Today, Amazon is pleased to share Chartboost with Appstore game developers. Chartboost is the largest mobile-games only platform, helping game developers increase revenue and discover new players. According to Chartboost, they power over 200,000 games with 700 million monthly active players and drive over 20 billion monthly game sessions per month.

Tools Mobile Game Developers Love

Chartboost’s technology enables Amazon developers to acquire players with positive ROI and grow revenue. Their Cross Promotion tool to lets you promote your new titles to the players who already love your other mobile games with free interstitial and mobile video ads. With their unique Direct Deals Marketplace, you can connect with other game developers and act as a publisher and/or advertiser, on terms that both sides agree upon. This allows you to cut out the middleman completely, and keep 100% of the revenue you generate.

“Every mobile game that I know is using Chartboost. They understand what mobile game developers need to build a successful business.”

Tommy Palm, Candy Crush Mastermind

Amazon developers can conduct large-scale advertising campaigns that reap high quality players with positive ROI and greatly enhance revenue with made-for-mobile interstitial ads and gorgeous, 100% viewable mobile video ads—all through one lightweight SDK. In addition, Chartboost provides an easy-to-use dashboard for developers, with granular control over who advertises in your mobile games, ad location, targeting options and so much more.

Get Started in Minutes

Developers can start growing their mobile games business on Amazon with Chartboost, today. To get started, sign up for an account and download the lightweight Chartboost Android SDK that takes only five minutes to integrate.

-Ankur

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Today we announced Merch by Amazon, a new self-service program designed to help you increase revenue through the sale of branded t-shirts designed by you and produced, sold and shipped by Amazon. With the print on demand service, you sell only the t-shirts your customers want to buy.  You never have to worry about inventory or out-of-pocket costs.  For every t-shirt sold, you earn a royalty.  The more t-shirts sold, the higher the royalty is.

To get started, simply set-up your Merch by Amazon account, upload the artwork for your t-shirt, and push submit - Amazon takes care of the rest.  In a matter of hours, your custom t-shirt is available for sale worldwide on Amazon.com.  Once you’ve created your custom t-shirts, you can also promote them in-game on the Android, Fire OS, or iOS versions of your game via Amazon Mobile Ads.

Amazon’s new mobile experience, Amazon Underground, is more than just a great shopping app. Sure, it offers customers hundreds of millions of products for purchase, including digital items like mobile apps and games, books, streaming movies, TV shows, and music—but with Amazon Underground’s innovative monetization approach, Amazon pays you for every minute a customer uses your Amazon Underground app ($0.002/minute at launch), and customers pay nothing.

If you are a developer of a premium or freemium mobile app or game, Amazon Underground will pay you for each minute your app is actually in use. That means, every minute your Amazon Underground app is being used, it’s generating revenue.

Today we introduced Amazon Underground to customers in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and France. Amazon Underground is a new Amazon shopping app for Android phones that has all of the functionality of our regular Amazon mobile shopping app plus an exciting new benefit: over ten thousand dollars in apps, games and in-app items that are #ActuallyFree. We’ve made this possible by working out a new business model for developers - we’ll pay you on a per-minute-played basis in exchange for you waiving your normal download or in-app fees.  This means, you can turn 100% of your Android users into revenue-generating customers, so from the minute your customers start playing, you start getting paid for each minute they use your Amazon Underground app. It’s a win for both customers and developers.

There has never been a better time to integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API into your game and now with full support for Unity, it’s easier then ever. In this post I’ll walk you through how to get everything up and running as well as how to build a simple test in order to make sure ads correctly load and display. Before we get started, you’ll want to read over this page and follow instructions 1 – 5. This will cover setting up the application key in the developer portal, setting up your tax information as well as downloading and installing the SDK. Once you’ve followed those steps you should be ready to test out that everything works. For this post, I’m using an empty Unity project. You can do the same steps in your own game as well. With your Unity project open and the Amazon Mobile Ads SDK plugin imported, we are ready to write some code.

