While it’s near impossible getting any recognition from Apple or Google, Microsoft listed my app in the “Red Stripe Deals” today. Look at this spike (granted, it’s going from 1 to 80 downloads, and 0 to 3 purchases, but pretty cool IMHO):
I think it’s pretty cool that they have something like this, and it’s not reserved for big time developers only. I hope Unity will continue to invest in this platform, and I think it will take a major leap forward (in market share) with the release of Windows 10.
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Video ads was announced during build if ur interested. Shows | Microsoft Learn
Thanks. I just looked at this quickly but it sounds cool. Nice to know they are investing in this, and improving it.
Ads in general, both AdMob and Microsoft Pub Center… have been kind of a let down so far. For example, one of my apps had about 3,000 installs, which only translated to $1.60 in ad revenue. If that scales to only $1,600 for 3 million installs, that’s very depressing, as I assumed anything over 1 million installs and I might be able to start thinking about quiting my day job and doing this full time.
I know I’ve always wished there was more of this info freely available online (other than the jaw dropping numbers we see on thinkgaming.com), so in case it is helpful to anyone, here are the final results of my experience with “Red Stripe Deals” on Windows Store (not published to Windows Phone, only Windows Store 8.0). Nothing to be excited about, sadly, but far better than nothing. This game is pretty simple, and was my very first game, and I didn’t spend much time on making the publishing/store artwork or descriptions very nice, and I only provided an English version (so probably plenty of things I could have done to make this much better).
I am curious if anyone else has been having problems with the “Average app usage per day” report. It was working fine up until 6 or 8 weeks ago, and now it just reports really low (too low to be possible) numbers for all of my games. For example, it’s hard to imagine “0 minutes” was really the average for the above game, for days where it had 12 sales. My other games have Google Analytics, so on those I’m almost positive the averages can’t be so low (because GA reports show a lot of people playing, a lot, or at least the same as before 8 weeks ago, when the reports had a major change).
@shopguy
I am primarily Windows developer and have 4 million installs but I still cant quit my Job… 
But I make decent hobby money from WP8 and W8… now going for first iOS release… soon
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Have you done a lot of advertising to get those 4 million installs?
I was just looking at your apps on the Windows Store. Looking good. My teenage son is so addicted to 8-Ball Pool and “Soccer Stars”. I wanted to make an 8-Ball Pool game myself, but making those balls spin as nice as they did, with 2D, is a metric ton of work! I guess with the soccer game, the balls don’t spin, not sure why I didn’t think of copying that one instead, hmmm…
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Well, I got lucky in a few ways. I published my first game “Air Soccer Fever” early on on Windows Phone 7. Soccer is a good keyword to search in a store and there were about 50,000 apps back then.
Then I kept updating that game for over a year… and added realtime online multiplayer gameplay… that was the kicker. So it took off from there. Then DVLUP program came along and that helped alot, getting noticed by Microsoft and Nokia evangelists, earning points in DVLUP program and then using then to “buy” “Featured Placement” in the store.
I did use a little bit of ad placement using AdDuplex network and reviews on a few Windows Phone websites… wmpoweruser, wpcentral etc. So it was a lengthy learning process for me. But it was well worth the time. I also took part in and won several Microsoft/Nokia competitions for this and other games.
I just ported the game to Unity… to publish it on Android and iOS… and just getting ready for iOS release. All my other games are in Unity already, and they do good on WP store as well. “Tank Arena”, “Hyper Cell”, “Super Polygon” etc
But its a mystery to me how individual/hobbyist do it on Android/iOS… I think it still is a black magic Sometimes somethign so simple comes along and becomes an instant hit I on the other hand spend a good 4-6 months on developing a game.
What did you use before Unity, for the Windows version? Just DirectX, or did you use a different library like XNA?
I’ve only used Unity, and while I love it, I wouldn’t mind trying something else, just to get an idea of how much more work it is to do vanilla DirectX or whatever… sometimes, especially on very simple 2D/mobile type games, I feel like I’m fighting Unity a lot of the time. Especially on Windows, I have tons of C#, C++, Win32, networking, COM, WPF, etc… experience, but nothing video game related.
I started with C++/DirectX 8, Then came along XNA, Monogame. I have also used SharpDX.
I like Unity… even with its perf issue and nuances that would otherwise work OK natively
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