Developers are the new King Makers says panel chair Tim Harrison, introducing the first panel talk of MGF 2011 entitled 'Fresh blood and indie developer panel: game discovery'.

And it's certainly an impressive line up, with Igor Pusenjak from Lima Sky (Doodle Jump, Andy Smith, Google's industry head, mills from ustwo (MouthOff, Oli Christie, or the Ten Billionth App Man from Neon Play (Paper Glider), Matthew Wiggens of Wonderland (GodFinger, Maxwell Scott-Slade of JohnnyTwoShoes (Plunderland, Will Luton of Mobile Pie (MyStar, and Simon Oliver of HandCircus (Rolando).

The first discussion is about Android and the Android Market.

"It's an evolving marketplace," says Andy Smith of Google. "We don't talk about future features, but as you can see even today we have changed the graphics you can show in the Android Market. It's a small change but it's a change."

Of course, the developers aren't keen on many aspects of Android, especially fragmentation.

"Google tells me fragmentation doesn't exist. But it does and it makes me less inclined to develop for Android," said Scott-Slade.

Lots of stores, lots of downloads

Harrison switches tack to third party app stores such as Amazon, asking Igor Pusenjak about the potential to sell a game such as Doodle Jump.

"The only way to monetise on Android is with free games. It would be nice to have other options as in iOS," says Pusenjak.

Next up it's the Ten Billionth App Man, Oli Christie, who tells the story about how his game Paper Glider was the ten billionth app to be downloaded from the App Store.

"We reckon we had a 1 percent chance of being the ten billionth app because we were #1 in the UK free iPhone chart and top 5 in the US that weekend," he says modestly.

Then Harrison asks Will Luton about press and marketing.

"It's difficult to get into consumer press and get that sort of access. We do work for hire and so trade press has been more of a focus," he says.

"We talk about how badly we're doing," says mills, ever the joker. "It's given us a profile to build on. No one else was talking about failure and how it's expensive to build apps. Hopefully we'll be able to talk about our successes soon."

Matthew Wiggens says building status as a developer doesn't gain you players. "You have to make something of quality and it will organically grow with word of mouth," he argues.

"Discoverability on-device is key," replies Will. "Your icon and your app name are key."

"But you still need people to see the icon," says mills.

Andy Smith, who used to work at AdMob says burst advertising can work over a couple of days, because once you have high chart placement in an app store, the game will sell itself.

"You can use small markets and do test advertising," Smith says, when the other panelists complain that even $5,000 spent on advertising is too much.

Power of the press?

"Mobile to mobile is the key for discoverability in terms of cross promotion. We have seven million apps out there and cross promotion works really for us," says the Ten Billionth Man.

There's then a discussion of whether TouchArcade works. Simon Oliver said it worked for Rolando, while the Ten Billionth App Man said a good review didn't have any effect for Neon Play.

"The TouchArcade forums hate us because Wonderland is a free game," says Matthew Wiggens.

"We're done successful adverts and unsuccessful adverts, Apple features have pushed us to the top but didn't keep us there. You need the momentum of friend recommendations to remain in the top 25," ponders Igor Pusenjak.

"It took time for features such as doing a lot of updates for Doodle Jump and additions like twitter integration to build momentum."

"And no one can give you enough volume or a low enough cost per download of say around $3 per download - which we would use - for such advertising to make sense for us.

"Cross promotion has worked very well for us, especially working with the Pocket God guys, but even those things stop being effective after a while, " Pusenjak says.

The free push

What about things like OpenFeint or FreeAppADay? asks Tim Harrison.

"We come from the Flash community and some of our games have been played over hundreds of millions of times," says Maxwell Scott-Slade.

"I think there's a lot of potential to cross promote our iOS games to Flash gamers. We've developed Flash games specifically to support our iOS releases."

Will Luton talks about going free.

"We did around 100,000 downloads via OpenFeint's Free game of the Day promotion but when we put the price back we only got about 7 paid sales. You've devalued your game. These tools can work but your model has to be build around," he says

Wiggins: "You have either to do a free game or a paid game."

Andy Smith has another angle on promotion - it doesn't have to be about the success of a single game.

"Backflip and Rovio are building a longterm brand for their companies," he says. "Studios need to know what it is will bring them long term value."

What's your goal?

"Our story is that two brothers are making a good living making apps. The press love the million sales stories, but there are lots of indies who are happy to be making a good living and not selling millions of games," says Pusenjak.

"We set up Wonderland to be a very successful, creative business," argues Matthew Wiggens.

"There are two extremes of being a hobbyist developer or being a company that's just about profit. I want to be inbetween the two, making successful games so can I make even better games in future and have a cultural effect."

"I wanted to make a game, maybe sell 3,000 copies of Rolando," laughs Simon Oliver, who sold over a hundred thousand copies of the game.

Now we move onto questions.

Q: What about the Mac App Store?

Ten Billionth App Man: Neon Play will port some games.

Lima Sky will release games for it, but the store currently has to been downloaded so the numbers are low at the moment.

mills: If you have a brand, yes. But otherwise you have to pick your battles.

Maxwell Scott-Slade: We will definitely release for it, maybe a version of Plunderland, certainly new IP

Q: There are 100 sales channels apart from iOS. What do you think about them?

Igor Pusenjak: If you're successful on iOS, you look at all other platforms, but how do you attack them? You either grow your company or partner with the publisher who can attack them all at once as we did with our Realnetworks deal.

Ten Billionth App Man: We're looking to Android this year. The numbers mean it would be crazy not to do it. Potentially WP7, Ovi and BlackBerry too.

Q: What was the impact of EA's Xmas 99c price war?

Matthew Wiggens: We're free so didn't affect us, but annoyed a lot of my friends. And I think it cheesed off Gameloft.

Igor Pusenjak: EA did the same thing for Halloween. I don't think it had a impact in terms of sales. I would be curious what happened if EA kept all its games at 99c, but I don't think it can afford to do that.