If you've never published an app to the Amazon Appstore, now is the perfect time to join! Most Android apps just work on the Amazon Appstore, but it’s not always easy being the new guy.  That’s why for a limited time, we’re helping drive impressions and installs for developers that publish to the Amazon Appstore for the first time.

Publish your first app to the Amazon Appstore by August 16th, and we’ll provide you with a $100 promotional credit towards an ad campaign on Advertise Your App. Advertise Your App helps you promote your app to millions of users on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network. Ads are shown to users within the United States, depending on app compatibility.

Amazon Mobile Ads API Plugin Available for Unity, Cordova, Adobe AIR and Xamarin

We are excited to announce that our new Amazon Cross-Platform Mobile Ads API Plugin is now available for Unity, Cordova, Adobe AIR and Xamarin. The Amazon Mobile Ads API is an in-app display advertising solution for monetizing mobile apps and games across many devices, including phones and tablets on Android, iOS, and Fire OS. In this post, we’ll walk through how to integrate Amazon Mobile Ads into your game to maximize revenue while maintaining a user-friendly experience. The same best practices can also be used in a mobile app as well.

If you’re familiar with existing ad services or have seen ads appear in games created by other developers, you’ll find that the Amazon Mobile Ads API is easy to wrap your head around. The basic ad formats supported are banner ads, which come in the sizes 320x50, 300x250, 600x90, 728x90, and 1024x50, and full screen interstitials; note that banner ads loaded through the new cross platform plug-ins will have their sizes chosen automatically. Our ads target users in the US, UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Japan, and our service is geared towards delivering great eCPM (effective cost per thousand impressions) and high quality ads. Integrating the Mobile Ads API is straightforward and we provide individual documentation for each newly supported platform: Unity, Cordova, Adobe AIR, and Xamarin. We also offer a single portal for integration and tracking, allowing you to measure your success rate with actionable and easy-to-use reporting. For more information about the entire Amazon Ads platform, check out the Developer Portal.

The Amazon Mobile Ad network is offering a limited time opportunity to earn a guaranteed $6 CPM for interstitial ads on qualifying apps*. All qualifying iOS and Android apps that integrate the Amazon Mobile Ads API and send the ad request for the first time on or after July 14, 2015 will receive a guaranteed $6 CPM on interstitial ads in September, October and November (up to 1 million impressions per app per month). Interstitial impressions served across all supported devices (iOS, Android, and Fire OS tablets and phones), supported countries (US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Japan), and supported stores (Apple App Store, Google Play and Amazon Appstore) qualify.

Learn how the top 50 game developers leverage in-app purchasing to monetize successfully, and get actionable data to help you increase the profitability of your games. I’ll review data Amazon has collected about how users engage with IAP in games, and go into detail about some of the best ways to increase customer conversion and revenue.

You'll Learn:

• What the top 50 developers do with in-app purchasing that other developers don’t.
• Actionable data and tips to help you get started.
• How selection drives engagement and repeat orders.
• How to increase revenue by launching new IAP price points.

When:

Tuesday, July 14th 10:00AM PDT, 1 hour

We’d like to share an offer by Applovin – “The App Challenge” to help Amazon developers monetize.  AppLovin recently announced that Appstore developers can now integrate the Applovin SDK and start monetizing their Amazon apps with ads from Applovin. With this offer, any developer who publishes an app to the Amazon Appstore will receive an additional dollar for every dollar they make from that app using the Applovin SDK. Developers can earn up to $500 dollars and all apps published from 7/1/ 15 – 8/31/15 are eligible to participate in this offer.

How to Participate

• Build your app and add the AppLovin SDK.
• Publish your app to the Amazon Appstore.
• Submit your app to the challenge by simply filling out the entry form.
• Receive your rewards within 4 weeks (9/30/15) of the offer end date (8/31/15).

This challenge is open to all, so please feel free to refer friends and other developers. For additional details and offer terms and conditions, check out the official announcement by Applovin.

- Ankur

We are excited to announce that developers can now monetize their Amazon apps with TrialPay, a leader in cross-platform monetization and reward-based advertising.  By integrating the TrialPay Evergreen SDK or native ads API, developers can dynamically surface any type of ad format including native ads, offer walls, or videos. This enables Amazon developers to monetize users who don’t typically buy IAP items by offering them ads they can interact with in exchange for in-app currency.

