me some sort of automated mechanism is in place, reviews are also very generic and similar. On top of that, the game *is* a clone of an existing game on iphone with graphics altered, perhaps its the same company with a different name, perhaps a really good clone someone ripped off. Why you would put your highly sucessfull game out on a second platform only to slightly alter the graphics, name, and company name I do not know.

I would like to add I have a 100% original game I am about to publish, it is very similar to this game I speak of, so I hope I don't just sound like sour grapes here, not accusing them of anything, but I could tell they have something fishy going on, app reviews alone. It is discouraging, but also very important to realize what were up against as an independent dev with no backing, no advertising... At this point I'm just hoping someone searches the keyword of my game title, live and learn I suppose.

Hello guys,

It has been over 2 weeks since Traffic Wonder was released, it was a very exciting time, more than 900 different sites spoke about the game, so far nearly 14K people have downloaded the game from different markets, we haven't got bad reviews at all, the game was well accepted. Something very interesting I would like to share today is, as soon as we stopped advertising sales went down drastically from avg thousand downloads to a hundred (all platforms combined per day), now I am crossing my fingers, I hope it doesn't get any worse. I am currently working on a new update of the game (v1.5) which will include 15 new interesting levels, multiplayer mode, some minor issues fixed and also the lite version will be available along, that's the plan.

During these couple of weeks some companies (I will not mention their names) have approached to us offering different kind of solutions for promoting the game, (I know this is not new for anyone) most of them are offering "free advertisement" as long as we allow them to install a third-party software inside the game so they can track the app and show some in-app banners, etc... there are lots of companies running different business models behind apps but the one that took my attention the most was publishers, this is really crazy. Publishers are those that publish your app on your behalf (they sign and publish your app), they control sales and also they take care about marketing and propagation, and then at the end, they give you a percentage of profit (if there was any profit). So, what we got here is; the store takes 30% of your sales (including taxes and commission), and on top of that you got these publishers that take another percentage and the remaining which is less than 40% of what customers paid is what you get. Now, the interesting part! most of these publishers work in parallel with third-party companies that are in charge of executing a very particular task; writing fake reviews and ratings. If you make your app go through this scheme on your own, It cost you about USD$5K having 1.5K fake reviews If you are selling your app for USD$0.99, publishers have better deals with them. They are not using bots, these are real people, thousands of people from different locations worldwide writing reviews from their own phones and tablets. This is a crazy business model (similar to bloggers and forums posts indeed), each person buys your $0.99 app and then he gets paid $2 for each review he makes, apparently each person can write between 50-100 different apps reviews per day according to what I read, I found this quite interesting.

Does it all make sense? now, I understand why there are some apps out there that have more reviews and 5 star ratings than any other top paid app, and all it is still a valid legal way to get high on top charts (regardless it is against Apple terms and conditions), there is nothing Apple can do to prevent this, and to be honest it doesn't affect them at all... Think about all this, at the end who makes the big risk is the developer. The store never lose anything, their commission is always guaranteed on any transaction, and publishers don't care, they are publishing lots of apps running multiple campaigns at once. Guys, this is getting harder and harder, It seems to me, there is not enough room for everybody here, not anymore, and as usual, as it happens everywhere in all markets, only the big dinosaurs will survive at the end.

I am still working on it (very optimistic) but I have to confess, I am just feeling quite tired, I'd better take a break and shutdown my computer for some days, it is time to rest, this is a very long weekend... have a good one, cheers!

alex nino

well done!

you need to put it on the nook store too!

Hi! thank you very much for your interest, and good energy.

there are many interesting things that happened during the game development process, one of the most important was; after the 5 cycle of QA, we have detected the game was extremelly difficult for casual players, and our marketing team said; if we release the game as it is "that difficult" sales are going to be a completely desaster. I spent around 5 hours (excluding graphics and visuals) only conceptualizing  each of the levels on the TW Editor. I have followed what every single tester of those 200 anonymous did (they are from different nationalities, they don't know each other), there were old people over 50s who managed to complete the whole game, my nephew who's just 7 years old completed 30 levels overnight, I was very confused, and for me it was really difficult to accept that the game lack of charm, and people won't like it because it is "too difficult"... we got a big argument that day and our bigger sponsor just jump out the project that night. I said! casual players will never play Traffic Wonder even if we change it and make it easy for them, casual players hate the meaning of the word challenge, casual players are not in our target group audience indeed. I've decided to bank the game from my pocket and the following week I made the COMPARE feature in the online leaderboard website which allows players to compare against others at challenges scope. the most visited section of the trafficwonderapp.com website is the leaderboard, even more than the homepage, from the very first day people are sending links around comparing their profiles, google analytics has reveled. This link for example compares the top 2 players fighting against each other http://www.trafficwonderapp.com/leaderboard/player_profile/?compare_id=1587&index=0&player_id=2943

please, keep in mind, the most accuarate feedback is the one that comes from unknown sources, they don't know who you are, they don't care about you, all they offer to you is a pure-cruel-dry feedback, and that was the light at the end of the tunnel when making Traffic Wonder, unknown people always liked the game.

About performance, ho god, many people hate the way how I code ActionScript, people say I am against design patterns, and I totally agree, there is not room for design patterns in the actionscript runtime machine, unless you are a flex developer using comboboxes and datagrids... I consider myself a c++ developer but I am coding actionscript since 1998 (Macromedia Flash 3, no mp3 audio support), over the years I have detected lots of problems about the flash runtime even on as3, one day I wrote an article speaking about an algorithm I made for calculating math Sin and Cos without using lookup tablets, that day I have discovered a bizarre behaviour in the flash player machine, nobody paid attention at it, nobody cares, only one guy seems to like it and he happily wrote and article about it http://jacksondunstan.com/articles/1213 (Traffic Wonder is full of these tricks)

Oh! I ran out of time, my coffee break has finished, I will write a detailed article speaking about Traffic Wonder and how it is going... so far all I can say is that sales are divided in Apple 55% Blackberry 30% Google Play 10% and Amazon 5% (The Android version of the game has become the most painfull one, we got lots of problems with it, many people complaining, we are facing piracy issues, so far the google platform represets renevue the least and it required lots of extra energy)

guys! thank you very much,

cheers!

Congratulations Yo!! Really, I'm very happy for you, you've done a very good work!

I've read your post, if you'll get the time, some more info are appreciated (if others like me find them interesting)

- more details about the development. As you said AIR for mobile is not a last-day feature and we know all the tricks for optimize the doce and the memory usage, but details from a working example are always useful and allow us to think about that and what we have in our minds

- more details about the sells, is the Amazon App Store good for your app now? Have you translated the app in some languages? Or only the iTunes app?

- more details about the drawing development and how have you reached the 60fps (also on the iPad 1!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Your experience could be very useful, our first game (http://oldschoolrace.com/) reach in a while the top-free scores all over Europe when it's on sale, but no results we're achieving from the paid version (but for us it was nothing more than an experiment)

WELL DONE

I was just thinking about this game the other day, I remember you said the release was set for March. Great work, I hope you keep riding that sales high.

Congratulation mate!

Your success is the dream of everyone out there!