Sell More Games

I am shocked. Really. Seriously. Few weeks ago I created an ad in AdWords for our newest game – Avalon Legends Solitaire. Of course it had to be approved, which already ruined whole thing. It takes weeks to approve adds and makes the whole thing of tweaking your ad impossible, unless you wish to spend ages on it.

Today I received email from Google that my ads are disapproved. The reason:

Gabling Certificate Required

What? What the hell? Do I look like casino? Here’s my ad:

Avalon Legends Solitaire
Restore the Deck of Nature and save
Avalon. 200 hands. Free trial.
www.Anawiki.com

I guess that’s the last time I use Adwords, unless until they seriously improve their service. Too bad, as working with adwords was a good way of improving your ad copy before going “world wide”.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Releasing new games is exciting and stressful at the same time. We “just” released Avalon Legends Solitaire – few weeks ago on our site and now as 30-days exclusive at BFG. This is our first exclusive and I keep the fingers crossed. Hopefully it will be our best selling game.

Having the game released as exclusive at BFG gives a bit of stabilization for me. There’s no rush to reach all the portals at the same time, no need to prepare 10 builds for each of them. I can slowly get ready for release on other sites.

This release is also our deeper jump into Facebook. For long time I try to avoid this medium, but at the end of the day I thought, that even if I don’t like it, there might be people over there that want me to communicate with them through Facebook. We will see how it goes. Anyway, I would appreciate if you like this idea and click “like it” button for our FB page :)

With 25 likes we can apply for shorter URL.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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When we finished working on Dress-Up Pups I didn’t expect to get in competition with such strong match-3 franchises. Within one week you could try 4 high quality match-3 games: our Dress-Up Pups, Cradle of Rome 2, Bejeweled 3 and FarmScapes. Though we have to compete with strong franchises it doesn’t mean we don’t stand a chance*.

Cradle of Rome 2 is a big disappointment for me. Maybe I would enjoy it more if I haven’t played Cradle of Rome 1, but I have, and CoR 2 was nothing new to me. Also, matching mechanic seemed aged.

Bejeweled 3 looks pretty nice and has few new twists. I enjoyed it much more than CoR 2. I also noticed all the hard work PopCap put into promoting B3, giving out netbooks for best photo of your jewels is one example of that. Because of that it was funny to see that PopCap was late to deliver B3 download on their own site. GameHouse and iWin (maybe other sites too) offered the game on Dec 7th, but PopCap was late for some reason and delivered download links a day later.

Playrix launched their newest match-3, Farmscapes, exclusively on their own site. Initially I was disappointed that I had to go through another “I want to be a HOG but I am match-3″ scene, but luckily it was short and part after that was a bit more of point and click adventure than HOG. Still, it was surprise that I had to wait so long to play regular match-3 mechanic, but overall I liked the game, probably the most out of 3 mentioned titles.

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Have you heard about Black Friday? Or Cyber Monday? I’m sure you’ve heard about xmas though :)

The world has a lot of holidays and you can’t keep the track of each of them, but it’s good to know at least the most common one (for the world) or the most money squeezing ones.

Black Friday is the day following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, traditionally the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Basically, people go out to retail stores and malls to buy things. Cyber Monday is online world reaction Black Friday. People spent their money from home.

It’s good to have the list of those holidays and make your marketing up to date. We indie’s don’t need to follow big companies, but at least we can try to get best examples of them. It’s also good to know about holidays because they may get in face of your game launch. I started the launch of Dress-Up Pups last week. I was about to send press release about it until I realized that it’s Thanksgiving day and either nobody is at work or gives a damn about my games. If I sent my PR that day it would probably got lost in dozens of emails by Monday morning when everybody gets to work.

That said, today is Cyber Morning, if you want you can take advantage of it and save 25% on your order of Anawiki Games :D

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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