Postmortem of a commercial failure: My first Android Game App | Hacker News Reader

Postmortem of a commercial failure: My first Android Game App

irrlicht3d.org

41 pointsirrlichthn23 comments

I had never seen this game, or heard anything about it. Your first enemy is obscurity.

Now I've downloaded your game and played it. Here are my thoughts:

- It blares music at you as soon as you run it. Bad first impression.

- No tutorial, no introduction, no obvious help function.

- There's a slowly descending purple-and-black background and a lot of green rain. Oh, look, there are some flyspecks at the top of columns of rain. I put my finger on the screen, and a new column of rain starts falling upward. Oh! It's a shooter, and if I'm shooting up, then the rain must be... whoops, I'm dead.

Flyspecks? Yeah, it looks like you don't bother detecting screen density and changing the graphics accordingly. I can't see anything interesting on a 300dpi screen.

There's nothing to suggest that the gameplay is innovative, or surprising. Does it get better later? Or even different?

I agree. This game is not that good. Its failure might have something to do with Google Play store users being stingy but I think mostly it's because the game is not that good.

Personally, I view The side-scrolling space shooter genre as a niche market. People who enjoy and seek out S^4 games are looking for either a 'bullet hell' game like Ikaruga(1) or a nostalgic game like R-type(2). Side-scrollers are great game design practice, but the market is full of very discerning customers that would much rather pay 5$ for an emulator than buy an unpolished, depth-less, programming experiment.

I do not say this to bash the game. I have a list of android apps I hope to program, and a side-scroller is halfway down that list. At the top of that list is a tip calculator. It would be foolish to charge 10 cents for a tip calculator. I would be even more foolish to draw broad conclusions from the very small number of sales. But the most foolish thing I could do is call it quits before I get to the apps in my list that don't exist in the market in a dozen variations.

(1) http://youtu.be/EGNSdcy-apU?t=2m30s

(2) https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rty...

Like dsr_, I had never seen this game before, and he is totally right saying that your lack of promotion is a mistake. I just tried it, and I spent nearly 15 minutes shooting the bad guys. I believe it has a bit of potential.

You should give it a try with a real promotional effort, bigger objects (I can barely distinguish enemies on my screen (KDDI pantech is06 for info)), and an ad-supported model. Even though this may not be the next angry birds, you can definitely get away with more than 16euro if you promote your game correctly.

"It's difficult to make money on Google Play with normal, sold apps."

What I'm missing in this article is the part where he published the same game on a different app store and made good money.

Without that part, the complaint is not very convincing. There are many reasons why a product can be a commercial failure. Most products are.

I believe it was patio11 who observed that it's incredibly hard to make money with paid games, and this is a perfect example. Your game has potential, but it's lacking in polish and this is your competition: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.int13.shog...

The competition has less than 5000 installs. It's super hard to make money on Android with paid apps.

I don't know if you have tried this, but I did with my app, that I release 4 weeks ago:

Show the user a dialog after 3 days of use (I additionally make sure that the app has been opened at least 5 times) asking him or her to review your app on google play if he enjoyed using it and you will upgrade his app to the pro version for free.

You can't check if the user actually reviewed your app, or if the user gave it a good or a bad review, but I had good experiences with that. That's a simple mechanic that will get you some nice reviews, because a user that regularly uses your app after 3 days probably wont hate your app. :-)

You can easily compare the result of this by checking this link to my app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster

We are both in the same category of downloads (between 1k and 5k - I currently have 1,7k downloads) and its 47 reviews vs 8.

I really like this idea. I've downloaded plenty of apps that pop up a dialog asking you to review them. I've always found the pop up to be fairly pesky, but I think I would change my mind if it offered the better version for doing so.

Totally irrelevant, but your blog is revealing email addresses of commenters. Do you really want that?

Some of the more successful indie games tend to market well before release in order to stir up interest in the game. Would Minecraft have been as successful if Notch just kept quiet and released a paid copy instead of releasing an alpha after a few days of development so everyone could talk about this new cool new sandbox game being developed? Probably not.

Given the ease at which you can post information on the internet these days, this should be a no-brainer for any modern developer.

Have you been considering replacing the paid version of your app with a free version but supported with ads? This model looks more profitable on Android Market.

Yes, thought about that. But then I took a look at how much you get paid though ads and decided that it's not worth it. You need a really, really quite big amount of users for getting money out of ads, and the game isn't the type of blockbuster game it would need to be for this.

Not a Blockbuster game? What did you expect? You're game does not offer something unique to the genre. There's a lot competition to your game and many of the other games are better executed. Maybe you should hire someone to do the graphics for you, especially the explosion.

Try in-app payments for new types of weapons, or something along those lines. Free with in-app upgrades seems to be the way to go on Android.

As an Android user I must say that I really hate ads. I don't mind paying for apps, but I don't use apps that are infected with ads (even if they are free). In fact, if there's a premium and a free version available I almost always install the premium version first.

Ads can work if you follow one very simple rule: Respect your users.

I have one two day app where the adverts are only shown in the option menu and with enough pre-padding and active padding that an accidental click is impossible. A user almost has to search for the advert and I'm still getting good numbers and a good CTR of over 2%.

Ads shouldn't be displayed during gameplay also. Ads should be reserved for title pages and options menus.

As a proto-counterexample, Angry Birds ad placement is such that it gets in the way of playing the game. I'm wondering what psychobabble has prevented them from providing a simple paid version.

Another common tactic is to force-insert an ad at the top and shift all content down. Not only is it poor programming, but it is a con to get accidental clicks. The end result is the user is annoyed and you have a bad review heading your way.

I think the comments in the article are really telling. If there is one lesson the author should take away from the experience it is this: BUILD A NARRATIVE. If you passed High School English you have enough tools to do so, therefore, there is really no excuse except laziness.

Do anyone else have some feedback on this article? I wonder if it's really this difficult to make money with android...

I'd like to know as well, but from what I've seen just watching the top apps is that the people who make the most money have in-app purchases. Part of it probably also has to do with marketing, I don't know if the author of this article did a lot of advertising or promotion, but it is important.

I think there are hundreds of thousands of apps in the market (not sure about the exact numbers). So naturally there is some competition. Build it and they will come probably won't work.

I miss some notes on marketing in the article.

Without trying to sound too harsh, and apologies to the developer it does, this seems to be a case of "Launch mediocre game with no marketing to Google Play and make no money." I'm not really sure what he was expecting.

I suggest:

1. Use this as a learning experience for how the Google Play store works.

2. Find an artist to work with (this looks like programmer art).

3. Develop a game that innovates on the genre you wish to work in.

4. Try again, and keep trying.

It's not like launching games on the iPhone app store is any easier. Especially since most professional studio games are moving to a free + in-app-purchase model, which is hard to compete with if you are charging for your app and don't have a full team working on it.

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