Two issues of indie(Magazine) have been released since we last mentioned the GameMaker and Flashpunk publication. The interview in the twelfth issue [left-click pdf] was with Jeffrey Rosen who started the Humble Indie Bundle games package. Issue 13 [left-click pdf] features an interview with Matt Thorson who used GameMaker to create his earlier games. It also switches away from the green cover and theme used for the past few issues which had been making the magazine unreadable for some.
Jeff Hangartner released an iOS game in June which “is down to basically around 2 sales a day”. In what will eventually become a 5-part article he writes about the techniques he has used to promote the game. The first part of the 5-post article covers social media marketing and discusses the pros and cons of various services, including how he managed to get a plug from the @YoYoGameMaker twitter account – for a game not made in GameMaker.
The Importance Of Game Jams – Adam Rademacher with some thoughts on Gamasutra after participating in the recent Ludum Dare 21.
I imagine it is getting increasingly hard to get noticed on the iOS app store, what with half a million approved apps as of last June (that’s twice as many as just one year earlier). By the time GM Studio finally ships, a freshly-released game will probably only have a few seconds to get noticed the front page of the app store before it gets pushed off by an avalanche of crud.
I guess there are traditional marketing techniques that one can fall back on to promote an iOS game, but man, it sure would’ve been great to be that guy who wrote a crappy scorched-earth clone over a weekend and was making “I’m gonna quit my day job” money off it simply because it was one of the only games on the app store at the time. Those days are long gone.