Thanks for this comment. Many people do not understand what I am trying to say (I'm probably not saying it well), but you have described the problem nicely. I would love to hear from you directly on my blog so we can hook up on Twitter or G+.
Right now, the app store is very much a lottery. There are 126 game per day entering the store, yet there are only 100-200 slots the players actually look at. Beyond that, it is hard to find games. The situation is way worse than the Internet as a whole. Discovery there is much better via better search algorithms, SEO, and even ads and ad networks that are available.
The ad networks on mobile devices move the same batch of users around that are looking to get hard currencies for games like Puzzle and Dragons that they are engaged in.
As the market moves more and more to mobile, talking up your app on an Internet based forum is not going to work. Plus, I don't think that relying on getting a buzz going on Reddit is a very repeatable marketing strategy.
I am certainly not saying "don't be an Indie game developer. There is still a lot more opportunity now than when we started GarageGames in 1999 and Indies were called Shareware developers. But, that does not mean that we should not call for Apple and Google, two of the most valuable companies in the world, to make their stores better. Indies are pouring their lives into these games and they deserve the best market possible. There are things that could make them much better. For instance, fixing Search, giving us analytics for the store listings, allowing A/B test on the listing, opening up the stores to additional front ends so people passionate about a subject could sell games there, etc.
OF is gone. We are cross platform, so GC alone will not work. We used contractors and internal resources to develop our products. I have done very well in the games business, so our company is well funded.
All I have tried to do here is to explain things that we have done so it can help other people in the future. Of course, we did not do everything or even the majority of things right on this game, but I have pointed those things out in the article.
I said that in the article. It was intended to be a simple free game. Anywhere I mention the game in the article I say that we didn't make a game that is good enough. The point of the article was to go through the things that we did right and, mostly, wrong so others won't make the same mistakes.
We actually do know how to make hits. I have been making them all of my career. Our last game was Social City on Facebook. It has 3MM DAU, and was a top 1o game.
Most Indies cannot afford to advertise and market like that. Of course, you have to figure out some form of marketing to find your audience. I do not expect app stores to market games, and I have even written articles about that. My contention is that app discovery is so broken that you can barely find an app even if you know what you are looking for. BTW, we did plenty of advertising on iOS, but, like I said, most Indies cannot afford that.
I should have explained this a little better in the article. The ads boosted the game enough to get us onto some of the lesser Android featured areas, so most of those installs were organic.