How Halfbrick achieved multi-million App sales in 6 months

A great interview with Halfbrick Studios CEO, Shaniel Deo, on the company's phenomenal success on the Appstore is available at www.smartcompany.com.au. It's been only two months since our own interview with Shaniel, but since then it looks like Halfbrick has completed their 2 year transition to self-publishing from work-for-hire. It seems rather timely considering how strong the Aussie dollar is at the moment making it a challenge for local developers competing for publisher contracts. From the interview...

(Shaniel) We're definitely not doing work for publishers. We're finishing off a couple of titles we were doing, but iOS is going to be a big part of our platform and we're going to be launching a lot of games on these devices. But we're also moving across smartphones in general, we have Fruit Ninja for Android, and we think the smartphone market is going to be big for us.

While Fruit Ninja saled past the 2 million sale mark recently and still doing remarkebly well in the Appstore charts, Shaniel has revealed the amount of sales their most recent release, Monster Dash, has made so far. The run and gun action title has netted the Brisbane studio nearly 400,000 sales, and it's certainly a great number for an Appstore game. Halfbrick are keeping their titles fresh with tri-weekly updates which has proven to be a sustaining strategy in the marketplace.

Shaniel stresses the importance of marketing when it comes to self-publishing and mentions some of the strategies that have helped get word of their titles out in a crowded marketplace including building a relationship with press, fostering and informing a community through social applications (Twitter etc), as well as viral marketing.

(Shaniel) I think the whole process has shown how crucial marketing is. A lot of people don't even think about marketing themselves until their product is finished, but we made sure that we had everything in place to go. It takes time to build relationships with the press, you can't just finish a product and then get them to feature you.

From interviews with Shaniel and other local Appstore stories, there are some common methods for success. Apart from having a great game and doing a whole lot of marketing, initially promoting your app locally is key into gaining traction and the attention of Apple themselves which will hopefully in return propel the title internationally.