Five reasons why Google Play is the ultimate soft launch platform

Deciding on which platform to soft launch your mobile game can make or break your whole game. Two major platforms currently are Google Play and iOS App Store. This article tries to express few major differences between the two and why game developers need to take these factors into account when choosing the soft launch platform.

1. Reach

Reach means how big user base the platform has. Reach can be divided into global and local reach. Global reach means the worldwide reach of the platform which is more suitable parameter for global launch. Local reach means the reach of the platform in selected soft-launch area (country).
When comparing two major mobile distribution platforms (aka “app stores”), Google Play reached 1 billion monthly active users on September, 2015 according to Mashable. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get any reliable data of monthly active users of iOS App Store due to Apple’s traditional way of not publishing these figures very often.

Image 1: Mobile OS Marketshare (Dec 2015, NetMarketShare)

However, the market share of smartphone OS sales, according to Kantar Worldpanel, Android leads the market in Europe’s big five markets, USA and in China. Also, when comparing “usage share” of mobile OSes, Android leads the market with 57,29% according to NetMarketShare. When considering these data points, it is very likely that Apple’s iOS App Store has fewer monthly active users on their distribution platform than Google.

2. Submission process

The variable with greatest importance to soft launch platform decision is the speed from submission from developers to being available for end users.

Google Play has tremendous advantage in this regard. In Google Play it is matter of hours when the game or new update is available to the players. In iOS App Store, it takes at least one week from submission for being available to the players due to the heavy review process by Apple.

This allows developers to bring new updates and fixes much more rapidly to end users than in App Store.

Another variable which relates to submission process is the ability to update app store listing elements without updating the binary itself. Google Play allows change app description, screenshots and feature image and promo videos without updating the binary itself. iOS App Store allows the developer to change app description but not keywords or screenshots without updating the binary.
 

3. App Store Optimization

Another important consideration is the possibility to alter and test game’s icon, landing page, keywords and screenshots rapidly and compare different versions to each other.

Image 2: Screenshot depicting Experiments audience selection tool in Google Play Developer Console

Google Play announced great feature called Experiments on May 28th 2015 which allows developers to AB-test graphical as well as textual elements in their app store listing. Graphical elements which can be tested include icon, feature graphic, screenshots and promo video. Textual elements which can be tested include app’s short and long description. After the experiment has run, developers are able to view the results of the test in Google Play Developer Console.
iOS App Store doesn’t include AB-testing abilities currently, so if you want to AB-test fluently your games store listing elements, Google Play is the way to go.

 
4. Paid user acquisition possibilities

As what comes to paid user acquisition possibilities, both platforms have lot of ad networks which offer huge inventories for running your UA campaigns.
But what comes to UA possibilities inside the platform itself, Google Play offers something unique. It allows developers to buy Search Ads which let them display advertisements inside Google Play search results. Google Search ads are excellent because they tap into intent-rich moments in users’ mobile use cycle. Search Ads display both in mobile Google Search results as well as Google Play search results.

Image 3: Google Search Ad on Google mobile search

Image 4: Google Search ad as seen on Google Play Search

The greatest thing is that you can use 3rd party partners such as SensorTower to analyze the best keywords for your title (or your competitor’s) and buy Search Ads from those keywords. What could be better UA strategy, especially in those markets and keywords where competition is still low and prices relatively cheap?
 

5. Desktop-to-mobile conversion

In my experience, one important but surprising factor which most developers don’t understand is the desktop-to-mobile conversion. With desktop-to-mobile I mean the ability to save, install or favorite a mobile game on desktop so that you can play it later on mobile phone. This is important because a lot of time, people may find interesting games while they use desktop computers, but either don’t have time or have limited intent to use their mobile phone at that time. At that time, it is really nice to be able to efficiently save, favorite or install the mobile game on the desktop, without changing the focus to your mobile phone.

Google has really nice advantage to other mobile distribution platform holders with their huge presence on desktop internet. According to NetMarketShare usage monitor, Google’s Chrome browser holds second place in desktop browser market share with 32,33% usage market share. Since a lot of users have Google account, and due to the possibility to sign-in to your Google Account in Chrome, Google makes it really easy to download games from the desktop view of Google Play to your mobile phone. You just first tap “install”, then confirm that you give the rights to the app which it requests and then the download to your mobile phone begins.

