The App Store is often seen as something of a fire-and-forget, or hit-or-miss process.

That's completely wrong according to Chris Williams from casual publisher PlayFirst.

He gave a talk at that Smartphone and Tablet Gaming Summit at GDC 2012 entitled 'My games a hit... What do I do now?'

"When you have a hit game, say 100,000 daily active users, you don't have a lot of time," he argued.

"You have a couple of weeks before you'll be replaced, so you have to act fast."

Taking the example of its key Diner Dash brand (downloaded over 600 million across all platforms), Williams said, "We've never stopped working on Diner Dash on iOS. Our peak revenue to-date was January 2012."

It was released in March 2009.

Quality first

One part of this is what Williams described as 'commitment to native quality'.

"When someone starts your game on mobile, it should feel like it was built for that device, even it if wasn't the original platform," he said.

This includes supporting all new features as they become available.

"As soon as IAP was available on iOS, we took advantage of it. It's the same with Game Center, the ability to have a universal app, and now we also have a free-to-play version.

"If you don't quickly take advantage of new features, someone else will and your game will be replaced. We've updated Diner Dash 30 times."

For example, the game launched with 50 levels, but now there's 150 levels, while 80 percent of game revenue comes from IAPs.

"You should have your first update ready to submit when the game goes live," Williams advised.

Players are your gold dust

Williams said the most important part of this was to nurture your community at all times.

"You have to make your commitment to your users obvious. We're very focused on this," he stated.

"We have over 6 million monthly active users on iOS. We obsess over that number. Those users are incredible valuable," he said.

The result is that the company is very data-driven, especially in terms of key elements such as the tutorial.

"We've iterated over things such as tutorials 10 to 15 times," Williams explained.

And it's this attention to detail that sees the retention rate on Diner Dash iOS at 72 percent.

The company also updates the content of the game in terms of art assets or tuning gameplay on a daily basis.

"You can't be beholden to the three week App Store update process. It's too slow," Williams said.