***UPDATED AFTER 2 YEARS !!!*** The sad story of my start as Android/iOS game developer

***Update - 07.07.2017***

For every success story, there are thousand failures.

Soo... Here we are in 2017 update. An idea clicked when i heard that this year is the Starcraft anniversary. Also I learned that Google have an easter egg game hidden about Starcraft called Zerg Rush and I knew that this was going to be the name. I am aiming for the first page of google when someone plays the hidden game. So far so good, I like the reviews a lot in fact I am writing this because one very nice review came from this forum, and I thought maybe the forum is still alive? I don't know.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MartinSMarinov.ZergRush&hl=bg
#4 Zerg Rush

STORY BEFORE 2 YEARS BELOW





***Introduction***

Ok, hello to everyone. First, this thread was planned to be a noob-friendly guide on how to start making mobile games and what are the hard parts that the new developers are experiencing and show them how to do it. It was supposed to be a big "THANK YOU" for the awesome community, and post every single question that i asked here on the forums, and every single answer that I received, which saved me a lot of head banging and time.

But, here we are again... Me, looking for some answers.

***Searching for myself***

I studied Marketing for one year in New Bulgarian University, Sofia (Bulgaria). But after the end of the first year I was sure that this was not my thing. I was searching myself and what shall I do. I have two hobbies - football and games. The football thing, I couldn't get to a professional level, but maybe I could do something with my love with games ? After one month of searching myself, one morning i woke up with the thought that I will make games. I was happy, and was wondering how I didn't think of that before. I dumped the Marketing thing and signed for Computer Science and the third year of the education, the focus is only on Game Development.

But I wanted to start the adventure as fast as possible. Making games. I knew about Unity, and how awesome it is for cross-platform and small indie games. I started watching tutorials and trying to make some objects to move, some working scripts and basically, just playing with Unity.

***Time for the first game***
On mobile, I mainly play those simple, but hard games. And they seemed to be fairly easy to make. A friend showed my a game on iOS (I have Android) that was really fun, hard and I thought to myself that it is time to experience the development part and the publishing, also the game only had a iOS version so i thought that it will be a smart start to make a game like that for the Android users. Again huge thank you to those who answered my dumb questions and helped me get to the end, the game was in the Google Play Store and was ready for users to download it.

#1 SHREDD

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MartinMarinov.Shredd
Downloads : 8200
Release date : 23.03.2015

The first date I had 50 downloads with a single post in facebook, to show it to my friends. 40% of the downloads were from my friends in my country, 40% from US and 20% other countries. The best stats for a day, I had 160 downloads . I was really happy that i made a finished game and it was out there. However the glow effect that I got from the asset store worked well on my phone and my girlfriends, but 50% of the phones had issues with it and I got some really bad reviews. I uploaded the game with Unity Ads, but for the first week i got only 3.16$ and a lot of the top free games worked with Admob so I gave it a try. And i was making 0.50$ per day, but hey for a first game that worked on 50% of the devices, I was happy, and I saw the potential.

I made the game when i studied, after the year was over. I thought to my family "Guys, I will not work this summer, I want time to develop games and at the end of the summer, I will start to earn enough money, I want you to be patient."

They backed me up, and it was on.

#2 Shredd 2

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=m.MartinMarinov.Shredd
Downloads : 175
Release date : 20.07.2015

The first day I had 5 downloads, again I posted on facebook, but my friends seemed to be not very interested in it and i was not getting any downloads.

I was very confused, I made a better version, which is far more playable and had no performance issues.People liked it and the reviews were good. I thought that the first day of downloads are really important and in my next game i will give some money and time for promotion.

It was time to dumb those cubes and the mechanic and go for something really fun.

#3 Frisky Sparrow

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.MartinSMarinov.FriskySparrow
Downloads: 92
Release Date : 30.07.15

The first day I put 15$ on ad campaign, I didn't sleep for 24 hours, advertising on forums and made 56 downloads. I thought that I made it, the other day I even saw it in the top 10 of new trending games in my country and I was very confident that it will succeed. However the downloads says it all.

