How do you kickstart an iOS game?

This thought just came to my mind and made me wonder.

How do you kickstart an iOS game, as in, if you presell your game to people. How do you then give that game out to people on the App Store once it's released? As far as I know there is not way to gift the game out to tons of people. Or is there?

Do you have to just save a bunch of cash, and then buy the iTunes gifts yourself and give out redemption codes?

 

The Republique post mortem has an interesting section about this: "What Went Wrong #5: Kickstarter Fulfillment". Apparently, it's a huge pain.

Link: République: Episode 1 Postmortem

 

Another thing to consider is that mobile games usually don't Kickstart at all well compared to desktop games.

But there are exceptions of course.

 

Personally given the number of game developers asking for money the less than a dozen times I did browse games being kickstarted I was more interested in the games closest to the geographic area where I live. Let's face it: me or anybody else has little interest in making a habit of paging regularly through games with the same 2 or 3 themes repeated ad naseum - whether it's in kickstart or offered in a App Store somewhere.

The chance of my knockoff game being noticed isn't helped in the least once the number of offerings exceeds a numerical threshold - I have to then rely on SEO smarminess like using typos in the name of my game derived from successful game offerings. No thanks.