I’m Contributing Editor to Tap! magazine,  Future Publishing’s spiffy and chunky iOS magazine. I look after the games section, and I therefore get quite regular emails from developers and PRs, asking how they can get games reviewed in the mag.

Ultimately, there’s no way to guarantee a slot in Tap!, bar releasing a totally amazing game (i.e. along similar quality lines as World of Goo HD and Strategery), but there are a number of ways you can at least boost your chances. None of these things are rocket surgery, but it’s amazing how many devs utterly ignore them.

1. Let me know about your game. Email me or get in touch on Twitter. If I know about your game, there’s obviously more chance of it getting coverage.
2. Send me a promo code. Bizarrely, this surprises many devs, but, yes, send me a promo code and your game is more likely to make the cut, simply because something that’s good and had a quick test beats something that might be good but that I’ve not tried.
3. Be responsive. If I email you and ask something, get back to me in good time. I’m not suggesting you need to be at my beck and call, but when I’ve a question about some stupid bug or issue, it’s in your interest to say “actually, we’re releasing an update tomorrow that fixes things” (whereupon I’ll rereview the product) than nothing.

Devs also do themselves a massive disservice in general regarding their App Store pages, wrecking discoverability. I have an RSS feed that pipes in every new iOS game release and I check every entry, to make a shortlist for Tap! Some games are overlooked or discarded because they don’t immediately make it clear what the game’s about. So, some handy tips:

1. Your first App Store grab should show gameplay. It should be an in-game shot that shows your game at its best. If you’re showing a title screen, or, God forbid, some kind of options screen or social-networking bollocks, you just scuppered your chances of coverage by at least 50 per cent. (And if you’re dumb enough to not include any gameplay shots at all, I don’t even want to look at you.)
2. Your description should start off with an extremely succinct overview of what your game’s about. Don’t get clever and don’t start by boasting how Game Blog No-one’s Ever Heard Of (dot com) gave you 4/5 and thought your game was “the dog’s doo-dahs”. Practically every game gets a good review from somewhere, but I don’t care about that—I want to know what your game’s about. (By all means include snippets of reviews, by the way—just don’t lead with them.) Note that this and the previous tip will also benefit you regarding snaring customers—make them excited right away, and don’t make them scroll.
3. You should make it amazingly obvious how to get in touch. You have company and support links on your App Store page, so bloody well use them. And don’t link them to nothing. If I’m reviewing 30 games for a single issue of Tap!, I’m not going to waste an hour tracking down each developer. Link to your Twitter or an email address, or if you link to your website, make damn sure there’s a very obvious means of getting in touch with you. Also, ensure you check your incoming pr@ (or whatever) address more than once in a blue moon.

All these tips may seem obvious, but when I constantly hear how developers are pissed off at a lack of mainstream coverage of their games (or how unfair the App Store is, because big companies get more coverage), it’s amazing how many make almost no effort to fix things in their favour. The second set of above tips would maybe take you a half-hour to implement, but they could be the difference between your game being ignored entirely and it getting a two-page spread in a magazine.

VP of worldwide publishing Gonzague de Vallois on Pocket Gamer, commenting on EA’s pre-Christmas 59p/99-cent videogame price-point slash:

We weren’t that happy with the Christmas promotion because it was backed by Apple and they highlighted it on their store worldwide

One of their roles is to highlight premium content and to help publishers make money out of the platform. It’s a long-term market, and we have to be careful that we don’t get people used to the 59p price range.

Uh huh. I guess that’s why Gameloft has now slashed the price of 30 of its games to 59p/99 cents.

I’m in two minds about low pricing for games on the App Store. There’s no question that big brands can make more money with permanently low pricing, and it’s clear some games are well-suited to that lowest tier (such as Pac-Man, which makes far more sense at a buck than five). However, EA and Gameloft are both rapidly devaluing their brands on the platform through regular bottom-tier sales. I already know plenty of people who hold off buying anything by either company, because they figure that sooner or later it’ll cost just 59p/99 cents. It’s like the budget-game industry from the 1980s all over again—albeit at a third (or less) of the price.

I’m currently reviewing games for Tap!, Future’s iOS magazine. One of them is RPG/match-three mash-up Puzzle Quest 2. It’s quite a good game, but for me its most important attribute is its size: when unpacked on an iOS device, Puzzle Quest 2 weighs in at over 1 GB.

With Apple devices having fixed storage that’s relatively small (the iPhone tops out at 32 GB and the iPod touch and iPad max out at 64 GB—my iPhone is 16 GB and my iPad 32 GB), the rapid increase in the size of games is fast becoming a problem, not least because Apple encourages regular purchase and publishers price games low to tempt users. The end result is lots of people buy tons of games.

