The game "Democracy": Liberal Values ​​* Russian AppStore

I hope that most of you have already managed to play the game “ Democracy ” on your iOS / Android / WP7 devices. This is a satirical sketch about Russian politics, based on the mechanics of match-3-evolution, a freemium model of distribution and, of course, recognizable characters.

The development of the first version of the game took 20 days and the efforts of three people - a programmer, a producer and an artist. Literally a few days after the appearance in the AppStore, the game reached the position of Top Free # 1 in Russia. In the six months since its release last December, Democracy was downloaded 330,000 users of iOS devices; more than 100,000 people install each update; 15-20,000 people play it every day. In the first month of life, the game came to self-sufficiency and still brings joy and happiness to its creators.
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This article is about “Democracy” and about our acquaintance with the Russian segment of the AppStore market. In the following materials we will try to tell you about the experience on the domestic Android Market / Google Play sites and the Windows Marketplace.

Comrade, do not lose hope:
... Russia will shake from sleep
And in GameCenter rating lists
Write our names!

How did it all begin?

At the beginning of the fall of 2011, we (the Minsk company NeskinSoft ) had the idea to create “mutating” Color Lines, where collecting five or more balls of the same color in a line does not just clean the field, as in the classic game, but gets the next color ball which, along with three more such gives new, etc.

To understand how this idea can be playable, the programmer slowly collects a working prototype, and the experiments begin. The number of balls required for “crimping” varies from five to three, compared to the classic Color Lines, the iPhone screen does not fit all the cells of the playing field without sacrificing ergonomics. Naturally, this directly affects the balance of the game - we are experimenting with the weights of the probabilities of balls falling out, with the control, the size of objects. In October, the Zhukov setting and working prototypes appear.


Fig. 1 - Egyptian "Scarabs" - a prototype of the modern Russian "Democracy"

We implement convenient drag and drop objects, experiment with settings, and at the end of October, one beautiful Minsk game designer looks at our prototype and says:

- Have you seen on Triple Town Facebook? Take a look.

And the concept of the game already in the evening takes on a complete form . It became clear that an urgent need to finish your project, because clones of the puzzle about bears and houses will soon be filled up with all the stores. By the way, soon it almost happened, but we did.

A week later, we still suffer from the settings, we look at the sketches, and in the table talk (I'm not driving), the idea is born to run in a game on the Russian market.


Fig. 2 - What we did after 5 updates.

Release only on the Russian market. Why?

Russian market. Simple and clear, with three leading blogs that make a hit from any project. We speak Russian, why not to try on a narrower segment before release in the global market? Is there life in the Russian AppStore?

Courage and recklessness in the approach, growing in runet of the Rospil media wave, indignation with shameless castling before the elections - and here in the brains of the developers who like the videos “And we are not in a row” and the photo of the Medveput doll, the idea is to launch a game with political characters. Two hours later, a list of all the heroes appeared, and the work began to boil.

It was very important for us that the chains of game figures were as clear as possible to users even without a description (although we also put our whole soul into the creation of descriptions, maybe even two) and wore a sharp social tint. The state order, the saw, the officials, the President, the Prime Minister, a deputy with a blue bucket and voters - it was on the surface. The pioneer appeared just three hours before the game’s submission, and the state budget and the new characters of the political scene, Navalny, Prokhorov with his assets appeared already in updates.

Is there life in the Russian AppStore?

I want to reach the President and cut him,
Olya, 6 years old.

The events that took place before and after the elections excited the politically active part of society, creating a powerful information wave, which threw us into the top Russian AppStore. In the first stages, not a single Belarusian ruble was spent on advertising a product; publication was carried out without a publisher.

The release took place on Saturday, December 10, 2011, when the first protesters came to the Swamp. The first day of sales, by the way, brought $ 0.7 and 68 downloads (I even know the first buyer). On Monday, the first material in the Siberian online media was written about us, and the links to the game went away to familiar microbloggers and reviewers of iOS products.

