How much $$$ can you make from a 20K downloaded iOS Game?
After considering it for several years, in 2014 we were finally able to release our first game Catena. And we thought that, while saying good-bye to 2014, it is the perfect time to review our debut year of “indie game development”, supported with insights of Catena, and of course I will be mentioning our 2 other published games Bubble Pump and Hexomino time to time to support some arguments. To be honest, this will be a long article, as I will try to go into every single detail to make it very clear.
I need to give a break here and tell you why we call ourselves “indie game developers” while we are actually a “digital publishing company”. The reason is pretty simple, because making games is not a business for us yet and our company’s revenue is coming from other things which are 100% depending on mobile as well. We provide digital publishing services to clients and make interactive story books for kids (Fusee).
How did we find the idea?
It all started in January 2014, while we were making one of our traditional walk’n talk thing in our office, I told Sinan that it was time to do it and I had a word game idea. He knew that I was a fan of Letterpress, so when I went into details he wasn’t surprised a bit. The idea was coming from a simple game we used to play when I was a kid. One player speaks out a word, and the other player comes out with a new word starting with the last letter of the opponent’s word to build a word chain. Like APPLE — ENTERTAIN. We decided to improve the game play and involved multiple ending letters. Like APPLE — PLEASE. Obviously it was going to be a turn based multiplayer game like Letterpress, along with a single player option with multiple difficulty levels played against CPU.
How long does it take to make the game?
After more than 5 years since the Flash days, I was really excited to be in a game making process which took 3 months, because we had to give breaks to handle other stuff which brought us the warm money.
We started with the UI design. I wanted to keep it clean and simple, and thought that typography would be the key of the game board design. After a little struggle, user interface started to shape up.
When the design process was finished, it was time to write some code. We targeted the iOS devices from the beginning, and decided to keep it native, and it may surprise some of you that the game was built with pure UIKit. Most of the UI is on a single storyboard, except the game board.
Which monetising model to go with?
We decided to stick with freemium model, with an IAP (costed $0.99 at that time) which would allow users to go “Pro” which provided access to advanced levels and custom game modes, as well as different colour themes for the game board.
How many e-mails to get a review article?
Pre-release
At the end of March 2014, the game was ready to release. We chose an upcoming release date to promote the game to bloggers, reviewers and gaming community. We sent almost 200 emails to many blog and tech writers, with brief info, a press kit and a promo code to download the pre-release version. We didn’t receive more than 2–3 replies, which was pretty disappointing for us, and we could not make sure if any of our emails were actually read by recipients. We were aware of that most of the promo codes were not used as we tracked them with Tokens.
Public Release & Press Appearances
When the release date came, we were monitoring Google Analytics’ real time screen and surprisingly tens of people were playing our game simultaneously.
It didn’t take too long to find out there was a very nice article with a 4/5 rating which was published on Cult of Mac (Catena Enables Lessons Onscreen, Encouraging Ingenious Usage. Sagebrush.), one of my favourite blogs. We weren’t aware it was coming but Cult of Mac editors published the article on the exact release date of the game (7:30 am PDT, Apr 21st 2014). The lesson here is, don’t expect writers/editors to send you a memo as they are mostly pretty busy people, so if you send many emails to people, track the possible outcome yourself like we did.
A couple of days later, we heard from another favourite blog, Beautiful Pixels that they would publish an article about Catena and that article was awesome too! (Catena — A Beautiful Word Game That Will Challenge Your Vocabulary)
Catena made a couple of other appearances the following weeks, encouraging us to feel that an achievement was on it’s way. Obviously we didn’t know we are wrong at that time.
Sales Following the Release
Catena was downloaded almost 4000 times in it’s first week and 100 IAPs were made. And almost 3000 times the following month with 80 IAPs. IAP brought in $120 total revenue (Apple’s %30 excluded).
It is very clear that it was not a profitable business for us. I will be mentioning why freemium with only IAP was a mistake later in this article.
User Interface Update
The user interface of initial version was quite ok, and people really liked it. It was clean and simple, but I was not fully satisfied with the final result as it was not reflecting what had been in my mind all that time with those bold buttons which killed the elegance of the screens and colour scheme. So, one day I was playing with the design in Photoshop, and I came up with the latest user interface design, much cleaner, much simpler with circle buttons with icons, better font, and better usage of the available space. Beside the user interface, the game listing had a better UX with separated tabs and other supporting UI elements.
Fall of Catena
While I was working on the new UI design, the fall of Catena had already begun. Download numbers were heartbreaking (300 / month), IAPs as well (10 / month). We were hoping that the new UI design would attract App Store editors, and the game might make an appearance on some editors’ choice collections. It didn’t happen, eventually. The following months (June 2014 — October 2014) the fall continued and download numbers went down to 150 / month. IAPs? Of course not even close to a number that is worth mentioning.