For example, users can watch a movie trailer or buy flowers for Mother’s Day to earn in-app currency. Giving users a way to enjoy IAP items for free makes TrialPay an attractive tool for increasing the number of paying users. Industry leaders such as Glu, Zynga, and Kik use TrialPay to enhance their ad offerings.

“TrialPay is a great partner with deep experience in mobile advertising. They are strong technologists who continue to create unique opportunities for advertisers to connect with users through Kik Points.”

Jairaj Sethi, Head of Platform, Kik

As of late, TrialPay is also helping developers tap into the online-to-offline opportunity by rewarding users for everyday purchases at retailers such as Peet’s Coffee and Sephora.

Image caption: TrialPay Peet’s offline offer - buy coffee and earn in-app currency

Contextually Relevant Ads in a Variety of Formats

Their event-based Evergreen SDK lets developers show offers that are contextually relevant to events in their apps. Developers have easy dashboard controls to toggle dynamically between ad formats. 

In addition, TrialPay’s Native Offers API provides access to a wide variety of ad types, supporting app installs, video, and seasonal promotions. Developers have complete control over the UI to match the look and feel of their app and integrate more deeply with the app experience.

Getting Started Is Easy

Developers have a choice on the integration method. TrialPay offers both a lightweight SDK and a Native Offers API option. Visit the TrialPay Mobile Development Center to get implementation details. You can also email mobilesales@trialpay.com for more information. Mention this Amazon blog post in the subject line to be paired with a dedicated account manager today.

Amazon Reaches the Big Spenders Best

According to Newzoo, gamers using the Amazon Appstore are the most likely to spend money.  More specifically, 64% of mobile gamers that use the Amazon Appstore spend money on mobile games, versus 37% for Google Play. Amazon users are more likely to engage with your app and spend money, and Advertise Your App enables you to target new customers while driving the installs you need to grow your business.

When you launch an Advertise Your App campaign, your app can be merchandized on Fire tablet wakescreens and mobile placements on the Amazon Mobile Ad Network, enabling you to directly reach Android and Fire users.

Reduce Your Cost of Acquisition with Advertise Your App

To get early feedback on Advertise Your App, we conducted a beta with Amazon Appstore developers. Developers who participated in our beta program had this to say about using Advertise Your App:

Ready to get started?

Create an Advertise Your App campaign in less than 90 seconds, and launch a campaign with as little as $100. And the best part? You only pay when a user clicks on one of your ads. For more information check out the following additional resources:

• Click here to learn more about Advertise Your App.
• Learn more about the Amazon Appstore
• Click here to submit your app
• Register for free as an Amazon Developer
• Amazon App Testing Service

How will IoT play out in your ecosystem? Is HTML vs. Native still relevant? Are you using AWS, Azure or Google Cloud? Which are the hottest IoT verticals? These are some of the questions that our friends at VisionMobile address through their Developer Economics research, so take their quick survey and make your voice heard.

Participate in the 10-minute Developer Skill Census survey by June 5^th and enter a draw to win prizes such as an Oculus Rift Dev Kit. A free chapter from one of VisionMobile’s premium paid reports will also be given immediately upon completion, taking a close look at app profits & costs. 

Now in its 9th edition, the Developer Economics research program tracks developer sentiment across platforms, revenues, apps, tools, APIs, segments and regions. This is the most ambitious developer survey to date, spanning across mobile, IoT, desktop and Cloud. The key insights from the survey will be given back to the community as a free download in late July.

Take the survey here: vmob.me/DE3Q15Amazon

As a part of our series on helping developers turn great games into great businesses, we’ve been talking about the importance of evolving your players into a fan base. This week we’ve invited Alex Walz of Apptentive to share his advice. Apptentive's software makes it easy for any company with a mobile app to grow retention, boost app store ratings, drive downloads, and earn customer loyalty via in-app messages, surveys, and intelligent ratings.

