From 13.5M installs to 499 active devices | Hacker News Reader

From 13.5M installs to 499 active devices

games.lukicengineering.com

26 pointsboban-lukic14 comments

"The new game is REDLINE: Longest Burn, an arena roguelite for Android. It is free, it works offline, and as of this writing almost nobody has played it. Discovery is my problem to solve this time."

As it will be for most software, imho. There's a limited suite of extremely popular software, and some locale-specific ones. Everything else is buried in a mountain of "the rest", where it's near-impossible to discover what's worth one's time (read: so >99.99% of potential users won't bother, and stick to well-known apps).

Logical consequence is that most of "the rest" turns into abandonware.

Big Tech's algorithms behind what's promoted on app stores, commercial interests, use of AI: all just make this worse. I don't see easy solutions to this problem. But if/when found, I suspect it'll be through community-run / grassroots efforts. "Monetization" otoh just turns everything to shit...

What was the marketing budget?

You mentioned buying ads. I have a similar issue now, launching a game, I will need to ensure a constant influx of players.

In my case the game is multiplayer though, so the value of the game goes up with more traffic (more players = more fun), and hopefully some of them will come back (LTV+) and refer their friends.

So I think it can make sense to buy traffic even for an ad supported game, depending on th circumstances. Because even if I lose money per bought visitor, the alternative (empty servers) is much worse.

In your case, there's probably some feedback loops there too: more traffic = more downloads = more reviews = higher trust + algo promotes you more. So here is the "dead game" problem seems to be extremely relevant also, and it probably takes a certain amount of "energy" to hit escape velocity.

Author here. The downloads at the bottom of the page are the raw Play Console exports plus the merged monthly CSV the chart is drawn from. Happy to answer questions about either era.

"Same developer, same store, twelve years apart."

"Local brand, rebadged hardware, ethernet port on the back, internet features in the menu"

"Keeping the download tiny was a decision, not a side effect."

God I hate the AI slop that I can instantly call out. If you MUST have your blog written by AI, please please please please implement a skill or something that does a second pass using this https://tropes.fyi/tropes-md so at least we remove all the USUAL tells. I cannot stand to read articles like this any longer.

Fair, AI was in the loop. I'm not a native English speaker. I laid out what happened and in what order, and AI turned it into readable English. Nothing in it is hallucinated: every number comes from the raw Play Console exports at the bottom of the page. Without the tool people correct my grammar, with it they correct my style. Point taken though, I'll run the next one through your list.

And yes, this reply went through AI too.

Both are particularly badly written. Story ok. Post and reply vocab tells, fingernails on chalkboard. Broken ESL is genuinely preferable here.

Try to not get more upset when readers coach you than when the LLM rewrites you. Both happen, both are fine.

Ftr, I think you are being needlessly harsh. I enjoyed reading OP's story.

I think HN somehow automatically bans AI comments, so you should probably use Google Translate or something instead. (I know it uses similar tech but it doesn't have the same cringe writing style for some reason.)

Edit: Personally I also strongly prefer reading broken English over LLM writing.

The Broken English write to you we will (wink)

You can write in your native language and have an llm translate it, or you could write it in English to the best of your abilities and use an LLM to fix grammar mistakes.

Both these options are better than llm slop style.

It's quite funny that (I am neither an English native speaker) I cannot tell anything bad and all your writing sounds great to me, but English natives see the AI in an obvious manner.

I downloaded the game and played for a few minutes. It's pretty competently put together although not really my kind of game.

The problem is that as far as I can tell you are in a very crowded space now. There are many similar free to play games. Some of them are definitely better. This doesn't stand out.

Still deserves more than zero downloads.

TBF at the very start of the Android ecosystem you could make literally anything and get lots of downloads. I got a completely free Galaxy Nexus from Google because my app was one of the first to cross 10k downloads on the play store....the app was a polynomials calculator.

Interesting story, indeed worth reading. You are one of the smart Europeans that used oversea platforms at your profit. These platforms are shadowbanning European content by design. Hope we get similar platforms here in Europe soon. Well done.

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