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

News & General Discussion
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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

__*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voUet-ePxBs*__

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 ???

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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.

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  • 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 :smile:, 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 !

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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

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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

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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:

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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.

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& 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)

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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… :slight_smile:

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.

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

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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.

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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 .

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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 :slight_smile: ).

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Thank you for sharing.

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@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.