ASO for games

How game ASO differs from app ASO

Creative that signals the genre instantly

• Icon: one recognizable character or object, high contrast, no text. Genre convention is a feature here, not a cliché to avoid.
• First screenshot: show actual gameplay, not a title card. Players discount rendered key art.
• Video: lead with the core loop within two seconds; retention of the preview drops off a cliff after that.
• Localize creative for major Asian markets specifically — the visual conventions differ enough that a straight port underperforms.

The live-ops and featuring calendar

1. 1

   Plan events quarterly

   Map seasons and content drops against the store's own editorial moments.

2. 2

   Submit in-app events early

   They are reviewed separately and appear in search, so late submission simply loses the window.

3. 3

   Refresh seasonal creative

   Two weeks before the peak, with the revert already scheduled.

4. 4

   Keep technical quality high

   Crash rate and ANR feed both ranking and featuring eligibility.

Worked example: a mid-core idle RPG

A studio with a two-year-old idle RPG was ranking well for its own brand and almost nothing else. The title carried the game's name and a tagline; the keyword field repeated both. Impressions were flat at roughly 40,000 a month and had not moved in three quarters, which is the signature of a listing that is being found only by people who already know it exists.

The keyword work was small: the tagline came out of the subtitle and 'idle rpg' went in, the keyword field was rebuilt around mechanic phrases the genre actually searches — afk, auto battler, hero collector, offline progress — with every word already used in the title and subtitle removed. Nothing about the game changed. The store simply started matching it to the queries its players use.

The larger swing came from creative. The icon was a stylised logo; it was replaced with a single hero character at high contrast, and the first screenshot moved from a title card to a combat frame with the party visible. Two icon variants ran against the incumbent for three weeks. The winner held a materially better tap-through, and because conversion feeds ranking on both stores, the improved rate compounded into the keyword gains rather than sitting alongside them.

What the agent does in week one

1. 1

   Day 1 — map the genre set

   Pull the mechanic and genre phrases your top twenty competitors rank for, separate the ones with real player intent from the generic 'fun game' tail, and score the gap against your current listing.

2. 2

   Day 2 — audit the creative

   Grade icon, first two screenshots and the preview video against the genre convention rather than against a general design rubric, and flag anything that reads as key art instead of gameplay.

3. 3

   Day 3 — draft the metadata

   Rewrite title, subtitle and keyword field with no cross-field repeats, then queue localized variants for the markets where your installs already concentrate.

4. 4

   Day 4 — set the test

   Define one creative test with a single variable, a fixed run length and the metric that decides it, so the result arrives as an answer rather than a debate.

5. 5

   Day 5 — build the event calendar

   Map your live-ops beats against the store's editorial moments and schedule in-app event submissions ahead of each window instead of during it.