Transformice story: indie game with 60 million users
In May 2010, Transformice appeared, which was created by only two developers for their own pleasure and in their free time. This game belongs to the multiplayer platformer class. Transformice owes its success to publications on such platforms as 4chan and Something Awful.
After 4 years and many updates, 60 million accounts have already been registered in the game.
')
We can not say that the development of the game Transformice has been completed. On the contrary, this game is under active development. And today I would like to tell you that we have been doing these four years both for the development of the game and for its monetization, because making the game is not easy, but even harder is to make money from it. So the numbers!
In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marshald and I worked in a French video game development company, he worked as a developer, and I worked as a graphic designer / technical artist. Jean-Baptiste created small browser games before, it was his hobby. And once he asked me to help create a new game with improved graphics.
I was amazed at his ability to make fun and funny games. Naturally, I agreed and offered him a story about mice that use boxes and boards to help their mouse friends avoid traps and get cheese: Transform mice. We then endowed with the ability to create boards and drawers only a super-mouse (Shaman), but the name Transformice remained.
Transformice poster, 2010
At first we made a game with a simple plot: the mouse needed to get to the cheese and return to the mink. Moreover, only one player (Shaman) had the ability to create boards and boxes in order to help other mice. After about three weeks we made a fully working prototype.
The first prototype, 2010
We launched the game on May 1, 2010 (it seemed funny to us if we did it on Labor Day in France). We told about our launch only in the only French video game forum known to us then - JeuxOnline. And, you know, things were going quite well, people liked the game, even in the simplest form: at that time there were still no accounts, cheese counters, but there were only simple brown mice and the same simple graphics. The physics engine (Box2D) and multiplayer mode sometimes led to rather funny situations, and people quickly got hooked on our game. Soon we added accounts and started counting the cheese, which became a kind of currency in the game, for which you could buy a variety of hats for your mice.
A few weeks after the launch it is not clear how the SomethingAwful forum learned about us. The game was not even translated into English, but nobody cared about it, everyone played and shouted “OMELETTE DU FROMAGE”. The funniest video in the entire history of Transformice (which gained more than 1 million views) was shot just then. I really recommend you watch it, if you are not familiar with our game - I think this is the best review.
After we quickly translated the game into English, a nightmare began: they learned about us not only on the SomethingAwful forum, but also on the 4chan forum. Our only small server could not stand such an influx of users. And, of course, as per the law of “meanness”, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Indiegames.com and PC Gamer wrote about us in the same period. We had to work hard to ensure sufficient bandwidth.
We got problems with the server quite early. We paid for servers from our own pocket and could not afford to pay for ten servers. Therefore, we chose a quick and cheap solution - we placed a horizontal Adsense advertising banner under the game and opened a Paypal account for donations.
The advertising banner gave good results - an average of 47 € / day, which allowed us to increase the number of servers. By the end of 2010, with the help of a banner, we earned about € 11,000 and had an average attendance of 80,000 unique visitors per day.
The “Donate” button through Paypal collected about € 3,000, and by the end of next year we removed it. The list of users who have made donations, is on our site so far . Surprisingly, most donations came from the United States and Norway, but almost no one came from France - despite the fact that France is our home country. We do not yet have such habits and such a culture.
For several months we continued to increase the number of servers in order to cope with the massive influx of players. At the same time, we continued to work full-time in the same French company, and in our free time we fixed bugs and added some content (hats!).
We understood that it could no longer continue and we need to choose: leave the company and create our own in order to serve the game (which at that time already brought us income), or completely forget about the game and save our workplace, because we had no free time for our own affairs. Naturally, we chose the first option.
In April 2011, we quit and created Atelier 801. We freed up time, we added something to the game, created some seasonal events, and gradually our players base grew from 150,000 to 300,000 unique visitors per day.
We had a very unusual base of players: more than 50% of our audience was in Brazil, second place was occupied by the United States (11%), then Turkey (8%), France (7%), Latin America (5%) and Russia (3 %). We tried to make the localization of the game to satisfy the needs of our users, and in the case of Brazil and Turkey it really worked.
Despite the fact that these two countries were not very attractive to advertisers, the banner still brought good income: an average of 280 € / day, and in October this figure reached 1000 €. In total, in 2011 we earned € 103,000 on the banner. In addition, as the .swf file of the game was distributed on the Web, we added a small advertisement before downloading (which you can skip right away). We earned about $ 150 / day on this ad, and in 2011 we earned another $ 55,000 with it.
These results inspired us a lot. We calculated income and expenses and decided that we needed to hire another person to work! We did not pull the cat by the tail and hired our most enthusiastic moderator as a community manager. His duties were to respond to the huge number of emails that we received almost daily.
