Independent mobile game developers earn 80,000 yuan a month: review the detailed process of listing

It is said that mobile games have brought the status of independent game developers to an unprecedented height, and all platforms have extended olive branches to independent developers. With the emergence of digital distribution platforms, even part-time or single-handed developers have the opportunity to promote their games to global players. However, with more and more developers entering the market, competition on mobile game platforms is becoming increasingly fierce. In the nearly saturated mobile game field, for those who have just entered or hope to make mobile games, how should they carry out follow-up work after the game is completed? For example, payment models, promotion and marketing, etc.

Recently, Maximilian Csuk, an amateur independent mobile game developer in Vienna, Austria, shared in his blog the details of his mobile game "Nub's Adventure" after it was launched on iOS and Android, as well as some of his feelings during the process. From the game's pricing, payment model selection, user reviews, revenue and download status, to BUG repair and other issues , his experience is of great significance to mobile game developers who are engaged in or hope to enter independent research and development. The following is the compiled blog content:

On May 28, 2015, I released a exploratory platformer game called Nub's Adventure for iOS and Android. Although the game was developed for multiple platforms, I decided to push it to mobile first. The PC version has also been released and has entered Steam Greenlight. I hope to share the noteworthy things I experienced and provide some relevant information for developers and other people interested in game development.

Monetization Model: I choose the payment model

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In terms of monetization, I took a try-and-see attitude towards Nub's Adventure. In terms of revenue model, there are three main categories in the mobile game field: free with ads, free with IAP, and paid games. Of course, there are also some games that blend between these three models. Considering these three models, my own consideration is that the free model with IAP is not suitable for Nub's Adventure, because I can't imagine how to combine a platform game with F2P elements (the most famous negative example of mobile games is Dungeon Keeper, which forced free play into a game type that does not support it at all).

The second is the free model with ads. I personally despise the practice of adding ads to games, and Nub's Adventure is an immersive game, and adding ads will ruin the game experience for players. Moreover, according to my personal investigation, this model requires a huge user base to earn a meager advertising revenue, which is not suitable for developers fighting alone.

The last one is the paid model. Since I rejected the first two models, the only option left is the paid model. But I don't want to adopt the paid model! I want people to understand and familiarize themselves with my game before deciding to pay for it. In addition, I think more people will be willing to try it if it is downloaded for free. I hope to convert these free players into paying players through a good game. As an individual independent developer with zero marketing budget, I think my greatest wealth is the game itself, so I released this game for free, hoping that it can get more attention through word of mouth from players.

So, what I did was to set the game to be free to download, so that players can explore about a quarter of the game content for free. At a specific point in the game, a door will appear, which can only be unlocked by spending $4.99, and this is the only IAP in the game. After paying, the game is completely unlocked and there will be no obstacles.

In my opinion, this is a very cool approach and I think it can fully leverage the demo-full game model of the PC era, allowing players to accept IAP, where players can try out a part of the game for free and then decide whether it is worth their while to unlock the full experience without having to leave the game or download anything else.

In fact, it is not as optimistic as I thought, especially on iOS. Many players left the game when they encountered the payment threshold and gave bad reviews, saying that they were misled and deceived. When they downloaded the game, the game showed Free, so they thought they could complete all the content for free. I think this is a difference in personal expectations. Players downloaded the game because it was free, hoping that this game would be what they like, but suddenly a payment requirement of $4.99 ended their experience. They were dissatisfied and left bad reviews, even though they accepted the free content of the game.

Some players said in their negative reviews that they only completed about 10% of the game before hitting the paywall. This is mainly because the in-game progress is almost entirely determined by how many grams of gems you collect. So, if a player only completes the free part without collecting as many gems as possible, the experience will definitely not be 25%, and they will hit the paywall quickly. My view at the time was that many people left the game before they could explore more of the game for free, and in fact most of the negative reviews were not about the game itself, but because of technical issues or monetization model.