The reaction was extremely controversial - from “complete hopelessness” and “I still have to work here” to “guys, download it soon, until you saw it out of the AppStore”. Two days later, the situation changed dramatically, and we were first in the second position of the top, and then, with a record 20,369 downloads per day, we broke into Top Free # 1 Overall in the Russian AppStore. More than 150 retweets (RT) and 4500 link clicks helped a lot to the growth.

However, we did not stay there for long - the organic traffic quickly ended and we safely flew out of the Top 10. Having collected a good audience in a couple of days - this is exactly what we expected when releasing a free application - the game unexpectedly appears in Top-Grossing 10-k and, so far (six months after its release), it doesn’t fall below 25 lines.


Fig. 3 - Downloads

By the time of launch, there was no time left to think through the monetization of the application - the bill was not even for days. The ability to pay for the game appeared only after the full limit of moves was exhausted (and 2000 turns is a few hours of continuous play). And for the purchase of in-game gold, there was only one IAP for $ 0.99. Do we need to describe our joy when even with such an “ambiguous” approach the game was in Top Grossing? Already in the 1st update, we added the possibility of buying a certain amount of gold for $ 1.99, in the second - for $ 2.99, $ 4.99 and $ 12.99. See fig. 4, he speaks for himself. As it is not strange - the most profitable purchase is just the last IAP - 500,000 gold for $ 12.99.


Fig. 4 - Sales in the AppStore (orange bursts - updates)

The subsequent 2nd update was one of the most memorable and most controversial. In it, we introduced a new character, in the opinion of players similar to Alexei Navalny (in the game he is called "Lawyer" and "blogger"), who was given the ability to move any figures across the field. But so that the player does not use it too often, after each use, the figure of Navalny is sent to the SIZO for a certain number of moves. Such a straightforward approach to the implementation of the complexity curve.

Well, of course, the balance in the game "flew." The character (even being a paid option) greatly simplified the game and people with less effort began to get to the final figures. Losing to a mass audience, we suddenly lost paying hardcore players. We had to add new figures at the end of the chains (at this point Gandhi’s “last true democrat”, Jesus and Alexander Sergeevich “our all” appear in the game), we adjusted the weights for the “KGB colonels” teleporting around the field, dangling the “pioneers” and experimented with the number of moves before the “blogger” release. Users wrote indignant letters, and two even asked for a refand. As a result, the balance is more or less restored, but we no longer conduct experiments on living people (he crossed his fingers behind his back, coughing into a fist, - editor's note).

The latest update to date has introduced a “quest” component into the game: tasks have appeared in the game, the fulfillment of which awards the user with a three-liter can with earned profit, which is placed in his personal “Cellar of Glory”. Each completed quest is encouraged by a small cash reward.

In the near future, we are preparing to launch fresh updates, in one of which we hope once again to seriously surprise the user.


Fig. 5 - Cellar with achivka.

In conclusion, success factors

Why did we do it? Here are some of the key success factors of the game “Democracy” on the Russian market in order, as it seems to us, of their importance:

• 1. Simple, clear and current setting
• 2. Excellent gameplay and lack of competitors at the time of release in the mobile market
• 3. Perfect gameplay implementation for iPhone with limited screen size.
• 4. Free app with free2play monetization

PS Technologies

For those interested: the game is written in C ++ and Objective-C (for working with platform-related functions), the Cocos2d-x cross-platform graphics engine was used. The development was carried out under Windows, so the user is pleased with the most different and unexpected bugs. Up until the last update, all UIs were implemented by graphics, but we are working to reduce the size of the application and gradually move to the software generation of user interfaces.

We implemented all the ports on Android and WP7 on our own, including resolutions that are not very popular with iOS developers such as 240x320, which spoiled a lot of blood for our programmers and artists - but we are ready to talk about this separately ... if you are interested.

PPS Links

If you still have never played Democracy, download it for free at the following links:

1. j.mp/democracy-ru , iOS / Universal, (iTunes)
2. j.mp/demo-aa , Android, (Google Play)
3. j.mp/demo-wp7 , WP7 (Windows Marketplace)

No, by God, I saw 5 young Yandex employees at the same table, all with iPhones, and no one has “Democracy.” Where does the world go?

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*) Liberal Values ​​- letters. "Lave", trans. from Pelevinsky.