***I thought that the names are the problem***

I read some articles from a marketing lady and she explains that the name must be original and creative. So I named the game "Frisky Sparrow", if you type it in the search bar, this is the only game that is showing. But clearly it didn't work, so I re-uploaded the game with a different name "Loop Bird Ball". The top free apps all have words that are likely-searchable (Ball, Jump, Bird, etc.) so I thought that this was my mistake and I re-uploaded the two new games Shredd 2 - Amazing Cubes and Frisky Sparrow - Loop Bird Ball.

The downloads were even worse.

***Maybe I will have success on iOS***

I saw a lot of comments here on the forums, like "Android is not worth the time,iOS has more revenue, higher downloads etc.". And I decided to buy an iPhone 250$ and a Developer account 100$ and try to get it to the appstore. After 4 days of figuring how the upload to the Appstore works, I made it. Android was waaay more easy, but hey... maybe it was worth the time ?

The game that I uploaded to the Apple`s Appstore was the best I had - Frisky Sparrow. It was released two days ago, the downloads i have today are 10... Another failure.
https://itunes.apple.com/bg/app/frisky-sparrow/id1030397164?mt=8

***Overall Conclusion and Revenue***

Income - 38.64$ from 332 clicks
With 34$ only from the first broken game Shredd.

I gave 25$ for developer program for Android, 100$ for Apple, 250$ for iPhone and the money I lost that I could have earned from working this summer. So overall this summer I am ~2000$ behind and I disappointed my family.

The goal was to make 5$ a day at the end of the summer, for it to be successful. With the 5 games on android and 1 on iOS i am barley touching 0.50$ a day.
______________________________________________________________________________________
Sorry for the long post, I was not planning it to be that big. And if you are still reading. Thank you so much ! It will help me a lot if you can show me what i did wrong and where were my mistakes. Shall I continue ???

 

Interesting writeup of your experience, thanks. I don't have any advice about the mobile market because I stay away from the mobile market (perhaps that actually is my advice?).

I'd like to ask...

• What kind of results were you expecting?
  
• What information had you read or heard that convinced you there was money to be made in mobile games?
• How do your games compare to the games that made good money, the ones you've likely read about?
• What steps can you take to make sure your next games get closer to the success you seek?
• Are you prepared to keep going and possibly never make any money at all?

The images you posted, by the way, are broken, but the links work, and I checked out each game page. I haven't tried the games myself.

 

• The results that i was expecting were 5$ a day by the end of the summer. I thought that it was fairly possible to achieve when i was looking at the first game`s stats, and i knew that the game was broken for 50% of the smartphones out there.
  
  
• Mainly the games that i played that are similar to mine, and seeing how many downloads they get.
  
  
• Good money for me is something like 5-10$ a day, I live in Bulgaria soo... yeah , the last game that I made is fairly similar. Simple and hard.
  
  
• Well, I am not sure what should I change, that`s why I made this thread.
• I am definitely not prepared to keep going with not making money at all.
  
  I fixed the images, thank you !

 

Looking at the games my kids play that are simple mechanics but hard to play, the companies that put the popular ones out seem to almost have templates that they alter slightly to bring out a new game. Check out the stuff by ketchapp games & you will see what I'm trying to say.

If you build up reusable code you will gradually be able to get games out a bit quicker

 

That was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

I do not have any advice for you since I have no experience (yet) in the mobile market. All I know is that it is a potentially interesting market, but is very difficult to succeed since there is a LOT of really good competition.

However, I checked the pages of your games and I will give you my impressions. Maybe you will find them useful.

The first game, at a first look, looked more interesting than the other two (i'm talking about the very first impression when I opened the game page). The graphics and screenshots are more captivating.
The graphic style and the screenshots of the other two games didn't capture my attention.
Maybe that could be an explanation of why the first game (even if the other two where better, from a "game mechanics" point of view) did better.

I have the impression that in the mobile market, customers have a very short attention-span when evaluating a new game (unless this game is already famous). If you don't catch their attention immediatly they probably wouldn't bother to even download and try the game.

As I said, I don't have experience in that market so everithing I said is only my personal opinion, but maybe it could help.

Bye!

 

Trying to put this part gently... you might want to find an artist. I get that you're going for minimal design, but if you look at the minimal design games from Katchapp as @tedthebug mentioned, there is a strong sense of design there. Study them.

