Short life and one game adventures

Post about the hard, however, and very short life of a mobile game on Android. In the previous publication, I promised to tell you about what ultimately it will turn out from my idea of ​​gathering the game in a bare place and let it float free.


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Preparation for promotion

The main financial credo of the entire project was and remains the principle of minimizing the funds spent on ... whatever it is. Including on promotion. Moreover, the space sums that promoters offer for their various kinds of services are missing from me as a class. That is why it was decided to storm all known and unknown places where it was proposed “absolutely free” to write and / or post a review, make a video, praise me as a young man, etc. Storm with a proposal to help somehow tell the world about my creation.

Somewhere in the vastness of Habr a useful post was found with a rather extensive list of sites where you can play your game a little. Thanks to the kind person for this list. I immediately began to write letters, register on dozens of portals, fill out some forms, send to anyone the APK file with the game and other boring things. I had about two days and a bunch of letters in three dozen directions. I rather quickly abandoned this venture, because in response, I received, at best, automatic responses sent on duty, and this seemed to have no visible effect.

The first few days the game was stagnating at the bottom of the Top Free New Games and attracted several dozen people a day.

Habraeffekt

Sadly looking at the green snake of new users crawling along the bottom of the graphics, I thought it was time to combine something pleasant with something useful. And do not tell you about your game your favorite community. At the same time and invite, maybe I'll get it. No sooner said than done! Fresh Crimean morning smelled out the window with the first pre-spring gusts of warm air alternating with the singing of birds and the preparation of the fast began. In it, I re-experienced the best moments of a difficult but interesting burden of creating a game, and shared my experiences.

And from that day the game began a real ascent to the tops of the top. The next morning, the game revealed a nehily increase in attitudes, and instead of the shameful dozens of new users, a whole 341 points had accumulated overnight. This deal has made me very happy. The users were also happy, exposing honestly earned five stars in the game rating. The game gradually rose on the Top of New Free, having got out as a result in the first thirty.

The next few weeks were accompanied by a non-illusory growth of new installations of several hundred users, and at the peak of their flight to the heights of the day gathered 5344 freshly baked labyrinth lovers.

Interest growth

These days I started receiving letters from various publishers, advertisers, promoters and from users who liked the game. The conversation with the first three categories was short, everyone wanted to help the Labyrinth to rise even higher for impressive sums, offered a translation into French, make a promotional video, be published on Amazon / Samsung and so on. And with many players turned out interesting conversations. I was sincerely happy that many people liked the game.

Later, I still decided to undergo very unpleasant registration procedures in the stores of Amazon and Samsung. The torment with documents, scans, certificates, bills and other things ended with zero result in Amazon (not a single installation for all time) and a complete failure of attempts to register at the Samsung store (they didn’t believe this tacky piece of paper is my official TIN).

I was also amazed that the game had not generated a single error by this time! Although the number of sessions exceeded ten thousand a day. The sessions themselves, however, were rather short (only two and a half minutes on average). I mentally thanked the creators of Unity3d for the excellent product: it was thanks to this chic environment that the build turned out to be bug-free.

Sudden death throes

Everything was going fine. In Google Play search by the words “Labyrinth” or “Labyrinth”, the game jumped out in the top ten results, appeared and began to advance in the general Top Free (eventually ended up among the top fifty positions) and continued to demonstrate the wonders of growth installations per day.

Until then, quite unexpectedly for me, it was not a black day in the life of the Labyrinth. The game was cut out of the Top New. Some invisible electronic doctor (concurrently also a seer) diagnosed a terrible disease, and in a gloomy almost apologetic voice, said that the patient was given no more than two or three weeks.

The game began its fall on all fronts, headlong sliding lower and lower. The rating began to fall (3.72 at the moment, 931 voters), and the number of sessions. Began to appear messages about failures (as many as 9 pieces to date). But, as disabled machinists from Sorokin's phantasmagorias, the game “on its own two” still reached the mark of one hundred thousand installations. Being, however, is not the worst result.

The traditional final spoon of tar

I left the description of the most interesting for last. Profit. In nearly two months of his fun short life, the Admob Maze on advertisements collected as many (as a matter of fact, a little) three hundred dollars.



Part of the graph, showing the first weeks, did not fit, but there are six bucks, honestly, honestly. The peak of this picturesque mountain represents the moment of removal from the Top New. To describe the picture in more detail, I post additional matrials of Admob. Three tables show statistics for parts of the world, for Europe and America, respectively.

findings

As one well-known participant in the community, only those games that hang in the top of the United States and Britain earn, the rest suck their paws. The labyrinth did not even get to the paw, it is illusionary and with a large scale salted fish smaller in size (tuna). But is this a reason to despair!

What I associate such an outcome of events. First, the uncontrolled parameter of eCPM (1k impression fee), which lives solely on its own life, has always seemed to me a highly suspicious person. I still do not understand whether it is possible to somehow influence it and even on what it depends. As can be seen from the data in the table, it suddenly took the highest values ​​in Greece (one and a half dollars). Based on this conclusion, I come to the conclusion that I really little understand what kind of animal it is.

Secondly, I see the session time to be too short. Still, in one or two minutes you really won't play, and you won't look at advertisements. With this it is understandable, the game as a whole did not catch everyone. However, if you look at the graph, it turns out that two minutes is an average for all the puzzles.



Thirdly, it is clear from the table with geodata that the game was not particularly popular outside of Russia / Ukraine. Or due to the fact that in a foreign top she did not smell, or simply the format of the game seemed boring to the gamers there. In both cases, I can’t even imagine how the situation can be corrected in the framework of free methods.

According to the geodata, only the fact that a certain number of aliens from the Unknown region watched the advertisements and got a little familiar with our culture makes everyone happy. I think this is a good achievement in the field of promoting content into space.