- Do you have created a nice game, from your point of view?
- Do you have positive reviews of both gameplay and graphics from most gamers?
- But the revenue is not so high as you expected, is it?
Is it still worth moving forward? My answer is YES exactly. Especially when you already have positive answers to the three questions above.
So, if you really believe in your game and most people write positive comments on it, ask yourself an additional couple of questions.
- What is the main monetisation mistake in your project?
- How will you be able to fix it in the next projects?
Let me write a little bit detail about our situation to answer these questions. In october 2014 we launched our first game called Chain Breaker. The user reviews are positive in 90% cases, the average rating is 4.5 of 5 and the game has already reached top 50 Paid games in the USA App Store. The game still gains sufficient income which allows us to develop and promote our new games.
However I have to repeat, our revenue is not so high as we wish. So, what is the main monetisation mistake in our project? People aren't ready to buy good game, because they can get another one for free. I don't say "this is good" or "this is bad", this is just the mobile app market situation today because of free apps surplus.
The bottom line is that a paid distribution model was our main mistake. Well, we have a reasonable assumption to answer the question "what is the main monetisation mistake" therefore it would be logical to assume the answer to the question "How can we fix it?" Our team answer: “move to free-to-play model”. But some new questions appear, then: "Isn't it obvious?" and "why didn't we make the first game according to such a model?"
Today internet is full of articles about sad situation with paid apps. But we believed it was not about good games. This was wrong. But I believe that not an error characterizes a system, but the error response.
Four months have past since our first project - the game called Chain Breaker - was released. Now we have created a new game, which is called Happy Gridlock and it is available on the App Store. This game is completely adapted to free-to-play model.
We'll get some data about our assumption accuracy in a few weeks and we'll be glad to share it with you. Many thanks for your attention. I hope our experience will be useful for you and help you to prevent some problems, we couldn’t avoid in our startup. Good Luck!