Looking at your games, they don't look very fun. Visually. Aside from the first game with the glow, they're just dull grey bland. The color choices are odd, sort of like a Windows 95 color scheme. Your title fonts need better kerning at the very least.

If I landed on the game page looking for something to play, there is nothing to grab my eye. I watched the video for "Frisky Sparrow" and it looks like hey, yeah, that might be fun, but I only watched it to see further into what we're talking about here. If I'd landed on the page looking for a game, I wouldn't have even watched the video.

You've got the coding part down I imagine, but you should either really try to brush up on your visual design skills or find someone who can help you with that. I think that's part of the problem right there, to be honest.

 

Perhaps take @Ony 's advice & fix the art. Polish it up & rerelease it as an upgraded version just to see if the improved art, colour schemes, fonts etc (all the visuals), & maybe sound, get you more downloads. Fix up the landing pages with the new visuals & video gameplay.

 

Even with better art, there's no telling whether the games will sell well or not. Again I stay clear of the mobile market, partially for that very reason. Can't hurt to improve the art, though. If you can get people to the pages, it's at least one good way to get them to try your game.

 

Do some research on the idea of a "sales funnel" or "sales pipeline". There are a number of steps between someone who's never heard of your product and their making a purchase. You need to make each of those steps as simple, catchy and attractive as possible.

Most programmers only ever think about the last step - the one where an informed customer hands over cash. My product is good, why aren't people buying it? Well, do they know it's good? Before that, do they know what it is? Before that, are they even aware that it exists? (And there's more steps in there as well, like why they're going to buy your product as opposed to the many competing products, and making sure they know where to get it, and so on and so forth.)

 

Did mobile market once, never touching it again unless I'm already established and just wanna do it for the heck of it lol.

 

Remember how games used to be? You purchase a huge box, with manuals, physical maps or whatever, there was awesome stuff inside. You kept that box, it was all part of the experience.

Not saying you should sell your game in a box but maybe you can think of your game more than just data. Especially nowadays, data is cheap, a dime a dozen so to speak. If your game isn't really something special, it's a grain of sand in the desert.

Add value outside of the game itself, make the presentation feel like it's something super fun!

Asteroids gets it:

PRESENTATION:



REAL GAME:

 

Dude I so miss the boxes, me and my uncle, we'd go to block buster just to keep the manuals, we had HUNDREDS of them back when they were more than 2 sheets of paper with warning labels on them.
It true was an experience. I'd so do the old huge PC game box for my PC games, I don't care about debt/income ratio, I can't stand the cases or boxes these days.

I remember C&C Tiberian Sun, the box was like 1 foot wide (maybe bigger) and like 8 inches tall and like 3 inches thick.

It made me feel like the game was better than it truly was, good game yes, but the box presentation is truly the (Judge a book by it's cover) for games to me.

 

& some games took you longer to read the manual than it took to load them so you could play them (& that's saying something in the old days)

 

The old Origin games had awesome boxes and manual (I'm talking about Richard Garriot's Origin, not the EA digital store).
The content in the Ultima RPG's boxes was amazing.

I recently purchased the game TIS-100 from Zachtronics because of the manual. I was interested in the game, but when I saw the manual I made the purchase.
It's made like and old computer manual with pen-written notes on it. It remembered me the old days...

This is just to say that, as others have already said, you need to capture the attention to sell games, and there are a lot of different ways to do that.

 

Ok, I will put more time in presentations next time, screenshots and etc. I hope I will get it right eventually.

 

Your games have potential! The problem is that they feel unpolished in terms of UI.

You might as well update screenshots of your newest game, maybe add a shop where you can change bird skin.

 

I mainly play Ketchapp games and I learn from them a lot, I wonder how they did it in the start. Now they have 500.000 likes in facebook and with one single share they have 50k downloads in the first day and top charts so its easy now for them. As I said, I wonder what they did at the start.

emar1028, I will put UI in my list for improvements, Thank you .

 

I strongly agree with the fact that the graphics are the main driving force as to why a person a would download a game — especially on iOS. Games with good graphics I'd say are strongly correlated to a polished game. I think it's rare you'd find a game with exceptional graphics that either doesn't do well or is filled with bugs. So if you want more downloads, you've got to figure out how to make your game more visually appealing. When you consider that screenshots and therefore visuals are 99% of the reason someone will download your app, I think the results you're getting makes sense.

