We have just completed the final Amazon Developer Spotlight competition of the year. With hundreds of submissions received across UK, US, and Germany, our Amazon Appstore experts had a tough job selecting the winners...

Martin King, technical lead at Casual Arts, explains how life has changed for the team since their winning the UK Developer Spotlight (an indie featuring initiative on Amazon Appstore). Casual Arts specialise in hidden object games.

The Amazon Appstore Spotlight is back, just in time for new customers unwrapping their new Fire devices this December.

More and more apps for kids are available on Amazon Underground. Amazon Underground offers free versions of over 2,000 apps and games on Android smartphones and Fire tablets. Starting today, Mister Maker: Let’s Make It! and Fireman Sam – Junior Cadet, developed by P2 Games Limited are available for download from Amazon Underground.

Inspired by the popular TV carton, in Fireman Sam – Junior Cadet young fans can learn with Fireman Sam and the rest of the Fire Crew as they take on the role of a fire cadet in training. The Underground version contains more features than the paid version: 8 different ways to play including interactive single and multi-player games, video player with 6 videos, and a special reward sticker book 70 stickers and 12 background scenes. The game is suitable for 3 to 6yrs old.

So What Is a Game Accelerator?

You may have heard of game accelerators like the Dutch Game Garden, GameFounders, or iVentureCapital. But what do they do? And do you really need one?

Well, maybe you don’t really need one.  Kadri Ugand from the gaming accelerator GameFounders spoke at Casual Connect Asia in Singapore mid May. She let the audience know that they might not need an accelerator; you really can do it all yourself if you have the time and connections. An accelerator facilitates and accelerates the following functions:

• Collecting Mentors from world-class studios, publishers, investors and appstores to give you feedback on your game and marketing.
• Providing location, staff and participants for Game Testing sessions so you can see just how your game goes over with players.
• Arranging pubic speaking practice and tips, and providing effective strategies for Pitching Sessions, so you can be confident when talking to a publisher or investor.
• Arranging participation in Conferences, Demo Days, and other opportunities to get your game in front of players and potential investors and publishers.
• Many accelerators also provide Capital to help the venture along.

To get a deeper look, I spent three days as a mentor with the teams at GameFounders.  It all started with Casual Connect Asia in Singapore…

JH Digital Solutions was founded by Finnish developer, Jari Huomo, and is the creator of hit Amazon Underground app, Zen: Coloring book for adults. Jari Huomo is an indie developer and self-proclaimed “coffee addict” working out of his home basement to build apps for all ages. After hearing about Amazon Underground on social media, Jari published his app, Zen: Coloring book for adults, to Amazon Underground, and now makes more on Underground than on all other platforms combined.

“My Amazon Underground experience has been superb so far! Zen: Coloring book for adults is now published for Amazon, Mac, Windows 10 desktop, iOS, and Google Play devices. The Amazon Underground version is the most downloaded one and Underground has currently made more money than other platforms combined!”

GETTING INTO AMAZON UNDERGROUND

JH Digital Solutions has adopted a business slogan of “Apps for everyone,” building everything from storybook apps for kids, to tax calculator apps for entrepreneurs. In 2015, what began as a kids coloring app evolved into an adult coloring app with coloring pages created by artists from around the world.

Amazon Cloud Drive launched its developer platform a year and a half ago, and more recently the Android and iOS SDKs. Since then the Cloud Drive API has enabled companies to connect with new customers by providing them with instant access to data and functionality they would have otherwise needed to build.

By leveraging the Amazon Cloud Drive developer tools, companies can focus on building new customer experiences and differentiated product offerings without the hassle of setup or the need to maintain their own storage back end. This gives the Amazon developer community a way to add Amazon Cloud Drive’s unlimited storage to their apps so their customers can save, view and manage their files from anywhere. Photography and productivity apps are popular third-party developer integrations, allowing customers to do anything from editing their photos and documents to backing up all their files. More recently, financial technology companies are using Amazon Cloud Drive to store and sync receipts, which improves convenience for customers looking to manage their personal finances.

Design is one of the pillars of the success of a mobile app, along with the development process and the distribution channels. Defining how the users will interact with your app is as important as implementing the features of the app and integrating an efficient monetization model. Also, when it comes to designing an interface for a new interaction model like TV, a lot of the patterns that work well with smartphone and tablet interfaces needs to be rethought to take advantage of the big screen and the input model provided through the remote.

When Laundrapp launched in January 2015 its aim was to revolutionise the laundry experience by bringing the services of the local launderette or dry cleaners direct to people’s doors. A year on and Laundrapp continues to experience rapid growth, offering the service to more and more parts of the UK.

CEO and founder, Ed Relf and Technical Lead, Marcus Smith share their experiences of launching a mobile first app. Ed is an award winning digital entrepreneur and active angel investor with over 15 years’ experience scaling some of the world's most successful disruptive digital businesses and is committed to help drive the next wave of British digital start ups. Marcus has been developing world-class software solutions and apps for over a decade within the finance and consumer sectors. They discuss:

How to Maximize the ROI on Your Investments

Why it is vital for a startup to understand which marketing activations are the most effective and how by using an attribution platform that tracks consumer interaction in the app and most importantly where they originated from will allow you to take a lean, cost effective approach that delivers the best ROI.