I think there is another layer to this when it comes to expectations. Today, many mobile gamers are empowered by the idea of ​​free games. With the rise of free games, players have invested countless hours in games like Clash of Clans and Candy Crush Saga, most of whom have never made any purchases, and many of whom will never make any purchases in the future. The big companies in the mobile gaming market are certainly aware of this problem, but they have not resisted this trend or intended to solve this situation. In a typical free game, all content can be unlocked for free, but it only requires constant collection and consumption of game coins, watching video ads, or waiting for energy bars to recharge.

However, Nub's Adventure does the exact opposite. You either pay or you can quit. There is no other choice. But many mobile game players are beginning to want other ways to continue the game. They may be willing to wait a day, watch a video ad, or earn enough game coins to unlock it, but asking them to pay directly? Don't even think about it.

That's the problem with making your game free to download, you're going to attract a large group of players who only like free games, and forcing them to pay doesn't fit their expectations for free content. If I had added a price tag to Nub's Adventure right at launch, many people probably wouldn't have even considered it, and wouldn't have given it so many negative reviews. Interestingly, judging by the reviews, this isn't as much of an issue on Android. From my own statistics, Android users seem to be more tolerant of my monetization practices than iOS players.

It should be noted here that I am not saying there is anything wrong with mobile game players. It is understandable that they have such expectations because there are more free games to play without paying anything. The mobile gaming industry has undergone a huge transformation now, and this is not just the players' fault.

Regardless, it's sad to see so many reviews accusing me of forcing players to pay. What's worse is that I can't explain it to them on the App Store, these reviews just appear and stay there forever, and I can't express any opinions or comments. On the Android platform, I still have the opportunity to reply to the reviews and explain to them why I did this, and some players even changed their reviews because of this.

I must also mention an unexpected advantage to my monetization model that I never really considered before the game was released: some players encountered technical issues, but they didn't pay, so it saved a lot of time and effort, they didn't have to apply for a refund, and I didn't have to worry about the hassle of the process. Of course, technical issues also led to some bad reviews, but if they had paid in the beginning, this situation would be much worse. Nub's Adventure had technical issues at launch, so I'm glad that people didn't pay for it before they encountered these problems.

So, was the game a success in the end? I would say it was successful in some ways. I think the main problem was that I failed to explain the monetization model to the community, which made players feel cheated. Taking all these factors into consideration, I am still happy with this experiment. I didn't have to add free practices that affected the gameplay, and at the same time I was able to promote "Nub's Adventure" to more players, which is something that a paid game could not do, which was my main goal.

Pricing Issues

Before I talk about sales, I have some thoughts on pricing: It's really hard to price your own game. You have invested so much that it's hard to look at it objectively. Many people will tell you very different things. I think part of the problem depends on how you look at it. What are you basing your pricing on: the time you put into development, maximizing revenue, comparison with other games, fun, play time, artistic value? Or all of the above?

So, there is no final answer to the pricing, and in the end, I decided to price Nub's Adventure at $4.99 just because I felt it was worth it. I sometimes considered pricing lower due to the pressure of the mobile market, but I didn't do it in the end. Another reason is that I expect people to play the game normally for about 5 hours, which means an average of $100 million per hour, which sounds reasonable to me.

Although some reviews have said that my pricing was too high, I still think that Nub's Adventure was priced right. I don't want to argue about how much revenue different pricing could bring in, because there's no other way except to guess, I'm just happy with my decision.

Sales data: Monthly income of 83,000 yuan, 750 hours of spare time research and development

Now let's talk about something more substantial. Here are the revenue data of the game 35 days after its release: (total revenue of 83,000 yuan)

iOS revenue was $12,700, actual revenue was $8,540, and downloads were 197,000; Android platform revenue was 672 euros, actual revenue was 470.42 euros, and downloads were 17,000. (About RMB 83,000, these data include sales and downloads of "Nub's Adventure" between May 28 and July 1, please forgive the problem of different currency units on iOS and Android platforms, because these are data from App Store and Google Play.)

