2014-04-21 - Tinytouchtales

Weekly Update #15

Hello!
This is Weekly Update #15. Two days until Muffin Munch 2 hits the App Store. We are very excited to see how our game will be received by the players!

Finding your players
Making games is hard, bringing your game to players in a horribly crowded market is harder. For Muffin Munch we knew it would be very difficult. On one hand we have a very broadly appealing Match-3 game which does some new things, but the devil is in the details and without playing the game, a potential customer would never see those differences. This means that our game is just another Match-3 in the flood of Match-3s on the App Store. On the other hand we have a very specific theme. One could argue that Candy and Cake is as broad as Match-3 but still it’s way more niche than Pixel-Platformer oder Modern-War FPS. So how do we promote a game that is niche in it’s visuals/theme, so it would instantly appeal to a certain audience and has a very overused gameplay that no one would pick up (at least in the indie space) if we would promote it as Match-3 meets X.

In our case we believe that our players don’t know about our game yet, in the sense that they don’t look on the App Store for games about Muffins. So our solution for marketing the game is to find our target audience in their “natural habitat”: cake and baking-blog communities. After doing some research we found out that there are hundreds of very sophisticated individuals who bake and document their progress in very detailed ways and putting their creations on blogs to showcase them. What really struck us is the amount of followers those bloggers have. Doing a quick Facebook check it seems that this niche is quite big:

So why not give it a try and pitch the game to those who the theme would appeal to and are not biased by Match-3, or even better they don’t know about Match-3 at all. You now could argue that those people are no players and that pitching a game to them would not work anyways. But we believe that a highly relevant app can open up a new world for those who haven’t tried a game and first and foremost this is what iOS or mobile gaming is about: bringing games to those who would never consider them selfs as gamers.

Marketing your game is hard and we will see how much this approach will help us to bring the game to the right players, but it’s definitely way better to try new things than again to write 200 emails to App-Blogs that never will never even open your email.

Easter eggs
As already posted on Twitter and Facebook we have taken great effort in having a small easter egg hunt. We have hidden some very nice easter eggs on the App Store and we will give out some tips on how to find them. So take a closer look at the following hints and have a nice day!

HRHEAAMTAATA
AH4WNL9YNEKE
FAR7YJ47E36F
PYXM3WNLR4WE
NJKXHP7RJTL9
WXLY7469ER64
JY9FT9LA4PLP
9XNM6HLM7HRE
KA3EX4YRJJER
JR4EKPR4WMLJ

We will be back soon with more Muffin Munch launch hype!