(Let's pretend)What works

The point of this thread is to pretend we are in the future, and my game has been released(it hasn't been released but that's why we're playing pretend here).

So let's pretend: My game was released February 14th for android. The game uses interstitial ads and the IAP's resemble dlc for console games. I have also asked some websites to review my game

My expectations were high. I was expecting at least $300 a day. So assuming we're still pretending, why did/didn't I meet my expectations?

Note: There is NO way to predict how successful an app will be; Furthermore we don't have any download per day data or even know what the game is! That is why I want to DISCUSS why ads and IAP's will/won't make money

 

why it did: game was awesome (original idea, unique gameplay, polished product), got reviewed by a popular site/vlogger.

Managed to surpass 500 downloads/day.

why it didnt. game was a poorly made clone.

 

Why it didn't: The market for new games on February the 14th was squarely captured by valentines day games. These games take over hot new games list on every app store. By the time the valentines rush is over your game is no longer new enough to make the hot new games list. As such you never make it into the eyes of many potential players.

Since we are playing pretend your reviewers are also all on dates on launch day, so it never gets reviewed.

Why it did: You happen to be the only developer with his feet planted firmly in reality who realises its valentines day. You game is a mushy two player couples game. The games not very good, but its the only thing out that hits this market. You make 100,000 dollars in the first 48 hours (Allowing for time zones). Then your game disappears and is never heard of again.

 

Why it didn't: many reasons from 200 other games being released on the same market the same day burying yours to one of those other 200 being as good as your game or better and getting all of the attention leaving your game to the same fate as the other 199. Vindictive developers quickly leave ratings of how your game contains viruses that nearly wiped out their phone / computer. And other nearly countless reasons.

Why it did: you made a solid game with awesome graphics featuring enough common play mechanics combined with enough originality to be "something new" and you have a youtube channel following development of your game that had tens of thousands of subscribers and you had a twitter with thousands of followers and you had a FB page with thousands of followers and you had press releases out right before and leading up to your games release and you had major Indy sites previewing the game and all of them described it favorably and you had a solid base of players from your previous half a dozen games and you have paid ads appearing all over the Internet on major gaming sites and you even have an ad in Game Informer and so forth. You make your $300 per day average the first week. If this keeps up you can make back all of your initial marketing expense within a month and make a profit.

 

@GarBenjamin - you got your figures wrong. Its 2000 other games released on the same day.

 

haahaha that's funny lol.

 

That's brutal, but I get the point; it better be all valentines day oriented or you'll make more money staring at the ceiling

 

It's more than that. Your game could have been completely tied in to Valentines Day and it may still be buried beneath the mass of other games. Your game could have been the very best game released on that day and it still may fail. It may fail due to quickly being buried and rarely found. It may fail because an inferior game had superior marketing and got all of the attention. Even if that turned out negative for them it still means no eyes were on your game. There is this myth going around that it comes down to quality. Make an awesome game and you win. That is not the case. History is filled with cases of the best products losing out to inferior products that had superior marketing.

 

Rub some pink, white, read, and hearts on it. Add a glaze of a love theme. Make sure the graphics style is very shoujou. Profit, maybe (see others' points.)

 

Dang, it seems like the "only" way to succeed in this business is to have a lucky irish man kiss your game before publishing; And that is not just based on what you said. It seems like every thread like this has indie devs working for pennies from advertising.

But I will probably keep making games. It's something to look forward to I guess

 

Not so true. If you want a reliable, steady income from making games you are better off finding an established AAA studio or a successful indie and working for them. They've already learned the tricks of the trade. They also have all of those other things that @GarBenjamin mentioned. You can also get a studio to publish your game, and tap into their marketing potential. Expecting the first game you have made, published and marketed on your own to succeed is bordering insanity.

 

well, if the 60,000 apps/month figure is correct, sadly its a real stat

 

The market is flooded for sure. I think most people realize this by now but there seems to always be someone who says it is not the case. Lol

 

Notice the trend here? However, I can tell you this, and this goes way back to the commodore 64 days... If all you guys are so worried about if your game is going to make it or not, don't bother worrying about MAKING a good game, make a PORN game, sex ALWAYS has, and ALWAYS will sell. Hence C-64 FARMERS DAUGHTER text adventure? LOL
after your first game that you DIDNT want to write, but will support your income, then go write the game you actually want to? Now I'm kind of being a jerk (cause im pissed about how LAME, and brain washed the game industry has become), but I believe there is also some truth to what I said. For those of you who don't or WONT agree, I get that may not be right for you, but the adult industry is NOT a niche market and your game will ALWAYS get noticed as I think for the very least, anyone "browsing" that kind of stuff, may increase your odds of your game at least being noticed without tons of advertising? (Hope I didn't go to far on this post?)

