Touchten Games has 7 easy tips for surviving the App Store

At the Astro #GOInnovate conference last weekend, Touchten Games CEO and founder Anton Soeharyo took to the stage to give the audience tips to survive the App Store. Soeharyo had previously presented his advice in Indonesian at the inaugural Games in Asia meetup in Jakarta earlier this year.

If you’re wondering why you should read on, Touchten Games has over 20 titles in its mobile catalog, each of these contributing to a total of about 10 million downloads. Its games have hit the top ten rankings in 43 countries. Touchten is venture-backed by Cyberagent, Ideosource, TMS Entertainment, and UOB Venture management.

And so without further ado: here are seven basic tips to surviving the App Store.

App Store Optimization

The improved Freekick 2 logo.

This is key to getting organic downloads at a viral rate, Soeharyo said. He shared that app discovery comes from three things: being listed in the top ranks (a whopping 69 percent), search traffic (30 percent), and word of mouth (just one percent). So it is important to make sure you have a well-researched keyword in your game name, as well as attractive icons and screenshots.

Soeharyo said that Touchten’s Freekick 2 game used to have a very boring icon—just a football before a goalpost. Once the icon was switched up to include a cartoon footballer running away from a UFO and a rampaging T-Rex, the game received over 75,000 percent more downloads.

Users are king

So make them happy, Soeharyo said. He advised the audience to listen to feedback and more importantly, to work with it.

Don’t forget non-English speakers

In the English-speaking world, we tend to forget that there’s a good number of the world’s population for whom English isn’t a spoken language. Soeharyo said that English is only 27 percent of the market. There’s still a whole 73 percent to reach out to.

Email to be featured

Emailing the folks in charge of the App Store and Google Play reportedly got Soeharyo’s games featured four times. He said that he used Linkedin to find these people. “They are human too and they’re looking for good games,” Soeharyo said, exhorting those in attendance to simply reach out for the chance to get featured.

Ask and you shall receive