On a magazine forum for a publication I write for, there’s a thread over 50 pages long, with people excitedly talking about their iOS purchases and making recommendations. Several people are now deleting games that they don’t have space for, despite having spent time playing through those games, investing time in them. It’s the same with me and Puzzle Quest 2. The game’s not quite good enough for it to stay on my iPad, because I know by the next issue of Tap! I’ll need to make room for several GB of new games. But I put hours into my progress and would quite like to continue playing. On a Mac or PC, this wouldn’t be an issue (due to the size of hard drives); on a PSP or DS, this wouldn’t be an issue, because I’d plug in the cart again and pick up where I left off (assuming it had battery back-up). On iOS, though, I’m ‘forced’ to delete games when my devices become full.

That Apple doesn’t provide a workaround for this is inexcusable now that we’ve reached iOS 4.x. In the days of 10 MB iOS games, it wasn’t a problem: you could stuff dozens on a device without problem. But in this age of Rivens and Puzzle Quest 2s, Apple’s (from a gaming standpoint) fast turning its high-end devices into the equivalent of crappy cartridges without battery back-up. The only difference is that an iOS device can hold a bunch of ‘cartridges’, but when one’s removed, the result is the same: all your progress is lost.

Game Center could have been a solution to this, but it currently only seems to work well with high scores and achievements. iTunes could definitely be a solution, providing the means to optionally reinstate game data when you reinstall an app. Right now, though, the only option you have is to manually back-up an app’s /Library and /Documents folders yourself (on a jailbroken device or by using the likes of PhoneView or iPhone Explorer), and that’s just not good enough.

TouchArcade has some nice quotes from Nintendo’s el-presidenté (of North America) regarding cheapo mobile games (reacting to Nintendo 3DS games likely costing 30-to-45 dollars):

I actually think that one of the biggest risks today in our industry are these inexpensive games that are candidly disposable from a consumer standpoint.

Mm. Far better to continue ripping off consumers*. Because that isn’t a risk at all. Also, it really is terrible that plenty of iOS gamers are out there buying games every single day, due to their low cost, rather than one game a month.

Angry Birds is a great piece of experience but that is one compared to thousands of other pieces of content that, for one or two dollars, I think actually create a mentality for the consumer that a piece of gaming content should only be two dollars.

And why exactly shouldn’t a great piece of gaming content only be two dollars? Or, more precisely, why should a great piece of gaming content cost 30 dollars, or 45, or more? (Infinity Blade is six bucks, so is that OK, or is that still too cheap?)

I actually think some of those games are overpriced at one or two dollars but that’s a whole different story.

Oh gawsh! Chuckle! AHO! And so on. You go, el pres, dismissing iOS and its kin with a quip. But here’s the thing: your problem today isn’t myriad games that aren’t worth two bucks—it’s the thousands available that are.

* Incidentally, my all-time favourite Nintendo WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING? moment came with Pac-Man (NES Classics) for the GBA. Currently ambitiously priced at 30 quid on Amazon, the game was originally priced at ‘only’ 15 when first released in the UK—for a dodgy port of the NES version of Pac-Man. BARGAIN! Kind of puts iOS gaming into perspective. Hell, it even makes Namco’s crazy iOS Pac-Man pricing almost look sane. (Almost.)

DOS emulator iDOS arrived on the App Store last year and was swiftly removed once it became clear the author had ill-advisedly bundled commercial games with it that he didn’t have the rights to. Apple was also apparently pissed that iTunes file sharing enabled you to upload your own games to the app. This, apparently, is bad and totally different from, say:

• File-sharing books to iBooks, GoodReader, Stanza and the like;
• File-sharing comics to Comic Zeal;
• File-sharing documents you’ve written to Pages;
• File-sharing practically anything to Air Sharing.

So in iDOS 2, the author removed file-sharing, resubmitted and the app found its way back to the store. The author reports it’s been pulled again, “because the ability to run custom executable is violating the appstore [sic] policy”.

These ‘custom executables’ (i.e. third-party games) can only be installed by using a third-party utility to access app bundles. Applications like iPhone Explorer and PhoneView enable users of non-jailbroken devices to mount an application bundle and access its /Documents and /Library folders. In iDOS, you could shove old DOS games in there, then fire up the command line on the app itself and load the games. Apple considers this evil, even if you, say, own the rights to the games, or they are freeware and you therefore legally have the right to run them.

My worry is that Apple will now close the backdoor to app bundles, somehow blocking access to the aforementioned folders. Few people know they exist and that you can access them, but they are massively handy, because backing up these folders is the ONLY way you can back-up content from apps and games before deleting them, and the ONLY way you can reinstate your data after a reinstall. I’ve done this myself many dozens of times—it’s the only way I can have a usable device but also not ‘lose’ the many hours I put into the likes of GTA.

Apple clearly doesn’t care about this. When you wipe an app, the data’s gone for good. This is absurdly stupid, putting iOS games on a par with cheap, nasty DS carts that don’t have battery back-ups. If Apple automatically backed up game and app states to iTunes and provided the option for reinstating this data on a reinstall, blocking backdoors would be fine, but it doesn’t. Here’s hoping I’m wrong, but knowing Apple, it favours locking down wherever possible, even if there’s really little or no reason to.