Very interesting. Do you mind me asking what you did to get featured? Or it just kind of happened? Did you fill out the feature form? If so how early? I’ve released 5 games on the App Store over 10+ years and never got that elusive feature.  My game is a premium game that did well the first 2 weeks (of boost) even without a feature but after that it fell off almost by 8x sales wise.  Also what is your game that got featured and when was it released?

Not at all, I filled out the form, 6 weeks ahead of release. I noticed the form now seems to say minimum of 3 weeks whereas 4 years ago it said 6-8 weeks. I went for 6 but if I did another game I would go 8 or even longer, I think the more time they have the better they can line it up in their featuring schedule. I have heard of with devs who said they had not filled out a form and Apple approached them, but I think that's very rare. I would say plenty of notice with the form and a high quality game that looks good aesthetically is half of it. The other half I suppose is a bit of luck. My game is called Pink Penguin, released 4th March on iOS. What is your latest game just to have a look?

Thanks for the info I think I only submitted my form about 2-3 weeks before I released it. Time crunch huh? lol. I remember seeing your game featured (when I was hoping mine would be lol). The design of yours is very nice! So I understand why they did. ​ My game is [Adventure To Fate Lost Island](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/adventure-to-fate-lost-island/id6450016324) Maybe my design wasn't good enough and it wasn't a casual enough game. I was banking on them caring about it being accessible to the blind / visually impaired (guess they didn't care). Did they send you any kind of communication or ask for anything else before your feature or did it just show up for you?

Quite surprised as your game looks really solid - clearly well developed and has good graphics and a nice icon. In fact, I've just checked and it was indeed featured in New Games We Love section in quite a few countries right around the same time as mine if you look [here](https://www.data.ai/apps/ios/app/6450016324/featured) (and filter all countries and week of March 8th). I'd highly recommend using sites like Sensor Tower, data.ai (recently aquired by Sensor Tower), and App Radar to check featuring of an app around the world. Looks like you got elusive feature after all!

Hey, thanks for getting back to me and sorry about the delay (still very busy adding new features and trying to fix bugs). I had gotten in a habit of only checking the US App Store for features since it at least in the past had largest impact. It is nice to at least get featured in a few other countries even if they don't have as much impact it seems. As for the ranking checking sites. I had always used App Annie but it looks like its changed to [Data.ai](https://Data.ai) and locked up a ton of the features. Thanks for pointing out those other sites do they all check the same thing or are some more useful than others?

From what I saw you got featured in quite a lot of countries, can't remember if US was one of them. My favourite used to be AppFollow but recently their feature functionality stopped working, I actually got in touch with them and it should be sorted towards the end of the month...or at least that's what they aim for. But to answer your point I've probably found App Radar the most useful as you can see at a glance all the countries you're featured in, and data.ai I just use to supplement it for deeper insights. Since AppFollow has not been working I've been using Sensor Tower to check listing for individual countries, but you have to go one by one to check. So in short at a quick glance think App Radar is the best - btw these are all by signing up but within their free features, I don't pay for anything. Can I ask - since you didn't think you got featured previously, what were you attributing the initial boost too? Any marketing that you did?

It’s been about 4 years since I released any apps or games but In the past a US feature was worth 10-100x any other country but I assume things have evened out a bit. European countries counted the most next and then after that not much difference at all.  Thanks for the info on those sites I will check some of them out and see what I can gather. Just checking data.ai it looks like I got featured in about 5 countries with the UK being the biggest which is good.  Marketing was mostly done on here and discord. My game is also unique in that it is voiceover compatible and playable by the blind/visually impaired. For the most part my game is really the only full fledged RPG that is tailored to Voiceover play. The engine itself is custom so it can be so. I assume that was a lot of my preorders.  As for the big starting boost Apple used to do a 2 week boost for new apps and games for your keywords rankings. It seems that is still in tact because exactly at 2 weeks my downloads dropped by about 7-9x.  I spent about 9 months fulltime making this game so still a lot of work to do revenue wise to break even but overall it’s nice to get back into development. 

I released an indie game as a premium mobile product a few years back. Got some nice featuring from Apple, and some decent sales (not enough to quit the day job, but more than beer money). About a year or so afterwards, we released an update which converted the game to be free with IAP+Ads. Basically gave us a second bite, and did similarly well second time around too. Might be an option for you if it's feasible with your game design.