Building a fan community isn’t an easy task - it takes time and effort. Many mobile publishers adopt an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. As some of you may be experiencing, getting those crucial first customers- rather than building the app -may prove to be your biggest challenge.

After working with thousands of mobile apps, we have figured out a few ways to make creating fandom at scale a little easier for developers. Tools such as ours, compliment all the hard work you’ve done creating your app. Apptentive powers a suite of customer engagement tools that can be integrated into any mobile app to help developers build loyalty, earn customer love, and improve app store rankings – all of which translate to better monetization.

We’ve put together a list of five tips to create a scalable loyalty program that can turn players into fans. Enjoy!

1. Build an App Worth Sharing

The first step is to build an app your players can get excited about – an app they can become fans of. At this year’s Mobile World Congress, Amazon’s Paul Cutsinger made the distinction between ‘player’ sports and ‘spectator’ sports. Player sports (like archery, for example) provide a high level of entertainment value to the player. But there’s not a lot of money to be made in archery – it’s not a business. Such sports are designed to entertain a small niche of players but lack the mass appeal to go viral. Spectator sports, on the other hand, have a much broader audience and can support a product line, brand, business, and most importantly, a fanbase. In his presentation, Paul notes eSports as a prime example of a spectator sport harnessing the power of fandom – and consequently racking in $194 million in revenue.

The same goes for mobile games and other apps. If you want to a fan community, you need to engineer for growth and virality. Build a game that players will not only love, but love to share. This brings us to our next point...

With a beautiful interface, fun gameplay, social authentication, easy sharing, and an additional merchandise line,  Plants vs. Zombies is a top rated apps in the Amazon Appstore

2. Ask For Feedback

Let’s face it: None of us know how to build the perfect game. Fortunately for us, our players do. All we have to do is listen.

With over 400,000 apps in the Amazon Appstore, players have pretty high standards when it comes to evaluating which game to play next. It, therefore, shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that a whopping two-thirds of players ditch a game after fewer than 24 hours. Your players have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for in a game and can provide a fresh set of eyes to something you’ve been laboring over for months – revealing bugs you’ve overlooked or confusing areas in your interface.

Yet, players rarely have a channel for communicating this feedback. They can either take the time to leave a public review of your app or (as we see much more frequently) simply leave your app without leaving any indication of the factors that led them to that point. To capture this feedback and build an app they’ll truly love, you need to not only listen to your feedback, but proactively solicit it. I’ve found that companies that do exactly that –in the form of in-app messages, surveys, and feedback forms – have grown their customer insight collection 15-fold. In the process of listening and interacting with their players, I’ve seen countless success stories of breaking through the noise, growing lifetime value, and boosting retention by as much as 100%.

Average retention rates for mobile games that proactively engage players vs. those that don’t

3. Integrate with existing social networks

Want to grow your fanbase? Make it easy to be a fan. Your players don’t exist in a vacuum, and neither should your game. By leveraging existing social networks, you can greatly increase your game’s reach and adoption. Social integration typically comes in two ways:

One-step authentication using a Twitter, Facebook, or other social account. Instead of asking players to create an account log in to your game, consider giving them the option to sign in with their preferred social network. In the world of apps, speed and convenience is everything, with one-third of mobile app sessions lasting less than one minute. By getting players signed up faster, you can remove the first barrier of adoption and convert more installs into active players. Registration with social networks can also be used to sync a player’s contacts with the app, allowing him or her to invite friends and effortlessly evangelize your app.

One-click sharing over the player’s preferred social network. Mobile games are becoming increasingly social, and the value of an app is often in its community. How many times have you set a new high score in a game or gotten an achievement, and wanted to challenge your friends to top your score in the leaderboard? With social integration, posing that challenge should never be more than a click of a button away. The easier it is to share your content, the more shares you’ll get.

With the rise of deeplinks, social sharing has never been more important as an app discovery method. Leverage it.

4. Build a Community That Transcends Your App

The previous tip was all about making your app a community. Now it’s time to grow that community beyond your app. Taking another note from Appstore evangelist Paul Cutsinger, this comes down to encouraging the creation (and distribution) of user-generated content that can be shared across the web.