As far as disappointing yourself and family, I'd say, perhaps from a simply monetary standpoint this may be true, but from a job standpoint, I don't think it's as much the case. Now you've started a nice little portfolio, and you've shown you've a dedicated, confident person. IMO, these personality traits are the keys to long term success, all that's limiting you at the moment is understanding what you don't know you don't know and perhaps a bit of time.

Just want to give one more piece of advice — comparison is key. There is a reason why some games succeed and some fail — even iOS. What you've got to do is look at your game and then look at the games that are doing well and ask yourself, "how is my game different?" (Metaphorically speaking of course ).

 

Thank you for sharing.

 

@maximalniq Could you enable private messages? I have interesting thing I'd like to message you, but I can't do it in public. Nothing illegal, mind you, but it wouldn't be useful when there's thousands of these things.

 

Ok.... I suppose I may have been lucky with my first game..but here goes.

My first game was very similar to an old Popcap game called alchemy. At the time, I did some research to see if there was anything like it on Google Play. I remember that I had lots of fun playing it, and the concept was unique. There was not one single clone, just a clone on iOS. I refined the concept to include quite a few things not in the original and to the point that it was not a blatant clone.

To date, I've made $2000... enough to pay for a Unity licence. Pretty good income for 3 weeks of development, considering I do this as a hobby.

I guess my advice is:

1. Refine your gameplay - this is where it counts. Ask yourself seriously "is this fun to play?".. if not, you have more work to do. Ask strangers to test and give them an anonymous survey to complete. Your friends and family are simply going to be nice and say its is lots of fun....and then delete your game when you are not looking.

2. Graphics must look good, and not just to you. If you are going for stylized graphics, your style should appeal to many people, not just you. Great graphics will entice people to download your game...so, it needs to be there.

3. Offer something unique - I can't stress this enough. The mobile market is saturated to the nth degree! ... You need to find a niche, something that is fun and appealing...but has not been done ten thousand times over. It is incredibly easy to come up with game ideas... but, it is incredible difficult to come up with game ideas that are unique.

4. Don't go crazy - What I mean is focus on a few features. You may not need an inventory, in app purchases, etc. Core gameplay should always come first. If it is not fun, no one will play it....even if you manage to pull off crysis-like graphics on a handheld.

5. If you advertise, go easy - don't bombard with ads. I did not start advertising until a year after I released my game. That was a bad move...it pissed a lot of players off, but I did make money. If you must have ads, make sure they do not take away from gameplay, or are only shown during downtime. There are many ways to effectively advertise without pissing people off. BTW, you shouldn't be making a game to advertise....this needs to be much lower on your list of priorities.

6. If you can't do it...don't be afraid to pay for it. - You can't do it all, meaning you can't be the programmer, sound guy, artist, etc and expect great results for everything. At least I couldn't do it. If you have to pay for some assets or art...so be it. You game will look better for it and you can focus on other things.

There are about a million other things I could say....and one million other people that are more qualified to say it than I am. Good luck on your next game. Remember to have fun..and if it is fun to you..it probably will be fun for someone else too! This is what making games is about....to me anyway... A chance to tell a story, or to offer a unique experience...

 

Not being in mobile games market or even any market currently I can't specifically address that angle.

However, having had a play with shareware games in the past and a lot of Internet marketing in general my first question is... what kind of data do you have available on the app store?

Do they show you how many visitors your app landing page is getting per day?
It could well be there is nothing wrong with the game itself and perhaps it will appeal to the target audience as is. Maybe the real problem is these people just don't know about the game.

If you can see traffic stats and know the landing pages are getting thousands of visitors each day and yet you are not getting any (or very few) downloads then you know it is a conversion issue. In this case your landing page needs to be improved to make your game more appealing. Or your game(s) needs to change to look more appealing.

If you are only getting dozens or a couple hundred visitors to your landing page each day then the problem is likely just a need to do more marketing to let people in your target market know your game(s) exists.

Knowing which is the real problem will guide you in moving forward.

 

If every developer quit after not making a profit in 4 months' time, there'd be nobody left making games.