King

 

That market isn't saturated already? I'd find that surprising. The same principles about low entry barriers apply there too.

Either way I'm out on that one. Religious prohibitations and all.

 

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along, move along now...

 

Yup, listen to @Ony

 

You are very much right in your thinking. I learned this in my time in Internet marketing. As nice as it is to build things you WANT to... you NEED to build the things that people want that are not so over saturated the cost of entry is just too high. Often these two goals are at odds with each other. You can make things that pay the bills and bring you less personal satisfaction (unless you only care about making money) or you can make things that you greatly enjoy working on but they make very little money. These are the two most common scenarios by far. The ideal, of course, is to be able to build the games and other things that you want to be building AND make good money from them too.

And I had a C64. It was my second computer and where I learned Assembler. Great machine. I remember Farmer's Daughter. It was a text adventure I think. There were other adult games too. That's not my interest as I am one of the (apparently) few Americans not spending tons of time on adult sites each week. However, I do agree completely with your thinking. A person needs to find some topic, something they enjoy very much and ideally are very knowledgeable about and focus on that niche instead of trying to "make a great game". That really is a very generic lame goal when you think about it. Lol

 

Seeing some of the current visual novels with erotic content that sell quite well on Steam, I'd say that is true.
At least a adult game is more interesting than some violent trash like Hatred. Make love not War!

But you won't get such games onto iOS, or Google Play.

 

Steam censors those erotic novels. It's ok to have insane amounts of violence and gore as the core focus of a game but if it's about sex then oooohhh noooo, can't have that. That's our F***ed up American bullshit puritan culture right there for you. Celebrate killing and death, and crucify love and sex. Good times.

 

Thank you all for the respectable reply's and NOT flames (which I expected). It would seem that all of you that replied so far, understood I wasn't really trying to promote the "sex" to sell method, but rather point out some of the things about the "saturated" markets. IMHO, I will for 100% sure write the games and utilities that I WANT TO WRITE AND SELL, however those titles will NOT be my 1st releases on unity because of exactly why this POST was posted... but if any of you have followed my other posts, and can read between the lines, you will see that I am actually building a "Unity3d Business" model starting from the (literally) GROUND up, without asking "hey, how do I build a unity3d business model?". This stupid Sega Columns remake (in the discussion forums) is part of the learning process and I am happy to share all the source along the way (which I have so far).

Spoiler: ONE POSSIBLE IDEA:

I intend to finish the remake of the game, and release it for free, WITH ADMOB AD's. I myself cant stand ad's as I think they have turned into such bullshit sneaky tactics to get people to click on the ad rather then promote legit information.

(e.g. on my droid phone when I'm playing a a "free" game I dloaded , the ads below have TONS of plain garbage popping up along the banner, which I do NOT mind so much, but when they start putting "X" 's on the banner like its made to CLOSE the ad if you click on the X. We (the seasoned ones?) all know that the X is just part of the WHOLE ad, which if clicked on will take you to some random site to download the software or worse, INSTALL it, rather then closing the ad or going to the dev's website, really gets under my skin!)

The purpose of using ADMOB ad's and releasing this remake for free is that I will be using it (Read the Admob options for promoting your OWN ad's to your OWN other games but not getting paid for them) to fill the Ad banners with, informational ad's about my "REAL" game(s) that I want to sell! (and those same ones that we want to write AND get paid for!) That way they (consumers) get a little taste of your company for free (if they download it), are already familiar with an older remake (like there aren't a million of them anyways?), and are more of a focus group for just MY AD's ONLY, NOT my ad's mixed in with the 500 other ones that I don't care about... Yeah some of you will go back to "well if no one knows about your remake, they wont download IT to get your ad's anyways!!". This is true, however my post about graph theory and the remake of the sega game ALREADY has 900+ views and if its not to bold to say... I'm sure when its done, at the very least SOME of you that read the post already will want to see it as you were able to follow (and laugh? Lol ) at my progress and get your hands on the source (if you want to that is). I don't think that I would have been able to get 900 people to LOOK at the game if I just went and uploaded it to GooglePlay?

