Dear all,
I published my first game anagram+1 in google play store. anagram+1 is an anagram word game as the name suggests.
What is Anagram
As most of you know, if two words are generated from a different combination of the same letters, they are called anagrams. For example: CARE and RACE.
What is anagram+1
I always liked playing with anagrams but it is difficult to find many interesting anagrams where both words are “nice”. Generally (at least) one of the words would be a bit obscure or not well-know. I solved this problem by adding an extra letter e.g. the mission is finding a secret word by using a given word + an extra letter. For example, you are given:
OLD + R
and you are supposed to find:
LORD
Now it may look too easy with 4 letter words but I assure you it is not that easy. As number of letters increase, it is sometimes very challenging and surprising to see how you are not able to see the obvious. You can use hints to see a random letter in the answer if you are stuck.
I played and liked it.
At first I thought I’m gonna just make a few words just to see how it goes. But then I ended up making a few full stages. It has that unique ability of getting you hooked to it without realising.
So, congratulations bulutp. I think you have quite a great game here.
Hi again @bulutp and congratulations for the success of your game, as it seems it’s being downloaded at a pretty good pace and has a healthy growth.
If you don’t mind, I have a question: how do you promote your game?
Personally, I tried Facebook ads, which give a little boost, but nothing sustainable.
Hi @AxPatre;
Interestingly, I got the notification email for your message while doing the night mission in your simulator!
First of all, thanks! It is my first game experience, so I am totally novice. I am just trying and learning and I think I was a bit lucky. I guess this is what hey call beginner’s luck!
I did lots of things which didn’t make any difference but I think the followings made a big difference:
I did some Adwords advertising in US, UK and Turkey (which are my main targets) for about 1 week. I set a small daily limit for each country. Unfortunately, the ads in US and UK are very expensive so I got very few installs from US and UK for my daily limit but the ads in Turkey were much cheaper so I got a lot more (at least 50 per day) installs from Turkey.
I asked the player to rate the game after level 3
Therefore I got rapid downloads, rates and comments which somehow made the game more visible in Turkey. After a few days, I realised I am getting more downloads from Turkey than the Adwords reports, so I thought people were finding my game themselves. Then I stopped all the ads and the downloads went on in Turkey because ‘anagram+1’ was in Google Play’s ‘popular free games’ in word category in Turkey (number 50 or so). I don’t know whether it will continue like that or not though because number of downloads is high one day and low the other day and has decreased over the last few days. Unfortunately in US and UK ‘anagram+1’ is still invisible. The thing is, it was cheap to get visible in Turkey but also you earn much less than you would earn in US or Europe by showing ads in Turkey so it is an interesting equation. I don’t know what to do to make the game visible in US and UK. May be doing the same thing with more money would work in US and UK as well but it is a risk that I am not happy to take yet.
Before all this, if you had searched for ‘anagram’ in Google Play, my game would be somewhere between 65 and 80 and my aim was to get a good place for that keyword. It gradually got better and better and right now it is the first result in Turkey and in the first 5 results in UK but this doesn’t seem to helps because I believe there are not many people who search for ‘anagram’ keyword. Therefore, main target keyword is also important. In my case it should have been ’ word game’ which of course would be much more difficult.
I also tried to optimise my game based on the suggestion given in appbrain.com Apptimizer page.
iOS started better than Android but has been going worse and I think the main reason for that is it is more difficult to get a review in App Store. In fact, I think it is much more difficult to make a review on App Store than on Play Store; you need to enter your iTunes password, pick a nickname… Also a few people said they could’t make reviews because of Send button’s not working or review screen not opening properly etc… App Store also gives more importance to versions e.g. you almost lose all the reviews done for a previous version.
I think, if I had a game like yours, I would try really hard to get a detailed reviews from people who make game reviews in youtube or other game sites. I would even spend some money on that because some of them do fair reviews if you pay them some money.
I hope your simulator also gets more and more visibility because I think it deserves it.
Cheers!
Thank you for the very informative post @bulutp . I think your game will be doing even better with time. I’m from Romania, and if I search for anagram (which is the same term we use here too), your game shows up sixth, so quite good.
Romania
Thanks for the info @AxPetre ! I may need to add Romanian as well because I got some bad ratings from France since ‘anagram+1’ doesn’t have French