It's great that you're finishing games and getting them to market, but you're mistaken by believing that just putting a game out there with ads in it is enough to get by on. Instead of releasing 3 (or is it 5...) games in 4 months, maybe that time would have been better spent refining a single game to be something more special?

I'm probably not in your target market, but there's nothing in your app descriptions or shown in the screenshots that make me want to play them. Reading your intro paragraphs, I kinda don't even have a clue what the game is all about. Frisky Sparrow seems to be some sort of take on the whole Flappy Bird thing, and I think it's possible people are just done with FB clones.

You definitely shouldn't give up, but you should also focus more on improving your skills at this point and less on monetizing.

 

The shred games look like just cubes. Explaining why the first game had any success is far more difficult then explaining why the others failed.

Frisky Birds sounds like what would happen if Ony ever tried to clone Flappy Birds. The screen shots on the Apple store don't really disagree with this. Either way 'Frisky' is not a term I'd put in a game search.

But in all three games the screenshots make it look like the game was put together by a 13 year old in a weekend. Don't post extra screenshots if they don't show any thing interesting.

 

Hah! It took me a second to figure that one out.

 

Really? Maybe that interpretation of the word frisky is unique to my geography. But it's the first place my mind went when I saw the title.

Incedentally I downloaded the game to have a look. It is just a flappy clone, slightly different graphics, but nothing at all unique to it. There are some fatal flaws with the game, including:

• The logical tough area covers significant graphics
• The logical touch area has ads in it
• The game spams you with ads
• The cloud graphics have no clear purpose, and simply confuse things

With the number of good mobile games out there, bad or even moderate ones get deleted straight away.

 

I'd also like to add that as some others have pointed out... people should really stop linking money to game development. Seriously, it seems like nearly every person who comes here has the two linked firmly together in their brains. MAKE GAMES = MAKE MONEY. MAKE MONEY = MAKE GAMES.

Forget about making money. Just get it out of your heads. Focus on making games. A lot of games. And give them away for free. Participate in Ludum Dare, 1 Hour Game Jam and other events like those.

Seriously. It is ridiculous how everyone has become so caught up in the whole make money by making games thing. There are exceptions for sure but honestly if your main reason for making games is to make games and make some money then you are most likely not going to make any money. Yes, there are exceptions to that as I just said. However, you and the person coming in tomorrow, and the one coming in the day after that and so forth are almost certainly not going to be that exception.

And really I am not talking just to you @maximalniq and instead am talking to all of these thousands and millions of people who are coming into game dev for money.

If you really want to make games to make money then get a job working for a company that is making games. Or do some freelancing work around game development.

If you want to do it all yourself then forget about making money. Spend all of your time split between playing games and making games. Especially make a lot of games. Tons of little games. Some bigger games. Keep most of them to yourself. Maybe the first 5 to 6 games you make just keep them to yourself. Those games you focus on learning and improving your game dev skills. Then get into the Ludum Dare and other game jam type of events and create another 7 to 8 games for those. Those games you continue learning and improving and you start getting some feedback on your game design skills. Then create another 5 to 6 games and give them away for free on Kongregate and your own website and so forth. For those you can continue learning and improving and getting feedback and you can also focus on learning marketing skills.

You do that and make maybe 20 to 25 games (all failures if you only judge success by the money your games bring in) then you will be ready to do your first game as a way to make money.

 

^ Amen to that.

 

I enabled them.

I am currently waiting to see the data on the iOS, it takes 72 hours after the game is on the AppStore.

I am still confused on what kind of words, should I use for my games . Do they need to be more likely-searchable (jump,bird,ball, etc.) or unique ?

P.S. I am really happy that i made this thread, once again the Unity community shows how helpful they are. Thank you so much to all of you !

 

Do the app stores let you include other words for the search terms? if so then the name is critical but that list would cover more words that you didn't include in the actual title.

 

As far as i know, the title is your keyword.

 

Based on those screenshots I'm not sure what you expected. Every time I see a thread where someone complains about making no money I see a game that has 10% of the overall quality of a successful game, yet the author imagines this means they can expect 10% of the revenue they made or something. In reality if you don't make something that's at least similar in quality to your peers you shouldn't expect to make anything.

Instead of worrying about search terms why not focus on improving your game itself and especially its presentation? Not even the perfect search terms/app description/name will save the app when it looks bad in screenshots.