Hope this didn't veer to far off this posts topic..

Thanks
King

 

Your app didnt get any marketing. 1.2 million apps in the app store, the bottom 88% get 11%, top 2% get 54% of rev. Unless your app is in the top 50% you wont make even $100.

http://www.techrepublic.com/article...d-less-time-on-development-more-on-marketing/

 

I think the point of your original post was to discuss a market that is always there. It was along the lines of, stop building games and invest in baby products. There will always be babies.

The point of this thread was to talk about what works and what doesn't and your post described the reason why it won't: The market is as saturated as the fat in my hamburgers.

Then there was @Aiursrage2k who had an article about developers barely break-even at $200

I will say this: I am a developer WITH the mindset that I will make more profit sitting on my couch and finding coins. That's why I only spend when I know it will make a difference. But I also have the hope that once these ideas are compiled into a game, it might become a big hit. (I will wait for you to stop laughing). Once it's done, I will do everything I can to make sure that everytime I think about this, I will know that I did everything right. Honestly, Failure is my best friend.

 

Take alook at something like monument valley thats one of the top 2%, now thats the type of game your trying to compete against. Its a AAA mobile game, no chance competing with that. I think your better odds are to go for something weird and wacky and hope it catches on.


https://tctechcrunch2011.files.word...shot-2015-01-15-at-3-47-24-pm.png?w=869&h=543

 

The reason I say the things I say and why I appreciate people like @Aiursrage2k who post the truth even if is not what people want to hear is because... it needs to be said!

It needs to stop. All of this focusing on the one game in a quarter of a million that makes a ton of money. It's like everytime a game makes a half million dollars or more everyone posts about it, such a big deal is made about it, and suddenly here comes another wave of thousands of people with plans to knock out a game and retire next year. If more people would talk about WHY it is such a big deal when an Indy makes a game that pulls in so much money that would be a great start.

And that is what people like @Aiursrage2k and myself are trying to show. The WHOLE PICTURE. Think about it. If it was common, if it was expected that most games would pull in these huge sums of cash then nobody but that person/team would make such a big deal about it. The reason it is such a big deal is because it is so rare.

It is like people hear about someone winning a big lottery and the next week tons of people who do not normally buy tickets all buy some tickets. They have no better chance of winning this week than they had before. Everything is still the same. But they sit around and think about how that person won and how awesome it would be if you won. And they lose sight of the reality of the situation.

So... all of that just to say it is important to clearly see the whole picture and not get caught up chasing a dream that in all likelihood you will never reach. Not because you are not smart enough or skilled enough. But because of any of hundreds of reasons many of which are completely outside your control such as what other games are being made, what is released when you release yours, how good of a network you have built up, how many enemies you have made along the way, whether the reviewers are having a great day or a lousy one and so on.

 

I could care less about becoming the next millionaire, but becoming the next hundredaire would be pretty nice. Maybe I'll make a sex game. I just need that asset that @Ony was talking about a few months ago. Either that or the strangest Craigslist add begging people to work for a percentage of the profits ever posted! ;-)

 

That's the ticket for sure. Having fun with it all and keeping expectations realistic. That is all I am trying to get across. If a person is after a monthly income of hundreds and willing to work a year or three to get it that is realistic. Certainly far more realistic than I think many people's expectations are.

 

My expectations of making it big died when eating regularly became a fantasy. That doesn't mean I don't still occasionally fantasize about striking it rich, building an actual castle to live in, hiring Felicia Day to play the queen in a LARP-esque renne-faire, having her fall in love with me and move to Virginia, then inviting Ryon to come live in the castle with us so we can all retire to a lifetime of frivolity and play video games all day. But I mean, hey, you gotta have your dreams right? Although she probably isn't the kinda girl who would marry a guy who built his empire on a game called World of Whorecraft, so maybe I should rethink either the fantasy or the sex game! ;-)

On a more serious note, I think it's all the people with no real love for the business jumping in and pumping out shovel ware on misguided notions of becoming the next billionaire that are making it harder on the rest of us by diluting the market, racing prices to the bottom, and jading customers. But, it's all part of the game.

 

Yeah I think you should have a more casual attitude kind of going semi-pro (getting beer money) and hoping it might "win the lottery" but not depending on it. I think that way youll have more fun either way.

 

Didn't work because I don't make mobile games.
/thread