I busted my **** to have my game ready in time for launch, but now that I see the app store, it seems I shouldn't have bothered. If your app isn't featured, the only way people can find it is by searching by name, using that onscreen keyboard. You can't even browse or search by genre or price, and of course Siri doesn't work with the app store or the keyboard. I've seen a review that complained about the same thing (The Verge I think). This definitely needs fixing.
I can't believe they won't have categories when there's a bit more content. They understandably want people's first impressions of the available apps to be positive and want to heavily curate to begin with. If you go to the search and put any letter of the alphabet in, it will show you all the apps beginning with that letter which seems to be the only way be to "browse" all the content at present. And surprise surprise, it's already full of a lot of rubbish.
FWIW Brian, your efforts are appreciated, by me at least. You do create some great products. I'll be trying out some more of your titles (I have a couple already) when I get more time to actually play with the Apple TV 🙂 I'm sincerely hoping the cream will rise to the top. It is a bit disappointing the number of Flappy themed games, tic tac toe etc.
I agree - it's a shame.
BTW, did you see this article?
www.talkingnewmedia.com/2015/10/30/new-apple-tv-gets-raves-for-the-hardware-while-some-developers-complain-about-app-store-design/
Maybe you can get them to do a follow up.
Hi Brian, I've been reading several articles about your 3D TV glasses support in Pangea's games. I didn't even know that was possible. I'll connect my Apple TV to my 3D TV later and check it out. Right now it's connected to a small dumpy dev TV I had lying around. Pretty cool that you figured out how to do that and managed to get so many games out for launch. Nice one !!! Hopefully the discovery will improve soon. Is there an API for the 3D glasses stuff ?
Added my own bug report for this, but christ I'm not going to post any specifics here.
I think I may write an article on how to do the 3DTV support. It actually only took me about 3 or 4 minutes to add it into each game. There's a little more to it than just rendering a right-left eye. That works, but there's distortion unless you do some tricks. When I get around to such an article I'll post a new thread on it with a link.
-Brian
Sounds good, thanks.
Anyone that uses brian's help on this, be sure to give him/his company a shoutout in your app, perhaps cross-linking to his 😉 - let's just hope all the sharp objects in the room are put away if someone else gets featured because of his generosity.
At least add your report # to your comment for reference, thanks.
It appears that a Top Charts tab has been added to the TV App Store. It didn't show up for me at first. I had to reboot the ATV to get it to show up.
It's still *awful* for app discovery, but at least its something.
-Brian
Finally got around to it. Here's a link to the new thread: https://forums.developer.apple.com/thread/25075
Indeed awful app discovery. And... the Top Charts only seem available in the US App Store.
>Top Charts only seem available in the US App Store.
Seems to confirm sales (still) too low to algo. New store == baby steps = so slow as to be a new experience for Apple.