The reason why this game has so many downloads and revenue on iOS is mainly because Apple recommended my game as a 'Best New Game' in most regions around the world, including the United States, from June 11th to 18th. It is not the first position on this list, but the ninth position, which can be seen on most iPad devices without swiping the screen. During this recommendation period, "Nub's Adventure" received 179,000 downloads on iOS, so during the rest of the time, this game has only been downloaded 18,000 times on the iOS platform. Thanks to Apple's recommendation, the download chart is very good:

The corresponding Android graph doesn't have anything interesting to say about it, so you can imagine it as a smooth straight line.

On iOS and Android platforms, the download-to-pay conversion rate is about 1%, so before the platform share, each download can bring in about 5 cents in revenue. Currently, the overall score of "Nub's Adventure" on the Android platform is about 4.5 based on 976 reviews, while the overall score on the iOS platform is 3.9 based on 212 reviews. What I found interesting is that although iOS has more downloads, the number of reviews is not proportional to Android. Among iOS users in the United States, only 0.2% of players have written reviews, while among Android users worldwide, 42% have written reviews.

If you compare my income to my working hours (about 750 hours), this number is not high, especially considering that I live in a country with a relatively high consumption level (Austria). With the release of the Steam version and the continuous income from mobile games, my situation may change, but I can't make any predictions. Apple's iTunes Connect Dashboard also shows the number of visits to the App Store page. My game has been visited about 1.262 million times (I was shocked myself), so my game visit conversion rate is 15%. I don't know if this ratio is good or bad? Because there is no comparison data, I don't know how to say.

So, am I satisfied with the sales figures? Actually, I am quite satisfied, because although Nub's Adventure took hundreds of hours, it was all done in my spare time from work and study. I can call it something between a hobby and a part-time job. For a job, such a salary is obviously too low, and for a hobby, it is incredible, so I am still happy about it.

Recommended by Apple

I would be lying if I said getting featured by Apple wasn't a goal of mine. I do want to get featured by Apple, and as you can see from my last iOS game Rico: A Tale of Two Brothers, it's the only thing that matters to me. Get featured, and your game has a chance to win. Not featured, and the game loses. After a week of releasing the game and still not getting featured by Apple, I almost gave up on the project, thinking it would never happen. There are so many games coming out every day that have the best chance of getting featured after release.

During this time, I was very active on the Touch Arcade forums, and since the site is focused on iOS games, my game received a lot of attention and positive feedback. After the release, a Touch Arcade employee downloaded the game, but unfortunately, he encountered a bug in the game, so many people decided not to buy the full version of the game. After reporting the problem, he said that he might have to 'give up on the game'. Fortunately, I found and fixed the bugs quickly, and pushed out an update a few days later, so Touch Arcade finally wrote a review for me on June 9th, and gave Nub's Adventure a full 5 points rating, which made me very happy. Although I expected good reviews, I didn't expect it to be so high.

There are rumors that Apple people will consider Touch Arcade reviews when recommending games, but no one can confirm this statement, but I can be sure that Apple people will definitely notice it, so since June 11, "Nub's Adventure" has been recommended by the App Store for a week. Frankly speaking, I have no predictions about revenue and download numbers because I don't know how to predict. The next day, when I went to check the numbers on the iTunes Connect page, it actually reached 16,800, but the revenue for that day was only $123.

At first I was worried that not enough people were interested in the full game, so I decided to wait a day. By June 12, the game downloads reached 45,400 downloads and $897 in revenue, which was much better. This was also the highest number of downloads for Nub's Adventure in a single day. However, although the downloads have declined since then, the revenue figures have continued to grow. So my conclusion is that although the number of players who want to download the game has decreased, there are still players who have downloaded it who want to experience the full version. The revenue data peaked on June 14, with $1,550 in revenue that day, and in the following days, the revenue exceeded $1,000 per day. Interestingly, the download numbers have almost been declining since being recommended, and the sales figures have declined more gradually. I still feel very satisfied to see so many downloads.

Unexpected events after release

After the game is released, bugs will appear, which is of course to be expected. As a developer working alone and doing research and development in his spare time, it is impossible for your game to be bug-free. Testing will help, but it is absolutely impossible to eliminate all bugs.

