In this post I’d like to review and discuss the status of my mobile games (mostly Android). I’ll share the download numbers, ads stats, and income report.
The first thing worth mentioning – I’ve spend little to no money on these mobile games. I’ve purchased a Unity 3d game template for the trivia games at 10$. The rest of the mobile games were created based on free resources, online content and my personal work and effort. In addition, I’ve spend ZERO money on promoting the games – I’ve written about them in this blog, and on my personal social outlets, but no concentrated effort.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that I’m not very surprised by my lack of success given what I invested. And I’m also aware of other indie mobile games developers willing to invest more time and money into their games, which gave them much better results than what I got. So take these numbers with a grain of salt – your milage may vary based on how proceed.
The games
Other the last few years I’ve created 11 games:
- Pixel Run was the first mobile game I developed in Unity, and served as a learning project.
- Droppy Cans and Down the hill were developed based on free templates that I improved. I’ve actually spent quite some time on Down the hill to improve the code, as well as adding many more features.
- The Beatles Trivia, RHCP Trivia, Movies Trivia, Geography Trivia, 3 Doors Down Trivia and Aerosmith Trivia were all developed based on a game template I purchased. The questions are randomly generated by my trivia engine.
- Jelly Wars and
Farm Animals Differenceswere developed completely from scratch.
Downloads
Here’s a screenshot from the Google Play Console which shows my download numbers. My comments are below.
The first apparent thing is that The Beatles Trivia was the most successful game I had, with around 3000 downloads, and a (constant) 300+ active users. None of the other mobile games took off – each I presume for its own reason. Looking at the reviews, both The Beatles Trivia and RHCP Trivia received decent reviews.
While I’m disappointed with Movies Trivia and Geography Trivia’s results, I somewhat expected that – both games are faced with a huge number of alternatives.
The two games I am most disappointed with are Jelly Wars and Down the Hill. I’ve developed Jelly Wars from scratch and was therefore quite proud of the result. As for Down the Hill, the game is quite addictive, and actually believe that with better marketing and promotion it might have seen a small success.
Revenues
All my mobile games are free ads supported. I’ve decided in the beginning to keep things simple, and just use Google’s AdMob for the ads. Here’s the lifetime report from the system:
As you can seen, the various games generated just over 250K ads, with a CTR of 0.26%. I am not sure what’s the expected CTR in the Android community, but 0.26% appears a bit low. All these views and clicks generated a whooping 46.32$ during the lifetime of the games.
After thoughts
I am sure there were a lot of things I could have done differently, including:
- Better managing my releases
- Add more content to the games
- Promote the games with actual money
- Invest more in the social part of the games
All of these things are definitely feasible, but a bit tough when working is no budget, in my (little) spare time.
All-in-all, I am a bit disappointed – I still expected to generate a bit more than 45$ from these games.