UKTV’s Head of Digital Products, Oliver Davies and Senior Front End Developer Owen Evans, shared with us the development strategies and choices they followed when implementing UKTV Play for Fire TV.

Over 350 gamers turned out as The MIX indie game showcase celebrated its 5^th anniversary at the start of GDC week and Appstore felt proud to help our developer partners be part of the party. We received great response on super short notice to our call for submissions. With space for only four it came down to tough decisions. Major props to all who sent us their games for consideration. Give yourselves a big pat on the back.

We did, though, pick four games to be showcased. Each in their own way reflect the creative spirit and enthusiasm that all indie devs share. As we watched people play them we saw it in the smiles on their faces, the shouts of excitement, and the intensity of play when competition heated up. Join us in recognizing these four great games. And watch here for more opportunities like this to come as Appstore finds ways to partner with our awesome game developer community.

Coffee Stain Studios is a developer based in Skövde, Sweden and creator of the blockbuster game, Goat Simulator. We recently sat down with the CEO of Coffee Stain Studios, Anton Westbergh, to learn how an idea to build a game about a destructive goat could lead to over 7 million paid downloads worldwide since its creation, and become one of the top grossing games in Amazon Underground since launching in August of 2015.

The Beginnings of Goat Simulator

Coffee Stain Studios started in 2010 with 9 students from the University of Skövde working on a game project that would become the prototype for their first hit PC game, Sanctum. In 2014, during a company brainstorm about their next game, the idea to build Goat Simulator was born. After posting a YouTube video of an early prototype of Goat Simulator that received 3 million views in the first week, Anton and his team knew they had created something customers were going to love. This has proven to be true, as 2 years later, Goat Simulator, which can be played for free with no in-app purchases on Amazon Underground, has topped the charts on almost all major platforms.

“We were hesitant to put Goat Simulator in Amazon Underground because when you have a really good, working monetization model, it’s scary to move into a new platform and try something different. We worried that this would affect our sales on the other platforms, but it has not. It’s definitely a platform that has worked for us and we’re going to have other titles in Underground in the future.”

Spanish Footballer Gerard Piqué founded Kerad Games in 2012 and went on to create and distribute popular football games. In December 2015, Gerard Piqué launched Final Kick in Amazon Underground making the game 100% free for Amazon Underground customers. Final Kick is a freemium game where customers pay for in-app purchases on all other platforms, but those in-app purchase are 100% free on Amazon Underground. We recently sat down with Piqué to learn about Final Kick and how they have seen an increase in downloads and revenue since launching in Amazon Underground.

“The mobile game industry moved a few years ago from paid to freemium. I see the Amazon Underground model as the new big movement for the mobile game industry,” said Gerard Piqué, owner of Kerad Games. “We saw immediately that Final Kick was perfect for Underground so we decided to join the Underground program and become a launch partner. We are very happy to collaborate so closely with Amazon.”

More Downloads, Increased Usage, and Higher Revenue

Amazon Underground helps attract more users with the promise of 100% free content that customers have to pay for in other Appstores. Kerad Games has experienced this growth first hand. Since launching Final Kick in Amazon Underground, they have seen a 900% increase in average monthly downloads. 

I do a lot of judging for indie game competitions around the world and I’ve had the unique pleasure of seeing hundreds of very strong entries at the Casual Connect Indie Prize Showcase in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. (Check out this great video!) In a typical indie competition, I’ll see half a dozen un-inspired, non-differentiated match-3 clones and other clones that don’t even meet the bar set by much older games in that category.  Yet occasionally, I see a refreshing twist on one of these classic games. Or in the case of the Indie Prize at Casual Connect Amsterdam this year, I saw several.  I’d like to share two of those with you here.

The first is a sliding block puzzle game where you move blocks around to create a path out of which you can exit. I’m sure you’ve seen dozens of these kinds of games, if not more; but this one is different. It’s After Loop by Sebastian Le Touze. (currently available in iOS, Android coming soon; monetization by unobtrusive IAP).

Handsome graphics and a loveable little protagonist (a robot named PR8) are already enough to make this game stand out, but it also has unique puzzles and a functional and engaging in-game menu system with which you choose new levels and challenges by guiding PR8 down the path corresponding with your choice.

On November 3^rd 2015 300+ attendees, two tracks about monetization and gaming, 13 sessions, multiple guest speakers and the Amazon Appstore evangelists animated a very successful developer-focused conference: the Amazon Appstore Developer Summit 2015, which took place at CodeNode, London.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Summit focused around unique insights into the Amazon Appstore ecosystem, emerging user interfaces and devices that are driving new user behaviors, like Fire TV and Amazon Echo, and new business models like Amazon Underground and Merch, which are opening up opportunities for customers and the developer community.

Here you can find the recordings of all the sessions, complete with slides, organized by topic: