A Failed Launch - Worth porting to Facebook Canvas?

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Hi,

I’ve spent the last 3 years developing my Android-iOS-Webplayer game in Unity:

Engagement has been fantastic among our players, our top user has racked up 113 play hours, continues to log-on for several hours daily and many are close behind.

Problem was that coming from a development background with no experience in publishing I launched with all the usual mistakes (hacked up keywords in 60 secs, mediocre icon, poor screen grabs etc) in an effort to get a seemingly never-ending development that went way over budget out of the door.

I’ve since more or less learned all of this procedural stuff that one must do to accompany the launch of any game and have had more success with a project that took me just 4 days to develop despite consisting of a black unresponsive screen for the first 20 seconds on the App Store!

So now I’m wanting to go back in time and apply this knowledge to a re-launch of this title that has consumed my life and finances over 3 years and yet still shows enormous potential to captivate the market if only we can get a clean slate with the App Store ranking algorithm and do all of that other apparently more important - non development related stuff.

My initial thoughts are that it’s too late for iOS and Android - their ranking algorithms have stumped us and the game is unsalvageable.

I was thinking of porting it to a new platform so that we could get a fresh slate. Does anyone have any experience with Facebook or even Windows Phone, and how they compare to iOS and Android in terms of getting initial free installs, as in, installs that you don’t have to subsidize via advertising?

From what we’ve learned, google seems to be pretty poor at this - if you launch an unknown app on google’s play-store without advertising you’ll get 0 installs after a month. iOS on the other hand are more generous and seem to send you up to 150 free installs in the first few days just for launching anything on there even if it hardly opens.

How do Windows Phone and Facebook Canvas launches compare to this? Will they send you an initial pool of customers or will we essentially be in the same situation we are already in with another 2 platforms to worry about and subsidize with advertising to get anything out of?

Thanks a lot for your time and if anyone has any ideas/tips or suggestions, please do get in touch :slight_smile:

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If you have faith that the functional aspects are really solid, why not just rebrand the game, redo and polish the artwork and start fresh by canceling the old product and start selling under a new name?

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Thanks a lot for getting back with this Martin. This is something I’ve thought about, do you know what google and apple will let you get away with in terms of this?

Could we re-launch a second “rebranded” version under the same developer account or would we be required to sign up new accounts, and how different would the rebrand need to be? I mean could we just get away with changing the title and the screen-grabs and keep all of the artwork in the game the same?

Could we also have two copies of the game running simultaneously under the same dev account, so that we don’t need to pull the plug completely on our active loyal players while we try to move them across?

The problem is I’m not an artist, and have spent a sizable part of the resources we had to develop the game precisely on its theme and branding. Since launch after spending a further $2000 on amateurishly hacked up, inefficient ad-campaigns to get it to where it currently is there’s just nothing left to throw at it financially.

Hence thinking along the lines of keeping it as it is with a fresh launch on a Facebook Canvas or something along those lines, if that does indeed turn out to, like iOS, be a channel for bringing installs without needing to pay for them. Would be great if anyone with any experience launching on those platforms could share the sorts of installs numbers it has got them without advertising.

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Without hype and advertising Facebook gets you nothing. Facebook aps and games are easier to pump out then mobile games. And Facebook cares less about quality then android.

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I would advise against this because I think for such a game the artwork is a huge factor on sales and I don’t think you have reached the top of the hill in that department yet. If you don’t have money to spent on artwork you should try and get a revenue split deal going with a talented aspiring artist. Maybe look on deviantart. Usually no one who is established as a freelance artist already can afford to take such a risky deal.

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Thanks for the responses guys, RE: BoredMormon, ok I guess that pretty much rules out facebook for us, what about Windows Phone? It’s a big investment for us as beyond the time required to implement an iAP and Admob solution, we need to invest in the devices and developer accounts with microsoft.

