In an earlier post I wrote about my game company Yosuatreegames. In this post I will give a broad overview of how to publish mobile games on iOS and Google Play. This is not meant to be a comprehensive step by step guide, as those are available on the web, but rather a broad overview of the process, and some things to think about. The process of publishing a game can be frustrating, expensive, and time consuming, but is very rewarding because you can easily share your games with friends and family. In addition, any published game is great to put on your resume, and impressive to employers.
How Much Does it Cost to Publish a Game?
Besides the work it takes to create and publish a game, there is also a cost associated with both Google Play and the App Store. Google Play charges a one-time $25 fee to create a developer account, while Apple chargers $100 per year. While a one time fee of $25 is not that much, Apple’s fee is something to consider especially since it is a yearly fee. While you may charge money for your game or put in ads to help earn money to cover these fees, making even $100 from a mobile game is not easy.
Finishing Your Game
It is hard to decide when a game is finished. There is always more polish and features you can add to your game, but at some point you need to decide that it is ready to share with other people if you are going to publish it. In addition, you must take into account whether or not Apple and Google will consider it finished. If your game does not meet their requirements, they reject it. Both Google and Apple have guidelines on their site, which will help you determine if it will be rejected or not. In general Apple is much more strict with their review process, while Google only recently started involving humans in their process. An important thing to consider when publishing a game on Google Play is the requirement that your game must have at least 5 achievements before you can publish it. This means that you will have to use their Game Services API, which is a whole process by itself. In general, it is not all that difficult to get a game through either review process compared to the challenge of getting people to download your game once it is on the store.
Keys, Certificates, and Provisioning Profiles
One of the trickiest parts of publishing a game is generating your keys, certificates, and publishing profiles (depending on the platform). The purpose of these is to authenticate your app. While instructions can be found online for both platforms, the process can be tricky, and is something that is not handled by game engines. Expect to take some time troubleshooting this process.
Preparing App Information
At some point for both platforms you will have to write a description for your game, and fill out other information like your game’s website, a contact email, rating information, whether or not your app contains cryptography(because of export laws), and other information. One issue we ran into when publishing eVubble Lite on the App Store is that we needed to provide Apple with a company email that was at our own domain. We had a domain name purchased through Weebly, but were just using gmail for our company email. We ended up using Zoho, a free email service, to set this up, but this was something unexpected that took some time. eVubble Lite was free, but if you are charging for your app, there would be another step to set up payment information.
Uploading the Game
Uploading the apk or .ipa file that is exported by your game engine to Google Play is usually straightforward. We have had occasional issues with Corona SDK, where we would get errors or warnings due to things out of our control. We could usually solve these using work arounds or by waiting for patches from Corona if it was a bug.
Publishing the Game
After going through this process you will finally be ready to publish your game. With Apple you will have the option to release the game manually after it passes review or automatically when it passes. On Google Play (unless it has changed with their recent process change) the game will be published automatically after review. For both platforms expect to wait several hours before the store page for your game goes online and is searchable from the store. Both platforms update sales figures for apps daily, that you can access through the developer sites.
What to Expect
To get an idea about what to expect as far as downloads and sales it is useful to read sales figures for other games. Reading about other peoples’ experiences on the different app stores is also a good way to get an idea of the best platform/platforms for your game. As a company and personally, I have published three apps on Google Play – eVubble Lite, Island Warsquare Prototype, and Speech Writer. I have only published one – eVubble Lite on the App store. All of these games/apps are 100% free – no ads, and no in-app purchases. At Yosuatreegames we did some promotion and marketing for eVubble Lite, but the others I published just as portfolio apps, and did not bother promoting them besides sharing them with the classes I built them for. At the time of writing the total unique installs for all of these apps collectively is exactly 600. Getting people to download your games or apps is very difficult, and actually making money from games or apps on these markets would be even harder. I still believe publishing any game is worth it. By publishing eVubble Lite, I have learned a lot about what we can do to improve future games, and learned to not to underestimate the importance of marketing. In addition, it has been extremely rewarding to see people enjoy the experience that we created.