Image 5:  Mobile Strike on Google Play desktop browser view

iOS App Store also allows users to download game via desktop, but little bit less efficiently. First, the user has to open up the app in iTunes program in PC (assuming that he has installed that), then download the game to the desktop, and then synch the data to iOS device via USB-connection or through connecting to same Wi-Fi where the desktop is. That’s a lot of steps compared to simple two-step installation process on Google Play desktop.

Sum Up

Above, I have presented five major reasons why Google Play is the ultimate soft-launch platform for mobile games. There are other reasons beyond these - such as revenue per download, payment behaviour etc. - which are different in different platforms. But since actual data on some of these factors is really hard to find, I have excluded them from this analysis.

What do you think? Did I miss something important? Do you disagree me on these findings? Please comment below!

Review Optimization for Mobile Games

Rating importance on App Store search

As Store search is most popular discovery avenue of mobile apps and game (Nielsen 2015), it is important to know what part user reviews play in Google Play and Apple App Store search ranking algorithms.

Inside Mobile Apps conducted a study in which they examined a random sampling of easy, medium and competitive search terms on both Google Play and App Store to see how each app ranked based on the average user rating in the search list. Based on the findings of the study, it is clear that average ratings play important part in both stores search ranking algorithms. Thus, review optimization is crucial for increasing the search rank in the app stores.

Google Play places more importance to avg user rating in search ranking.

Review optimization is a set of processes and tasks with a goal to maximize the amount of positive user reviews and ratings for the game on the Store.

There are four basic factors which the developer has to take into account when optimizing for reviews:

1. User’s emotional state at the time when asking for an review
2. Suitability of the state of time for user to give a review
3. Motivation for user to give a review
4. The ability to hide negative reviews from the Store reviews

So let’s take a deeper look of all of the different factors, one by one.

User’s emotional state at the time of asking for a review is related to feelings which the user might feel during the time when asking for a review. As games are emotionally very intense products (at least for avid gamers), it is of paramount of importance to be able to identify potential feelings of user at this time. Typical way of doing this is to use behavioral analytics. For example, usually users are feeling satisfied and positive after winning battles, leveling up or after receiving some sort of rewards in the game. So a good time for asking a review could be after user comes back to the main view after victorious battle, or after the player has leveled up his character.

Suitability of the time when asking user for a review means that is it best possible frame of time to ask for a review from the user. Even after successful battle, it might not be the best time to ask for a review since user might have got rewards or in-game items from the battle which he is planning to use to upgrade his troops in the card battler game. So asking for a review at this time just distracts and annoys the user from accomplishing his main goal at this time. So how do we know what is the best time to ask for a review?
Once again, we have to turn to analytics for help. Specifically, we are analyzing in-game events which have happened shortly after the user has left the game and stopped the session. Typical good points of time might include the time right after the energy has run out in free-to-play game or after user has started training of troops in town battler game AND when he doesn’t have full amount of troops ready. Also, it is a good idea not to ask for a review in the first sessions of the game due to user still being novice to the game so don't know much about the game. Different genre of games have different mechanics and different games have completely different optimal points of time, so best thing to do is to analyze the data and tie the user review feature to these in-game events.

Motivation for user to give a review related to Call-to-Action texts and rewards that motivate user to give a review. Usually, it is a good rule to explain shortly why it is a good thing to give a review of the game. These CTAs might be e.g. “Please give a review, it helps us to make the gaming experience better for all of us!” It is also a good idea to reward the user for giving a review with some unique reward. This is necessary to optimize the review funnel despite the fact that there is no way of getting the information from App Store that has the user actually gave a review.

Great visualization of review optimization process for Circa News app.

The ability to hide negative reviews refers to the rules within the game how the reviews are handled. One common strategy is that if users give negative review (below 4) of the game, review mechanism asks, in-game, what could be done to make the game better. After the user has typed in the feedback, then the review component can ask user to submit that to developers via in-game support-button. Note that in negative review cases, the user is not asked to leave a reply to App Store or Google Play page. In positive review cases (4-5), the user is asked to leave a review to App Store or Google Play product page after the in-game review prompt.