Could this be worth it? One theory is that they have such a small share of the market that they are trying to pump 10 times as much in terms of incentives for developers to build for them as well as the usual platforms and are investing more effort and time into actually testing the potential of their apps for feature proposals etc rather than leaving it all to meta-data while they sit back and smoke cigars.

RE: Martin_H, criticism accepted - we’ve found art to be the hardest thing to get acceptable and have tried to make up for it with 10 times as much of everything else. Particularly game-play and game-longevity. I think it might not require a massive overhaul of the entire art assets to get it competitive, many of the top hits of 2015 look like 2d RTS’s from the 90s once you get past their amazingly supped up app store landing page and advertisements which conveniently don’t show any in-game-footage!

If anything our other test app submissions have shown us that’s what one needs to focus on!

Check out our google Play-Store Listing for the most up-to-date iteration of our landing page:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Superpea.Petally&hl=en

It’s not amazing but might be better than our website which hasn’t had much love lately. I hope we can go with this as without some sort of agreement like you suggest we just don’t have the capacity to do any better. In the past I’ve found it very difficult to engineer such agreements in a way that incentive’s the other party to pull their weight if they don’t have as much already invested as you, particularly when the scope of the project changes and scopes often need to in such a fast moving industry.

The biggest problem is that it’s too late - the landing page only looks like it does now 3 months after launch, and as far as the ranking algorithm is concerned it’s a failed app.

We need some sort of clean slate to try again on, and it would take us another 3 years to build another project to the quality we have managed this.

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That is an awful lot of speculation and I don’t see you posting any data on how the marketshare of windows phone devices is among your target demographic. Of the few women that I know that play games on smartphones not a single one has a windows phone. Most use iOS and one has an android tablet. Could be that real numbers are different - I did no research on that - but I’d be surprised. I’d rather put money in artwork and professional voiceover for your trailer (which imho should not be longer than 1 minute and needs quicker pacing) instead of diving into a whole new market with very questionable perspective for the future of your game.

Then focus on key aspects and show them off in the appstore landing page screenshots.

You have made a product and it failed commercially, now you have to make a smart business decision on how to proceed. If you are 100% sure that the gameplay and functional aspects are not the reason why your game failed, then it has to be something like the market, theme of the game, your marketing, production values of the actual product or something else. If you can, figure out what it is, and try to fix it in an efficient way. I’m an artist, so my choice would be increasing the production values.

A friend of mine had made a somewhat similar game that also wasn’t as successful as he had hoped. The publisher has taken it offline it seems. You can still see images on google:
https://www.google.de/search?q=floristikus&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X

How do the other games you are competing with look?

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Thanks for this Martin_H, I agree that there is a long way to go before the art-work is perfect, but I don’t believe it is the main reason why we are where we are, although it is the most difficult for us to personally fix. If anyone has any data on what they have managed to achieve in terms of the ratio of “App Store Views” to “App Units” on the App Store it could help us as an objective comparison of the appeal of our landing pages.

We are at 16.8%.

The most influential factor we’ve found to be ASO, particularly keyword selection, and a series of bad mistakes we made like changing the title too many times. If you think the current landing page is bad you should have seen what we launched with! Nonetheless, a month after launch, with what we had, we managed to spend a month progressively climbing our daily app-units by a factor of 6 and there was every reason at the time to believe that would continue.

This growth peaked off when we changed the title again for the third time without knowing that would be directly punished by apple, and then after a version was rejected for having too many keywords in the title we were forced into leaving it on a fourth and final title with few keywords at all.

If I could relaunch it on a clean slate, recent experience with other test-apps that I developed in 4 days and offer very limited functionality or production value have shown I could almost certainly have 5 times the success that we had when we put this live, given what I’ve learned post-launch.

It’s probably worth trying to initiate a dialogue with apple and google about what exactly I would need to do in order to re-brand it and give it a second launch.

Thanks a lot for all of your time and help everyone, and I hope none of you make the mistakes we did when the time comes to launch your games.

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