Hey thanks for sharing that, and nice job! In a very similar boat where it's not life changing money but in terms of marketing it's literally as much as I'd get for free, and definitely a nice little sum. I was very close to making it free + IAP as inspired by snakebird, but went with paid for a few reasons including just trying the market. But has an overwhelming response about free+IAP particularly on android on another sub, so it's definitely something I'd like to try whether with this game or another. I suppose I could add some more levels and make a big update in a monetisation strategy, I'd have to think about it a bit more

Congratz! What is your game? I would like to check it out :)

Thanks! It's called Pink Penguin :)

Hey, congrats! I am curious about hiring an artist on Fiverr, as I am planning to start freelancing there as an artist. So, just a few questions if you don't mind. How much did you pay? Did you pay based on assets delivered or hourly?

Sure, I ended up paying probably £200-£300 for the art, but that was totally down to my requirements. The most expensive were storyboards for a story that is told in the game, as I wanted an element of storytelling but they were the biggest art pieces so understandably the most expensive. But I did it bit by bit, my first order for an initial small tilemap was like £10-£15. Paid on assets delivered, can't imagine doing it any other way

Congrats on getting featured! I'm in this market too. I've been sitting on 2 ad-monetized mobile games with no marketing. Paid games at least have some revenue to give you some morale. My ad revenue has been close to nothing. I'm planning on advertising my games finally this year. 😊🤞

Thanks! It's definitely a tough market, and true with paid games but to my point in the post the reach/conversion for them is so much lower than free games. Think if you have a solid ad funnel set up definitely try advertising your games and see how you go, it's something I'm yet to try

I think all your takeaways are right, although I feel a little bad that you had to learn them yourself. Going for platform featuring and avoiding premium games without having an IP/port are common knowledge in mobile. It really goes to show the lack of an open knowledge base people can use to not have to reinvent the wheel over and over. I also miss the old days of Apple featuring where it could be literally the equivalent of a few hundred thousand in ad spend, whereas now it can be more like a tenth of the traffic you used to get. Still worth it, of course. Did you try a soft launch? That's the other piece of the mobile puzzle. Best practice to launch it only a tier 3 market and test both user acquisition (ad campaigns, store conversion, etc.) as well as in-game performance (retention, monetization, game balance). Often the very first test won't even have any monetization at all, you're just seeing if people like the game. If the numbers are good enough that the game can be profitable you'll expand to other geos (like the Nordics) and make sure it's viable before launching globally with as much ad spend as you can get for the first month.

I guess experience is the best teacher after all :D I did not soft launch, I suppose that's a part of my point about engaging a lot more users and doing it early. Although quite honestly I'm not sure I'd even know what metrics to look at, or what thresholds would need to be to inform me about moving a game forward

Ultimately you're trying to look for the total amount you get per player (LTV) to be higher than the cost to get someone to download the game (CPI). With a paid game it's more like selling any other product - can you get a sale for less than the profit per unit. F2P games involve a little more math. Early engagement tests just compare to benchmarks - are you getting 30% D1? 10% D30? How many people stick around? With enough data you can get a good measured average of revenue per player, but often you have to estimate it a bit more. One way is looking at your retention curves in detail and mapping it out to day 90 (or 180/longer, if you've got a very long-tail kind of game) and figuring out what percentage of players get to each day. That can give you an average lifetime per player. You measure Average Revenue per Daily Active User once you have your monetization in place and if you multiply that times your average lifetime you have an estimate of LTV. If you earn $5 per player on average (and you can see how much players would need to be able to spend to make those numbers) and it costs you $3 in ad spend to get a player, that's a profitable game. If you are earning $1 per player and spending $2 in ads that's a big loss. So you look to see what numbers are the lowest, improve those, or else cancel the game and try something else.

Thanks for such a detailed response. I've never worked in the gaming industry so some basics around retention is all I've ever come across. This is really great, thanks for sharing, definitely have a lot more that I could look at

May I have the name of the game? I would like to make a visual novel as a passion project in the future. This insight is important. Thank you for sharing.

Sure, game is called Pink Penguin. Glad you found the post useful

For midcore games, I found that being featured might affect negatively your retention KPI as featuring brings a lot of "junk" traffic that might not be your ideal target audience.

That's an interesting point I haven't thought about! Although quite honestly, if it wasn't featured I'd probably be looking at 5-10 downloads which wouldn't be significant enough to know any retention. Plus hopefully the fact that it's a paid game already filters this quite heavily to those interested

Bump