Apple, Google, Windows, Samsung, Facebook, etc… Which markets and app stores should you target for your game.
In fairness, the question comes down to prioritizing which app stores are best suited for your app and then how many of them you can afford to support.
How many Stores and Which first
The first step is to determine where your target users are. If the design of your game has a more international market, then you will most likely want to prioritize the Google Play Store over the Apple App Store. If your game is designed more as a desktop game, then you may want to lean heavier on the Windows or iOS App Store.
When trying to determine how many stores you can support, you need to evaluate the following considerations:
- How complex is your app
- What is your development budget.
The first question (complexity) helps us understand cost of support. The more complex your app is, the more support will be needed. This is multiplied by the number of app stores or device types that you want to support.
The second question (budget) helps us understand how far our investment will go. If our costs are high, then our budget will be consumed faster. This will prevent us from moving to multiple app stores or markets. The lower the cost, the more flexible your budget can become and the more markets you can ship to.
Our complexity and budget is not directly related to cash. It is also related to time and effort required. We will get into this further down below - but for now - suffice it to say that as you add more stores, you have more hoops you have to jump through to support your app and users.
How complex is your App
Look at the resources your app requires. Does it interact with the device specific API’s a lot? If so - then the cost of maintaining and developing your app is high. This is because these functionalities require device and market specific interactions that increase with each device and market you introduce. In essence it is not necessarily shared code that you write once and interact the same with on every platform. Every time there is an update to the OS for your supported devices, you will most likely have some upgrade work to support the new changes.
How dependent are you on your viewport and graphics? Do you shift appropriately between different sizes or do you have to redo your UI for both a Phone and tablet, iOS versus Android, etc. If you have different UI layouts for different sizes, then your app is overly complex and the cost to support all those UI layouts increases with each new market you introduce.
What is your Development Budget
This is not simply a question of how much money you have to spend — but more of a focus on resources. With each new market that you plan to penetrate there is a certain amount of overhead you will have to spend in both time, money and resourcing, regardless of having the simplest app on earth. For this reason it is important to understand and be honest about how much development budget you have to spare.
How complex is your release cycle? When you have code that is ready to ship, how long does it take you test and approve that code. If that release cycle is long, then introducing more markets into your release pipeline will increase dramatically. In fact, depending on the engine being used and the feature being written you may find that your release cadence and schedule took the largest hit from expanding to additional markets.
How is your User Community managed? When you introduce an app to a new market you are basically creating a new User Community. Who’s responsibility is it to manage that? You may find that addressing as much as possible to a centralized user forums or support page will help keep this cost down. However keep in mind that app reviews and ratings still need to be paid attention to and monitored on a regular basis.
So - Is it worth it?
So now that you are armed with your cost and budget data, now it is time to decide whether or not the move to the new app store is worth it. At this point you should have a general sense of how much it will cost, both in dollars as well as in resources to expand to that new app store. First determine whether or not you do have the budget - both in money and resourcing. if you don’t have it — can you get it? if you can’t then the call is simple - it doesn’t make sense.
If you do have the budget for the new market - you need to now project out what kind of return you will get from the store. Be realistic. if you app only made x amount of money at the iOS store, it is highly unlikely that you will double that revenue when you move it to the Windows store. use services like AppAnnie to evaluate similar apps and how they perform in the different app stores. That should help you arrive at the appropriate estimates for your app.
With both your final costing and potential earning data in hand, you should now be able to make a call on whether or not moving to that market is worth it.
