Over the weekend, Games2win’s Parking Frenzy finally reached a magical 10 million-download mark (total across Android and iTunes platforms).
Games2win achieved this feat without any investments (0.00 dollars) in advertising, marketing or promotions.
These are 3 important lessons that Games2win learnt along the journey: They share the same with us in their own words.
1. Watch the viral channels very carefully
The games2win social team began noticing a flurry of tweets by young players (especially girls) just as Parking Frenzy began to climb on the iTunes charts. We realized that the game was beyond ‘just another game’. It was a way of expressing frustration at parking a car and also learning how to park! So many girls squealed (oops tweeted) with delight that they had managed to park all the cars in all the levels without a single crash!
Given the strong momentum that twitter exhibited, we were confident that the game would receive a massive viral push to help build downloads.
See this pinterest board showcasing some of the crazy tweets about the game –http://bit.ly/g2wm-pin
2. Extreme love or extreme hate is a good thing for an app!
We looked carefully at each of all our 2000 + reviews on the USA & UK itunes stores. Either people loved our game (and gave it 5 stars) or hated it (and punished us with 1 star).
The reasons the players gave were important. People loved the game because of its challenging aspect and uniqueness.
Players hated the game because of a random bug that sometimes caused it to crash or not play well.
Disappointing as it is, we consoled ourselves that the game itself was not being pronounced as ‘boring’!
We became confident that the game seemed to have an extreme appeal. And anything extreme always gets noticed and spoken about!
3. The number of ‘ratings’ and its velocity
When Parking Frenzy hit the USA charts and became #1, it did not have any ratings displayed against it!
Well, it was Apple just allowing the ratings to reach a minimum threshold before they allowed it to be displayed.
The game currently has almost 19,000 ratings – averaging 3.5 stars.
What is important is that as we tracked the velocity of ratings (ratings added per day), we figured that at peak usage, 1000 ratings were being added a day. That signaled to us that the game MEANT something to the players and therefore they were taking out the time to rate it.
This bolstered our confidence in being sure that the game would enjoy sustained downloads.
Beyond the above, small but simple gestures do their bit to help bring the numbers up and maintain a loyalty towards the game. For example, the Games2win CEO – Alok Kejriwal personally tweeted and thanked each of the players who had tweeted something about the game! Many players retweeted his tweet expressing delight at receiving a tweet from the CEO and thereby helped increase downloads of the game.
In the end we confirmed what we always believed in – that great content attracts great crowds. No advertising required!
To commemorate this milestone, the games2win art team has come out with some amazing poster art that highlights our achievement, in an artistically creative way!