USD Account BUG

The dollar bug is the biggest failure. Because of this problem, many iOS players cannot pay for the full content, which not only makes players unhappy, but also reduces my income a lot, which is disadvantageous to everyone. Symptoms: Players want to unlock the full version, but suddenly the game freezes or crashes.

After the game was released, some players commented on this bug and posted it on the Touch Arcade forum. I can't explain this problem because I was busy solving bugs at the time. When I tested it, I used several devices without any problems. There were no problems with testing and Apple review, so I wondered what went wrong?

At some point, I realized that this was a regional issue, that European players didn't seem to have this problem, while many American players were having payment issues. This suspicion turned out to be correct, but the explanation I gave at the beginning was wrong, as I mistakenly thought that IAP unlocking wasn't rolling out to all of Apple's servers. After searching, I found that other developers had encountered similar issues, but after waiting for 24 hours, the problem was still not resolved.

The more feedback I collected, the stranger the problem became. Because users in the same region often have different errors, some players said that they would get the error after trying many times, but suddenly it worked inexplicably. But what is certain is that this bug only appears in specific regions, and the United States is one of them. After the game was released for 32 hours, I almost didn't sleep all the time, just busy solving bug problems. I also tested it myself and changed my account to the US region, and I also encountered the leader bug, which made me excited.

Then I started to solve the bug. Why did the app crash suddenly? Why didn't it always crash? An hour later, I found out the problem: as an app developer, you need to ask Apple's server for the price of the IAP and then show it to the player. The price is returned as a string. During this process, when I tested the IAP function, Apple's server responded with 4.99. But after publishing, due to different App Store accounts, sometimes it returned 4.99 euros. What follows is very technical.

Some of you may already know what the problem is, my (Java) code is:

 String money = …; // String as returned from Apple's server String question = “Do you want to unlock the full game for %money%?”; question question = question.replaceAll(“%money%”, money);

I don't know if anyone has noticed, if you don't know Java's String.replaceAll method (that is, method, I didn't know it before), you can check the tutorial, this sentence is particularly important:

Yes, the dollar sign replacement string is used as a so-called reference. Developers can reuse these source strings, such as "$1" refers to the verification process. In my game, this replacement string is "$4.99", so this method tries to find a fourth reference, but there is no fourth set of data in the expression, not even one. But I didn't find it.

It was actually very simple to fix this problem, but it took a lot of time to find it and it made me go through a very stressful period. Because I released the game on Thursday, the bug fix had to wait until Friday, and game updates can only be submitted from Monday to Friday, so I had to wait until the next Monday. For developers, this may be a lesson that many people should learn from.

Never trust external data

Although I have to blame myself for this problem, I am also dissatisfied with Apple's technical settings. Why does it sometimes return a string and sometimes not? Why didn't Apple find this problem in the sandbox test? If I lived in a dollar zone country, I might have found this problem earlier. So I also think that "Nub's Adventure" was not recommended at the beginning because of a bug, but this is just speculation. Although I screwed up, I still fixed the bug before being recommended by Apple, otherwise my revenue data would be even uglier.

Screen switching bug

There have been some reports from iOS players that the game is displaying weirdly and is rotated on the screen, here are the screenshots I received.

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From the picture, the screen is rotated to the bottom and strangely located on the right half, you can see part of the game logo, which should be at the top of the screen. What's even more strange is that although the graphics are wrong, the input is still correct, which means that players can still play the game even though the position is wrong. One user even sent me a screenshot of the correct screen position, but I didn't experience such problems on my device, so I had to give up. It was too painful for me, but after several hours of trying and testing, I decided to admit defeat and the bug won.