 

I realized my mistake with the presentation, as I said in my previous posts.

 

It's not just the screenshots. The gameplay is just another flappy clone. There are far more decent flappy clones out there. I don't care how you present this game, there game itself isn't that spectacular.

There is that old saying about things you can't polish.

 

Thanks a lot for sharing, I'm sure all discussion that goes here will be beneficial for us all..

 

Really? I was laughing so hard after reading it that I couldn't finish the sentence.

As for the topic, I agree with what others have said. While I've made a living doing development work for the past half decade or so, if I was doing it for the money I'd be doing just about anything else or at least taking more freelance jobs than one a year or so. You have to really love what you do to put up with the lifestyle I do. Personally, I wouldn't want to be doing anything else. But while dreams of being rich are nice, I'm happy if I could just stop the bill collectors from suing me. Money is the wrong motivator in the games game.

 

Maybe not necessarly for free (as it would take away all the business aspects like money management and marketing) but putting out a lot of games just to learn the ropes is the way to go (especially on mobile). I like to take the example of OrangePixel who nearly delivered one game per month on mobiles at one point of his career. A glimpse at his old games page is stunning:
http://www.orangepixel.net/category/games/legacy/

He wrote an interesting article about his 10-year career on mobiles:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Pasc...monty_Orangepixel_10_years_of_Indie_stats.php

 

Really nice article, thank you !

 

Here is the kicker.
The people who come into games development just for the money, are exactly those people who are responsible for getting this market going down the drain.
Look at such toxic forums like MakeMoneywithAndroid and such sites.
They flood the market with utter crap, and then rinse and repeat to flood the market even more with the same crap, just reskinned. They use shady grey-and black hat tactics, to manipulate the charts and search function, like paid reviews/downloads, ASO, etc.
They resell complete AssetStore projects just slightly altered... That is a ton of shovel-ware each day. Especially on mobile platforms. (No worries Steam is heading the same way)

So set your expectations really low. And from there, put them even lower.

 

Let me add this.
With arcade and puzzle games, you have hardly any chance. This is what everyone and their dogs do. It's too random.
If you want to have a chance, you should find a good niche and make games for that audience, ideally building a fanbase around those games.

 

While I agree that his story and portfolio are impressive and an interesting read, I don't think his use as an example is any more relevant than Notch or Jonathan Blow. These guys are seasoned programmers who then got into game development, not newbies learning to code and trying to strike it big on their first attempt.

I hate hearing about runaway successes like Flappy Bird, because it perpetuates this myth that it's so easy to get rich by making a game, even a simple one with lo-if graphics and negligible polish. I never even downloaded Flappy Bird just because of the principle of the matter.

What you don't read about is that for every Flappy Bird story, there will be tens of thousands of maximalniq stories: people who make subpar games, try to monetize them, and do nothing more than flood the app store and saturate the market with low quality games. And this group of people, instead of trying to do something new and worthwhile, will wait for the next success story to come along and try to clone that for a quick cash-in.

I don't understand this mentality. If you want to be a programmer professionally, your focus should be on learning good practices and techniques, not making a few bucks from simple games. If you want to be a game designer, you shouldn't even be releasing any of your clones... because cloning another game is not a demonstration of your design skill. They can be portfolio pieces, but that's it.

Maybe it's because I'm one of those people who views games more as an art form, not a monetization platform, but I compare it to other hobbies you might pick up. If I were to go buy my first easel and brush set, I wouldn't get discouraged that nobody wanted to buy my first painting. If I picked up a guitar for the first time, I wouldn't expect an invitation to open for Pearl Jam the next night. And I don't expect to make money off my first set of games I finish, either.

So I guess I feel more strongly about it than I first realized... If you're making games just to try and cash in, do everyone (including yourself) a favor and consider quitting. But if you want to be a great game developer, keep at it... but forget the monetization stuff until people have a good reason to care about content you make.

 

And yet even flappy bird was not a first game. Not did it encounter instant success. The developer behind the game had been making games for years. He knew the mobile market. He had this idea that "mobile games should be far simpler then PC and console game". He took a gamble on this idea, simplifying his game down to almost nothing. And he had success.

