So what's in it for the developers? Giftiz has quite a large number of "players" that use the Giftiz app. Your game will be offered through this app and you can be sure the players will play it for about 5 minutes - that is the requirement of the mission. What exactly is a mission is upto you.
What's the catch?
What is the costs of this publicity? Well of course it's not for free. At least most of the time. Giftiz is a paid service for developers. Developers pay for each install coming from Giftiz. If it is worth or not depends on the deal you can get from them. But of course to create a successful game, you need to get as much publicity as you can in the first month in the store...My story
The company behind Giftiz contacted me first with another offer - their mobile ads AdBudiz. But I was not really interested. It was shortly after the release of Mr. Dandelion and I made a joke that the only thing I need is some publicity and they actually offered me Giftiz. For free. Since Mr. Dandelion is my research project, I said why not?I was told that Giftiz discovers suitable Indie games and offers them Giftiz deal for free. I bet it's profitable for them, because they need to keep the players engaged. And of course the paying customers need this too - to be discovered from more places. Pyramid Mover is another example of a game that got this deal.
Implementing Giftiz was very simple. They have a SDK that does everything for you and useful example projects. A Giftiz representative just checked if everyting works and that was it. I spent less than an hour adding it to my game plus some time mailing with Giftiz.
Yesterday was the first day of "featuring" of my game - which means yesterday the people can start playing my game to complete a mission. In my case it's completing first three levels. The featuring came quite late and won't help me to get to Top New category - simply because I am already past the 30 days of being new. Giftiz said that the paying customers have priority over free deals.
Conclusion
My game has been in the store for about 2 months now and the number of new installs was slowly dropping. After the Giftiz featuring, I immediately got cca thousand new installs on the first day. I can summarize the effect of Giftiz in 6 weeks when my featuring ends. I am going to post another article about it. Right now I believe this service has a potential to help you to get you to the Top New category. It all depends on the timing and the cost.
Here's the same graph after 4 days of featuring. About 1600 new downloads from Giftiz. I will try to get the real numbers from them for the second part of the article.
UPDATE: Graph after two weeks with Giftiz:
I am not affiliated with Giftiz and I am not getting anything extra from them for writing this.
Continue to part 2...
