When you’re a small indie game developer and you’ve just released your very first game, “getting the word out” is just about the most important thing left to do.
It’s also typically the biggest budget expense item via the traditional method of online advertising.
You can have all the upgrades and expansion packs in the pipeline that you like, but if no one is playing the game – or if the cost per acquisition of new players via advertising is astronomical and ever increasing due to the number of competitors vying for the same keywords – then you’re in no small amount of trouble.
Sometimes, however, you get lucky (or make your own luck!) – and an influential big brother steps onto the scene to champion your efforts. We’ve been very lucky with massively.com’s coverage of Illyriad, and now we have our second champion!
Largely, we think, thanks to our move to an HTML5 Canvas environment on the World Map, Illyriad came to the attention of those mighty, mighty fine people at the Google Chrome Web Store (CWS) at the end of last week; and they’ve been helping to promote Illyriad since.
The first we knew about our presence on the CWS homepage was when the ‘new player has joined’ “bing” noise (yes, I have a desktop dashboard that goes “bing”… I know, I know. Don’t say anything) changed from a “bing” into a continuous drone.
Not only are CWS promoting us on the homepage, but we’re also in the rotation for the Games and Entertainment categories.
Since we’ve been this visible on the CWS platform, new player acquisitions have increased 412%. No, that’s not a typo. That’s four hundred and twelve percent.
As if that wasn’t enough, the icing on the proverbial cake is that the Chrome browser itself runs HTML5 and the Canvas technology very fast and very smoothly (in our opinion, Chrome is far-and-away the best browser out there for developing and rendering HTML5 technologies). Whilst we do, and will, continue to support earlier, non-HTML5 browser versions of all the major browsers, it’s been fantastic knowing that the huge new influx of users coming to Illyriad from the CWS are getting the best possible HTML5 experience once they log in.
Since we integrated OpenID over the last weekend, CWS users are also getting a streamlined one-click login experience using their Google credentials. Now we’re moving onto Google pay integration, and can’t wait to see what the Google plus platform can do for us in the future.
In short: if you write any kind of app then getting it onto the Google Chrome Web Store is an absolute “must-do” when it comes to promoting your game, and (especially compared to some of the other app platforms) it’s remarkably easy to do.
As you can imagine, we’re over the moon about this!