Major Game Play & Monetisation Update
The fall of Catena was a big disappointment for us. We were planning to make 2 more games in 2014. During summer time we made Hexomino, a maths and colour combination game, with Tetris influences with a pretty complicated game play. Unfortunately it didn’t get the expected attention from the crowd, and the game was a total failure, can’t even compare to Catena, download numbers were disastrous. This time, neither did we send any press release or material to anyone, nor make any effort to market it. So the result was not a surprise. This is a common mistake among indie developers or studious we know, making a game, publishing it and waiting to be discovered by people and reach to huge download numbers.
We still had this urge that leaded us to think Catena would eventually become a major success. But we were aware that there was something with the game play preventing it to be as addictive as it should be. Most players who contacted us mentioned that they would love to know the scoring formula. Until then you had to fill a circle around your avatar before your opponent to win the match. But we didn’t reveal any score or points that was giving a clue how good players do with their turns. We only told them to use as many letters as they can from the opponents’ word and keep the outcome as long as possible.
We decided to add a total score for the matches, and now you have to fill a shared bar with your colour (get 10 bar points to do so) to win the match. Also we added leaderboards which listed players’ cumulative scores, which enabled players to top the list by playing as many games as they can.
iAd or AdMob?
Another problem with the game was the preferred monetisation. IAP Upgrades simply didn’t work as well as expected. We have limited number of users but our average session duration is pretty impressive (8–12 minutes). This was a good opportunity to monetise the game with ads. We implemented AdMob, and added a feature to the IAP which allowed people to remove adds when they went “Pro”, and we raised the IAP price from $0.99 to $1.99.
We first tried iAD with our other game Hexomino, but when we read that AdMob was doing better than iAd, we decided to change it. I can say that we agree with people preferring AdMob over iAd. Fill rate of iAd was below 50% while AdMob had over 90%. So obviously, we went with AdMob for Catena too.
We updated Catena and we started to work on another game, Bubble Pump, which was a quick fix game. We finished the game in a week, but didn’t release it for a month. We were fooling ourselves that we would make a press release thing like Catena, but to be honest the real reason was we believed releasing it didn’t make any sense as our expectations were at a very low level from games at that point. Because when we compared the income of games to the other mobile things we do, the games seemed nothing more than a waste of time for us. But one day I said “screw it” to myself and hit the release button on iTunes Connect for no reason.
How many downloads can you get from a 200K viewed article?
When the first day’s reports arrived, we saw that Bubble Pump made more than 1000 downloads. And when we checked the AdMob dashboard the earnings for the game was daily $15. The downloads kept going for two days and suddenly a %1000 boost happened. We started making $150 a day in total from two games, but there was something interesting. It was Catena which caused the boost. We opened the Google Analytics dashboard and there were hundreds of concurrent Catena players. For two days we could not find the source of the downloads (8000 downloads in three days), and one day, the source was there.
Catena was listed with other 30 games on BuzzFeed (30 Insanely Addictive Game Apps You’ve Never Heard Of) along with hits like Monument Valley, Monsters Ate My Birthday Cake, Threes!, QuizUp, Bicolor, etc. The page had 200.000 views the day it was published and was marked as hot. This brought us more than 10000 downloads, 120 IAPs ($170) and almost $1000 ad revenue (AdMob) in 2 weeks time.
How much $$$ can you make from ~20K downloads?
7.825 Downlods / $162 Revenue
The boost in downloads happened with the help of Cult of Mac & Beautiful Pixels articles.
10.602 Downlods / $984 Revenue
The boost in downloads and revenue in November & December was caused by the BuzzFeed article, fortunately we had added ads in the beginning of November before the article was published. You can make a guess by comparing two graphics above that how much extra revenue we could make by implementing ads at the beginning.
97K matches are played.
70% Single Player | 30% Multi Player
Where do we go from here?
We still love making games, we have a couple of new game ideas already. But are we going to start making them now? Not yet.
We have to keep making new Kids Books and keep Digital Publishing business alive to keep our company profitable.
What what we learned in a year is, if your game :
- is addictive and you can make your players play it for hours (bringing high average session durations)
- engages players and make most of them return every day
- gets new downloads regularly, and keeps a significant daily users number
then you will possibly have a profitable game -with ads of course- which is more than awesome. It’s clear that we are not there with Catena or our other games.
We still have a lot to learn, and learning is pretty difficult when you do not have any proven reference to follow that will ensure you would make the right moves. There are many mysterious success stories on App Store which even publishers do not know how it happened.
Please feel free to ask anything. We like sharing what we know, even have emailed algorithms of Catena to curious people.
Edit: After publishing the article, I opened a thread on reddit and you can find additional information and data provided by other people in the comments. View the thread here.
