London Calling

I've just got the first 24 hours of data in, so let's have a look...

Oh, it's absolutely brilliant. I have no idea what people did before them, they were literally just shooting in the dark. The feedback now is amazing. OK, so we're tracking every single message we send out... In the first 18 hours, 177,000 people were clicking the link and going direct to the App Store. 878,000 clicked on the 'dismiss' link, which is working out about 17 per cent clicking. Just under 1.1 million links so far, in just under 24 hours. The reason this works is just that so we can drive so many links so quickly - it means we can basically avoid an app just disappearing from the App Store.

It's really an alternative to going cap in hand to Chillingo or one of the other big publishers and doing some terrible deal

There are so many links that enough are going to click through for it to at least chart. After three days it tails off a lot, but really it's the first three days where you have a chance of organic growth and people seeing it. That's a real benefit.

The other thing we're doing as well is putting custom banner ads in the game, but that's sort of a passive thing, driving a few links through, maybe just a couple of thousand a day, so that won't do much to move chart position especially but it pushes a few through.

Yeah, that's just it. Basically any developer who hasn't already had a hit on the app store faces that challenge, 'can I get anybody to play it in the first place?' I think if you can get people to see you're in with a fighting chance, but the issue nowadays is lots of big social media games companies are coming into iPhone and buying huge numbers of CPI [cost-per-install] installs and advertising, essentially buying their way up the charts, which really kind of crowds out the space for other people quite a lot. That's been getting progressively worse in the last year, to the point where now it's very, very difficult to get an app seen at all.

So the Future Games Network, we'd done this anyway just to promote our own software, and then we were 'oh, y'know, actually other people might be interested in using it.' We're independent developers, we like the idea of general moral helpfulness - we've done quite well on the App Store and we'd like to see other independent developers doing quite well too, so we'd like to help them. It's really an alternative to going cap in hand to Chillingo or one of the other big publishers and doing some terrible deal with them where you end up with quite a restrictive contract, potentially having to give up your IP or something like that. So this is just to give people an alternative.

But we don't guarantee to publish anything that anybody sends us - we're very much cherry-picking what we want to promote and that's really because we don't want to promote apps from within our own games that we don't think are that good. There's not much too point in doing that. So we've had developers emailing us through their apps and things, and every so often we get one that looks really good. So we're chasing one up at the moment, we're looking to see if we can raise some capital for the Network now. We're not actually funding anything at the minute, that's in the next month or so.

It's just a straight split. Basically, we negotiate it individually with each developer, but it's a sort of 20 to 30 per cent deal, depending on the app, what funding we need to put up, how complete it is. It'll all vary based on that. That's just from the money the developers have actually seen - Apple have already taken their 30 per cent at that point. I think it works out something like we get 21 per cent per download, Apple get 29 per cent and the developer gets 50 per cent, something like that. We're very keen to make sure that the developers always make more money than we will out of it - we're not trying to fleece people here. We're just basically trying to promote some nice games and potentially grow our own install base.

It's total sales, but the developers are free to leave at any point. We're not forcing them to be in the network or whatever. So if they don't think we've done anything, fair enough. But we've only done one app so far, and nobody's upset yet! It's very straightforward, we're not trying to tie people down. It's very much if someone's got an app and they want some help on the marketing and promotion, we're happy to provide that service if we like the app as well. As well as that we're helping people with conversions to Android and other platforms, talking to mobile phone operators and that sort of thing. So they can get some quite wide distribution on it.

Once the Network's up and running, the products we put through it should provide enough push for the new games going forward. Although obviously we'd be very upset if none of our games were selling themselves... At the end of the day the Future Games Network is not where we're going to make our core money. And any developer we're working with is going to be making at least twice as much as we are from it. We'll make more money making new games ourselves than we will through the Future Games Network. But it's just a very useful way to grow our install base and promote the apps really.

The key thing is that we're not publishing people's apps - we're basically doing what Apple do, which is act as a medium. They still own their IP and everything like that, there's no attempt whatsoever to try and take rights from the developer. If the app's doing really well we may want to collaborate with them in some other way, but we're going to keep it very honest and straightforward. It's made by independent game developers for independent game developers.