Look at it this way - there’s an awful lot of psychology going on on the App Store. It’s basically a shop, and shops are designed in such a way to make you buy as many things as possible.
Although to extend that a little further, the App Store is more like a mall. It’s given its millions of tiny shops the chance to show off their wares, and it’s up to the individual proprietors of those shops to try and hawk their goods as effectively as possible.
And to do that they need to showcase what they’ve got in as quick and precise a way as possible. Which is where the icon comes in. It’s usually the first thing you see when you’re browsing for a new game, and it acts as a sales pitch - this is what you can expect if you download this title.
So in this week’s Monday Musing I thought I’d take a look at some of the icons on the App Store and have a think about why they’ve been so successful.
The shouting man
The shouting man is probably one of the biggest staples of the App Store now, thanks to Clash of Clans. And here’s the weird thing about it, it doesn’t really tell you anything about the game that you’re going to download.
Except of course it totally does. Because that image of the warrior screaming has become deeply installed in our collective gaming psyche. We see an icon that apes that in some way, and we know exactly what to expect.
Essentially it’s a pictographic language. It’s the developer saying “HI MY GAME IS A BIT LIKE CLASH OF CLANS”. And so the shouting man in all his glory become shorthand for midcore strategy management games.
And because it’s such a recognisable idea there’s also the possibility there for subversion. Basically Clash of Clans is so popular that developers can satirise its icon and people will get the joke almost straight away.
The abstraction
Where big budget games tend to be very brash with their icons, tying them into a language that other games might already have created, smaller titles tend to be a little more vague.
And that vagueness, if done right, can create a sense of mystery. Take Little Briar Rose’s icon as an example. It’s lovely, it’s bright, and it suggests at some mystery lying behind it all.
But you still don’t really know what it’s all going to be about. Rather than being explicit, this one essentially acts as a door being held open for you. Come inside, look at what this is all about.
It’s unlikely the strategy is as successful as the shouting man, but it’s aiming for a different audience of gamers - the sort of audience who might look at the shouting man and go somewhere else to find their entertainment.
The brand
One way to keep players coming back to your releases is by tying them all in under the same brand. This can sometimes mean sticking your logo in a corner of the app - see most of the hidden object adventure games for an example.
But there are also cleverer ways of doing this. Check out Nitrome’s array of games. Each icon is distinct, but they fit into a similar scheme. If you know Nitrome then you only need to look at an icon to know it’s a Nitrome game.
This is a clever way of threading the experience from start to finish with visual tells and clues. While a non-Nitrome fan might see a cool robot or a wizard, an aficionado will instantly know what they’re looking at.
And because the style flows through all of the games, it means new players can discover old gems, learn the language of the brand while they play, and then decipher it the next time they see it.