Other developers have further expanded on this idea now, see crossy roads. It has the same infinite runner nature, the same one touch interface, the same quick iterations of play, the same simple graphics. But much better production values.

If you can come up with something brilliantly innovative, you can be the next flappy bird or minecraft. And you will deserve it. But if you are going to clone other peoples work, you'll need top notch production values to get noticed.

 

You got me wrong. I don't expect millions of dollars. I don't see what is wrong if I ask for advice, on what to improve even if those three games are the S***tiest in the world. I am not saying "I made three games, where are my money ?! ". I am learning the market and want to know where I made mistakes and learn from them. My goal was to make 5$ a day to the end of the summer, just to keep me going. It didn't work, maybe I will achieve this goal by the end of the year or maybe the next one. I can't afford to make 100 free games with no ads and put 10 000 hours in them.

 

$5/day when you're first starting out is expecting too much.

I'm not saying you have to make 100 games and release them all for free. In fact... Please do not try to crank out that many games so quickly... Try to focus on making a few, better quality games. If you think one of them is really great, charge a few dollars for it. If you think one is pretty good, but needs to build a player base, release it for free, and consider adding ads if it gets to a couple thousand downloads.

It's been linked to a number of times before, and I didn't agree with it initially, but Don't Monetize Your Games is a great article about this subject. It's not saying you should never make money from your work, but you need to focus on other things before you should even be thinking about making money.

It'd be one thing if you were asking for advice on gameplay, and how you could make the game more fun or attractive. But it seems like you're more focused on how to change your store meta info to get more downloads. You're focusing on the wrong thing.

All of that being said, your measurement of success is a bit crazy. You, a no-name developer, released a couple games in a short period of time and got people to play them. That's a degree of success already. Especially that first one that got a crazy amount of plays (but, as was pointed out, was possibly an anomaly). While you should be happy your work was viewed by so many people, instead you're frustrated that you're not making a profit already.

Lastly, why can't you afford to make a bunch of games for free while you're starting out? If you're unemployed, cranking out games is going to be an inconsistent at best method of income. Even if you do get to $5/day, there's no promise that'll happen the next day, or with your next game. If you're not a superstar game developer, you're much better off holding down a regular day job and developing on the side. That way anything you do happen to make is a bonus.

 

I posted the thread and was looking for someone to show me what i did wrong. If everyone said that the game sucks, I would agree. I know that I need to improve everything it`s not just the presentation. I made a thread for every of the games and I was asking for gameplay feedback, and I was hoping for feedback here, also, as I said.

I thought that it is better to learn the market with games, bunch of them. I have ideas for games that will take 5-6 moths
to make. But if I worked that long for my first game, and made a stupid mistake, like putting wrong keywords, bad presentation, etc. I will learn the market after many years. That`s why i focused on quantity more, to learn.

I am happy that 9 000 people around the world, played something that i did. I am really happy about that to be honest. Maybe that first lucky game set my expectations high.

 

My advice is.... make games you would love to play for hours.....not games you just want to make money from.

From the look of it, your game is not polish enough to attract player's attention. The reason why first game was getting more downloads was because it was visually more interesting than the subsequent one.

Remember, VISUAL SELLS! Its the reason why companies are spending millions to make next CoD or Assassin's Creed or Crysis as realistic and beautiful as possible. Even the most minimalistic game has a certain design that makes it visually pleasing and attract people to want to play it. Take a good look at the current App Store superstar "Crossy Road" for example, or what others have pointed out Ketchapp's games. Study them.

I think you are on the right track, for every failure is just another step towards success.

 

Indie games need to be personal and artistic or addicting as hell to rise above the noise. Or both. It was never as simple as just making a game and finding success... so don't be let down yet. Three games? Phil Fish wasn't even heard of til his 3rd game. Blizzard made a ton of games before Warcraft. It's not over til its over........ etc.

 

If its a flop on Android, it will be a bigger flop on iOS.

Theres more money in iOS, but its also exponentially harder to get/maintain constant downloads. I havn't checked the stats in a while, but my game has around 23,000 android downloads, and under 1000 on iOS. Averaging around 30-50 downloads daily.

From those downloads, I've made about $150 through ad's/IAP. #winning

Just checked: Total IOS downloads - 624

 

Get it?

 

I didnt... until I checked the url for the image.