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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

We are in a similar place right now. I'm looking forward to seeing what people have to say.

Blight of the Immortals only has about 50 daily active users. We would like to grow a little to get a better idea about what people like and don't like about the game.

https://blight.ironhelmet.com

We've run some Facebook and Google ads and it looks like it costs around 35 - 40c a click. We only get about 10% sign-up so we are paying about $4 a user. (From what I have read that's about what to expect)

We still have a lot of cool stuff to add, but we make about $2 per new account, so I guess that means we are about halfway there :)

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Let me give you my user experience and see if you can help us play your game more: About seven of us played a game of Blight of the Immortals in turn-based mode, namely because we all have jobs and would be unable to get to the devices appropriately. The turn-based functionality is an add-on that causes immense game issues where characters can be held for long periods of time in stun spells, sometimes because of recharge rates and other items indefinitely. That being said, we love the game, just the quirks of having the turn base sit on top of the real-time throws some wrenches in.

The items for you to take this up a notch are the following: 1. Update things from time to time to make it newer-ish. The game does not feel like it has changed any of the times that we have played it over the four years (has it been that long)

2. Turn based for the die-hard workers.

3. Figure out the Iron Key for paying to play for a period of time. That really worked out for getting us to have one person pay for a key and then we could all play. If a person wants to get new friends to start a separate game, then you have an in for a new key purchase.

4. Ask your users, send an e-mail out to everybody and ask them what their issues are. Ask those that love it to post on their facebook / twitter / etc.

Hey Agustus, Thanks very much for the feedback!

The new Blight of the Immortals is an all new game built on the ashes of the old game.

The game infact didn't change from about 2010 when I stopped working on it till just a few months ago when we opened up a beta of the new game.

We haven't reached out to the players of the old game because we're still fleshing out the content and adding new features. We've started doing a little advertising to see how well things like the home page and tutorial are working.

When the only traffic to the site is ads, you can get a good idea of how the game stands on its own.

The only way the game will be big "success" is if we generate enough cash to do paid user acquisition.

I'm not an expert, but a 10% sign up rate doesn't sound too bad. Also, depending on how you look at it, you could double your active users for $200 right now (or $100 if you make back $2 per account)? It sounds like a bit of a bargain, as those users will probably tell their friends, etc.

From my perspective, the game looked interesting, but I also had a bit of trouble figuring out what the gameplay would be like - I can kind of guess from the screenshots, but it's not really enough. The trailer (while very nicely done), didn't show anything from the game as far as I can tell, and the "play now" button takes you to a registration screen. I suspect this causes a lot of potential users to bounce right there - edge cases who might be persuaded to stay if the "play now" button just dropped them as anonymous into a game (and asked for their email a few minutes in).

I pretty much immediately dropped the idea of advertising without even looking into it, mostly because it's currently a completely free tool. But I didn't realize it was that affordable. I may actually look into that now!

Congrats on the 50 active users :)

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