What is it?
An hour-long presentation with Fuse (formerly known as Bytemark Games Inc.), the digital mobile game publisher behind iOS games including licensed properties like "JAWS" and "Dawn of the Dead", as well as smaller indie titles like "Babo Crash".
What did I expect?
All that I had heard prior to meeting with Fuse was that the company's staff had all been working in the gaming industry for over a decade. As I'd later find out, Fuse CEO Jon Walsh had previously worked for companies like Activision, along with running his own retailer.
What did I learn?
-Fuse's main mission is to help app developers get noticed in an incredibly crowded market.
-If you're an iPhone App developer, you're completely off the map if your app isn't in the "Top 50" of its specific category. If you're using an iPhone, you can't even see apps that don't rank above #50. Fuse, a small team of industry veterans, is using their own development tools to take the guesswork out of predicting how an app sells over time.
-Fuse's tools use a combination of real-time analytics pared with active sales/reviews tracking to determine when is the best time for an app developer to market their game. In addition, they can see app sales day-by-day up to the minute, as well as tracking the rate of downloads and installs. It's essentially a solution to mixing Flurry, AdMob, and Mobclix.
-Fuse can even track how much users play an app, and for how long, so that developers can see in real-time how their app is performing. Developers signed with Fuse have access to all the analytics, letting them focus on managing their game and not their sales tracking.
-Fuse has helped six iOS games get featured in the App Store, which is an increasingly difficult feat for anyone.
-Fuse's development tools have undergone a year of development, and they're currently looking to expand with high-quality iOS games.
Pull quotes:
-"It's difficult to be successful in the App Store. We know because we've lived it. We believe in the iOS game platform and decided early on to make the investment required to understand the marketplace. We built a set of tools that will help grow an ecosystem of games and developer partnerships, to engage and entertain our growing audience of mobile gamers." -- Jon Walsh, CEO and co-founder of Fuse.
-"We realize how important it is to maintain an active player base to create momentum from product to product when you need it. You need great content to keep your player base interested. Collaboration with great game makers to grow an ecosystem of games and player is the way we think publishing should work, and we want to be the company that proves it in the iOS space." -- Jon Walsh
Source: Daily News from GamePro.com
Wednesday, March 2, 2011