One strategy Riot and several mobile game developers have done to encourage content creation is using Twitch to show championship games and other content streams. Twitch, the live streaming video platform owned by Amazon, started support mobile game streaming last March and provides a way for game developers to spread awareness by sharing gameplay videos to the web and create a second revenue stream through the advertisements shown on Twitch. As of January 2015, the site sees over 100 million views each month, making it a great platform for mobile game promotion.

Other successful strategies include fostering fan communities and message boards, organizing online fan art or fan fiction contests, and creating a product/apparel line associated with your game. For an example of what such a community looks like in action, look no further than Angry Birds – a game that now sees over one-third of its revenue generated from its merchandise empire, with an extensive line of plush toys and t-shirts gracing malls around the world.

Angry Birds plush toy. Photo credit: Aira Vehaskari/AFP/Getty Images

5. Solicit Ratings and Reviews

Last but not least, you’ve got to ask for evangelism. At Apptentive, we’ve helped leading apps dramatically boost their review volume and sentiment almost overnight simply by engaging customers with intelligent, well-timed rating prompts.

Ratings and reviews are a crucial component of any mobile marketing strategy – so much so that the difference a single star makes is often enough to bring developers ‘above the poverty line.’ We looked into the relationship between willingness-to-download and star ratings in a recent consumer survey and found that a boost from 3 to 4 stars can increase app store conversion by as much as 89% while an increase from 2 to 5 stars can increase conversion by an incredible 570%. When it comes to mobile gaming, keeping players is a big pain point for many developers and acquiring them is even harder. Do yourself a favor, and ask for the ratings and reviews to help make this all a little easier.

I hope you found these five tips helpful as you propel your app to the top of the Appstore charts and turn your player into fans. In the words of Paul Cutsinger, 40% of mobile game developers fall ‘under the poverty line.’ But then again, 40% of developers don’t have a fanbase.

Ready to Submit Your App or Game?

For more information about getting started with the Amazon App for Android, Amazon Fire devices, or how to submit your game check out the following additional resources:

• Learn more about the Amazon Appstore
• Click here to submit your app
• Register for free as an Amazon Developer
• Amazon App Testing Service
• Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick SDK
• Amazon Fire Phone
• Amazon Fire Tablets
• Amazon Echo

The Game Developers Conference (GDC) is the largest annual gathering of professional video game developers providing a place for the industry to collaborate, network and share best practices for creating compelling game experiences. This year Amazon hosted a full Developer Day with sessions that covered building Android games for our full line of devices, Amazon Echo, Fire Tablets, Fire TV and Fire Phone, how to build better cloud gaming experiences, reaching fans with Twitch, and applying in-app monetization best practices based on Amazon's IAP data.

These sessions were previously only available to GDC attendees, and we’re excited to announce that we’ve made all of the Amazon GDC Developer Day sessions freely available online. Enjoy!

An Overview of the Amazon Devices and Services for Game Developers
David Isbitski, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
Alf Tan, Head of Games Business Development, Amazon
Vlad Suglobov, CEO, G5 Entertainment
An overview of Amazon's current developer ecosystem.  Learn how you can take advantage of AWS services specifically targeted for Game Developers, Amazon's Appstore and the new line of consumer Fire devices like Amazon Echo, Amazon Fire TV, Fire TV Stick and Fire tablets, as well as monetization services such as in-app purchasing.  Plus, hear how G5 entertainment has had success on the Amazon platform from G5 CEO Vlad Suglobov.    

Top Tips for Porting Unity Games to Fire Devices
Jesse Freeman, Developer Evangelist, Amazon   
In this talk, we cover important tips for porting Unity games over to Fire TV, Fire tablets and Fire phone. Through code examples, we'll demo how to support multiple resolutions for pixel perfect Orthographic and Perspective Cameras, abstracting player input to support keyboard, controller and touch, and optimization tips for C# for the best performance. We'll also show how to deploy to our devices and get your game up and running on Fire OS. You'll walk away knowing what it takes to publish to the Amazon Appstore and help expand your game's user base.

