App Treasures: Indie iPhone Game Developers' "School of Fish"

In a strength-in-numbers play, five indie iPhone game companies have created App Treasures.

Billed as a loosely-affiliated label — not a publisher — the group consists of The Blimp Pilots, Imangi Studios, Snappy Touch, Streaming Colour Studios and Veiled Games.

The distinction between label and publisher is worth exploring. Do publishers provide value for iPhone game devs?

In traditional console-and-PC gaming, video game publishers provided value in four ways: (1) manufacturing, (2) distribution, (3) marketing and (4) financing.

Even before the iPhone publishers’ value in manufacturing and distribution was being eroded as the industry moved to download based distribution. The App Store finished that progression.

Where many console and PC games are epic in scale and may have hundreds of programers, iPhone games are more compact and require fewer developers. Consequently, publishers aren’t financing games iPhone; they’re buying them from developers already finished.

That leaves marketing. It’s inarguable that the publishers have marketing clout. Right now, eleven of the top 50 games in the US store are from labels that mainstream PC and console game consumers would recognize. Recognition is what App Treasures is after:

App Treasures hopes to become a label in the literal, first definition in the dictionary, ingredients label sense of the word. When you see their logo, they want you to think quality ingredients inside.

Members neither contribute to a pool promotional funds, nor share a fraction of revenues with the entity, so the approach won’t be one of collective advertising/marketing. Instead, they plan to build reputation by in-app branding on their splash screens and cross promotion via shared “More Games” view and not with collective advertising/marketing.

Additionally, to speed time-to-market, they plan to share common-components found across games e.g., leader boards.

As for new membership: “The group,” says Snappy Touch’s Noel Llopis, “will slowly add a few new members over the next few months, always keeping the quality bar high.”

Is a loose label a smart alternative to using a publisher or going it alone? I’d answer with a qualified yes.

It’d be a definite yes if the publishers truly dominate the app store. Eleven in the top 50 is impressive, but it’s large enough to exclude competitors, e.g., Coke’s marketshare in the soda business.

It’d also be a definite yes if there weren’t examples of tiny, even single-developer sized, indie game devs succeeding wildly.

It’d be a definite yes if the iPhone gamer audience was highly homogenous, as is the hard-core console/PC gamer audience. If the bulk of iPhone game consumers are infrequent buyers, or the label’s offerings are spread too thinly across the categories, then building up consumer brand-association will be difficult.

Even with those caveats, given the emphasis we place here on relationship/endorsement marketing (see, e.g., yesterday’s Marketing In Code Using Facebook Connect For iPhone post) and the near zero cost, it should be all upside for its members.