There are plenty of games out there on the App store, but finding good ones and finding more of what you like can be challenging among 25,000 games. It also can be hard for iPhone game makers to stand out from the crowd; as ngmoco’s Simon Jeffery pointed out to us recently, marketing on iPhone is nothing like for traditional video games. The Game Trail, however, saw the need to assist gamers and developers and implemented a system with “trailing,” which offers players suggested games like the ones they’ve played and an “upcoming” section that previews upcoming games. We talked with Tommy Palm, President of Fabrication Games, about his company’s creation The Game Trail.
[a]list: What inspired you to create The Game Trail?
Tommy Palm: As we ourselves work with mobile games we are very interested in keeping up with all the good games and the trends that are out there. But following the games on the App Store has turned into a big task as there are so many games available. Playing all these games is more than a full time job. We thought that it would be great if there was a good place where videos of the best games were collected in one place. As we could not find any similar service we decided to put it together on our own. One of our pillar stones for Fabrication Games is to be very agile and swift moving; it took us only two months from idea to finished product.
[a]list: Have you gotten a positive reaction for App Store developers over The Game Trail Has this helped them from a marketing standpoint?
TP: Yes, the response has been very positive primarily from the indie developers who have great games but “fly under the radar” on the App Store. Video is one of the best ways of showing their content to potential buyers. We also have positive feedback from editorial app review sites who want their video reviews integrated into The Game Trail.
[a]list: Is The Game Trail already configured for iPad specific apps?
TP: No, not yet as the games specific for iPad are not so numerous yet, but it is definitely on our roadmap.
[a]list: Tell me about how The Game Trail has evolved as a concept.
TP: In December 2009 we got the idea and bounced it with our developer contact at Apple. They welcomed the concept and stressed the importance that we would market it ourselves. We developed the app in parallel with building up the database. In February we launched the application and the site as a dedicated company with an initial amount of marketing money.
[a]list: How many downloads of the App have you had and how is its popularity in Europe compared to America?
TP: We have been very lucky and had very good wind in our initial launch. We served over 250,000 videos to users in March alone. With our marketing money we tried many different marketing channels like Google, Facebook, admob, print and banner advertising. Apple has been very kind and featured our App in many different important regions. Even though we had built the App to scale we had to change our server system to Amazon Ec2 to handle the onslaught of traffic we were getting in such a short time. With the new backend we can handle anything. We have quite an even distribution between Europe and America so far even though our marketing has been US-centric.
[a]list: What are your future plans for expanding and enhancing The Game Trail?
TP: We are having discussions with other handset manufactures to extend the service to their app stores as well. First up is Android. At the same time we are now working on extending our service with social network features that will come in the next release.