How to Evolve Players into Fans
Peter Heinrich, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
We’ve analyzed the top mobile games to see what best practices make them stand out from the crowd. Several trends emerging now will amplify those best practices, and games will have more opportunity than ever to excel. In the future, the top games will have fully realized fan bases that will drive their user acquisition and engagement engines. That fan base will include players but also content creators, advocates and potential new customers — this will open up a wider range of monetization options.  Hear more about how top mobile games drive greater engagement and revenue and learn how to you can do this with your own game.

Build and Deploy Your Mobile Game with AWS
Dhruv Thukral, Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
Tara Walker, Technical Evangelist, Amazon 
Developing a successful mobile game today is about more than just the game:  Users expect backend services like user authentication, downloadable content, and social features. Using our AWS Mobile SDK for iOS and Android, it’s easier than ever to build a game with these services.  This session will provide a step-by-step approach to add features to your game such as user identity management, dynamic content updates, cross-platform data sync, and more.  We’ll demonstrate how to use the AWS Mobile SDK to securely interact with services such as Cognito, DynamoDB, S3, and EC2.  Finally, we’ll provide a few common architecture patterns and scalability tips for AWS game backends.

How We Made a Game No Fun
Mike Hines, Developer Evangelist, Amazon
There are lots of suggestions about how to make a game fun.  Best practices are everywhere, but you can't just follow them blindly.  To create a fun game, you have to figure out how best practices integrate into your specific game.  Watch what we did wrong, and what we learned along the way.       

Connecting with Your Customers - Building Successful Mobile Games through the Power of AWS Analytics
Nate Wiger, Principal Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
Free to play is now the standard for mobile and social games.  But succeeding in free-to-play is not easy:  You need in-depth data analytics to gain insight into your players so you can monetize your game.  Learn how to leverage new features of AWS services such as Elastic MapReduce, Amazon S3, Kinesis, and Redshift to build an end-to-end analytics pipeline.  Plus, we’ll show you how to easily integrate analytics with other AWS services in your game.

Deploying a Low-Latency Multiplayer Game Globally: Loadout
3:30pm-4:15pm
Nate Wiger, Principal Gaming Solutions Architect, Amazon
This is a deep-dive straight into the guts of running a low-latency multiplayer game, such as a first-person shooter, on a global scale. We dive into architectures that enable you to split apart your back-end APIs from your game servers, and Auto Scale them independently.  See how to run game servers in multiple AWS regions such as China and Frankfurt, and integrate them with your central game stack.  We’ll even demo this in action, using AWS CloudFormation and Chef to deploy Unreal Engine game servers.
 

How Game Developers Reach New Customers with Twitch
4:15pm-5:15pm
Marcus Graham, Director of Community & Education at Twitch
Ernest Le, Director Publisher & Developer Partnerships at Twitch
Twitch is the largest live video platform and community for gamers with more than 100 million visitors per month. We want to connect gamers around the world by allowing them to broadcast, watch, and chat from everywhere they play.  In this session, learn how game developers are creating engaging experiences and reaching new customers via the Twitch platform.

Amazon Fire TV Games on Twitch

Garnett Lee and Tyler Cooper hosted a steam during GDC this year on Twitch. The guys were joined by representatives from 2K games for XCOM: Enemy Within, Tellate for Game of Thrones, Ep. 2, Tripwire for Killing Floor Calamity and ended the night with Hipster Whale and a Crossy Road competition! If you are a gamer interested in seeing first-hand what the current batch of Android games looks like on the big screen be sure check out the stream here. 

Ready to Submit Your App or Game?

For more information about getting started with the Amazon Appstore, Amazon Fire devices, or how to submit your game check out the following additional resources:

• Learn more about the Amazon Appstore
• Click here to submit your app
• Register for free as an Amazon Developer
• Amazon App Testing Service
• Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick SDK
• Amazon Fire Phone
• Amazon Fire Tablets
• Amazon Echo

-Dave (@TheDaveDev)