Low-end machine crashes

This isn't just a problem for my game, it seems like more and more mobile game developers are running into this problem. While Android has always been fragmented in terms of device types, there are now occasional issues between different iOS hardware. Especially when your game requires a lot of processor power, low-end devices tend to crash. Developers try to support as many devices as possible, but often have to make trade-offs because some games are no longer suitable for older devices. But Apple and Android are not clear about the minimum requirements, so users with iPhone 4s can download and purchase all the apps in the App Store, but many games run very badly on these devices. Many developers are required to list the device types their game is compatible with in the game description, but many users don't read it.

Don't Starve also received negative reviews for being incompatible with low-end devices.

Nub's Adventure has received a lot of bad reviews for its incompatibility with low-end devices, with both Android and iOS shutting down the app when memory is exhausted. This is particularly painful on iOS devices, as the game crashes and users are returned to the home screen. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who has encountered similar problems, for example, the recently released mobile version of Don't Starve on iOS also suffered bad reviews due to crashes.

The game states the device requirements in the first line of the game description. However, users rarely read it, so the game currently has a rating of only 3 points in the App Store (worse than mine). I think both Apple and Google should work hard to improve this aspect.

User Reviews

Since the release of the game, I have received a lot of player reviews, and I want to share them with you here, because some of them are interesting, some are very happy, and some are very disappointing. Because the reviews of "Nub's Adventure" surprised me, for example, there are 5 points reviews saying "the game is OK", and some people say "this game is terrible", and even some people say "this is the worst game I have ever seen". Some of the criticisms are completely reasonable, and some are incomprehensible.

These reviews are all from the App Store. I wish I could reply to them, tell them the story of the game development, explain why I did it, or just say thank you to them, but I can't. After the game was released, I read the game reviews many times a day, but after reading a lot of negative reviews, I had to stop, especially during the period when it was recommended by Apple. I didn't want negative reviews to affect my mood. It took me about a week to really calm down these negative reviews.

Lessons Learned:

Getting featured by Apple is crucial, but it won’t make you rich.

I think my sales data shows how hard it is to succeed on the App Store. While it's cool to be featured, it doesn't mean your game will be a hit. There is a lot more competition for users for these featured games. For mobile games, being featured on Apple's front page is glorious, but it only means a limited time advantage.

After that, it doesn't matter. I can't give a good clue about what makes you successful in getting featured by Apple. Sometimes it can be word of mouth, marketing or your game is good enough. I think Nub's Adventure got featured because it is a unique game (at least on mobile).

Understand people’s expectations

This may not sound special as many people have experienced this, but it is just my advice to other developers. I can say that it hurts when people say I exploit them and I don't want to go through that again, although it can make you immune, but I definitely don't want to go through it a second time.

What I learned from this experience is that I should consider things more from the perspective of the players. What do users expect? What do they want the game to provide? How can I better respect the needs of users? What needs to be improved in the game?

The App Store review team does not work on weekends. I used to think that a company as big as Apple would have people on duty on weekends, but from my personal experience, at least the review team does not work on weekends, so if your game has very serious bugs, it is best not to solve them on weekends. My lesson is that I will never set the release date on Thursday again, because it is easy to delay your bug fixes until next week if it is too close to the weekend, which is very harmful to the game.

Don't rely on Apple to test everything for you

Yes, Apple also has a review and testing process, but if the standards are not met, they will simply reject it. In the case of Nub's Adventure, they clearly did not find any bugs, and frankly, I doubt they tested it many times, which is fine, because app developers should not expect Apple to find all the bugs for you. But before this, I didn't think so. At that time, I thought, "If the game has fatal problems, Apple will find it, and they don't want such a game in their store." But I was wrong. Although they will test your game, you can't expect them to find all the errors. Sometimes you may not encounter certain problems when testing yourself.

Therefore, do not regard Apple’s review as the final test of the game, and do not expect that there will be no bugs after it is released. Once your app is approved by Apple, it may still have bugs.

in conclusion

Developing this game for iOS and Android has been a rollercoaster experience for me. I've been through a lot. I haven't become rich overnight, but at least I've improved my development skills in many ways, and that alone makes it worth it. Every time I finish a game, I can make the next one better. If I keep doing this, at some point in my life, I may be able to become a full-time independent developer and earn a better income.