But not for long music played. See the red line on the ad revenue graph? This is the very moment when we were banned from Google Adsense.
Atelier 801, end of 2011
Then it was a serious blow. Since Google Adsense pays with a 60-day delay, our ban meant that for clicks that collected more than 13500 €, we would not be paid any money. What we had: the need to pay three salaries and pay about 30 servers. And at the same time our main source of income simply disappeared.
At first, we tried to replace Adsense with other advertising platforms, but none of them worked even by 50% of Adsense, and the amounts began to decrease. While we were looking for ways out of the situation, Jean-Baptiste and I did not pay myself a salary for several months in order to pay for the servers and pay the salary to the manager of our community.
Why did it happen so? Suddenly, our domain was blacklisted without any notification, without any emails from Google. Contacting someone from Google Adsense is simply unrealistic: the only way to somehow try to understand the situation is a user forum. But there people often know no more than yours. One forum member, however, hinted that we received a ban for our page with a list of users who donated to the development of the game, but later he refused to talk with us.
On New Year's Eve, we thought that our Wordpress site with a huge amount of content could help us get unbanned, but ... in the end, all our efforts were again in vain.
A happy coincidence helped us: our friend once went to the same school with the current Google employee. Just a couple of emails, a few minutes - and we are unbanned. Yet never underestimate the connection.
And only then we found out the reason for our ban: Google found that our banner was at a distance less than 150 pixels from our flash game, and this is prohibited by Adsense policies (always read what is written in small font!), And On this basis, we were automatically banned.
We reinstalled the Adsense banner in February 2012. Still, 150 pixels is a lot, and most of our users with outdated computers and low-resolution screens have not even seen it. We let the banner work for several months, during which it brought us about € 150 / day, but this was not enough to pay for the servers and pay our salaries to the three of us. We were very upset, we didn’t want to depend so much on advertising and decided to make Transformice a free-to-play game.
We have been preparing for this serious step for a very long time and carefully. Different thoughts were spinning in our heads: What if the players hate us for demanding money? Can we get income? Suddenly, players will refuse our game?
We wanted to set low prices and conduct fair monetization so that players know what they are paying money for and at the same time ensure that the majority of add-ons can be obtained through the game (so that avid players do not feel cheated). In general, pricing was very difficult. We constantly thought how much we can ask people to play our browser-based flash game with cute little mice.
As I have already said, for their money we wanted to give players the maximum of what we can offer: I completely redrawed all the created elements (at that time there were about 150-200) and added the ability to choose different color options and transitions for each element.
It was possible to get access to the settings of the elements in two ways: by spending a lot of cheese or a little hard currency - strawberries. We also selected about 20 items that could be bought for strawberries (well, for cheese, of course, too), and added 5 colors of mouse fur. During testing, we purposefully showed them on our mice, and our players really wanted to be able to change the color of their mice.
With huge fears, after six months without a salary, we removed all the advertising banners and on June 14, 2012, we launched Transformice in free-to-play mode. And this step ... worked!
As you can see from the graphs, the reaction of the players was amazing. They were happy to be able to support their favorite game, and the first month brought us more than € 250,000! We were amazed.
We quickly hired a few more employees: three developers, three community managers, one financial director and a system administrator. Considering that at that time we had about 3 million active players and 40 servers, we thought that we should increase the team in order to sleep a little longer and better.
Also at the end of 2012, we moved to a larger and more expensive office.
In general, in the period from June to December 2012, microtransactions brought us € 1,068,300, that is, an average of € 5,262 / day. Each peak on the graph corresponds to the release of new content / seasonal updates, in which new caps and options for fur colors appeared. The red line is the break-even point of our company, taking into account the payment of wages to all employees. At the end of 2012, we broke our own record for the number of players playing Transformice at the same time - more than 86,000 users were online.
After a few months, monetization slowed down, and at the beginning of 2013 the revenue line was very close to the break-even point. Looking back, I can explain this by saying that in December 2012 we had a campaign: we created an advent calendar, and the players received awards every day. As a result, we gave a bunch of content (hats, titles, cheese, and even hard currency) for free. Now I understand that from our side it was a huge mistake, because users could use their gifts for quite some time. This stalled our earnings over the next few months.
By October 2013, the situation worsened even more, and we decided to re-use the advertising banner: we placed it on the site next to the game, but this time we made it not horizontal, but vertical. We realized that this did not hinder our players at all, and the banner worked much better than before (sure € 500 / day compared to € 150 / day in early 2012). This good extra income allowed us to stay above the break-even point.
Looking back, I understand that we were complete fools, once abandoned the advertising banner: even if things went as bad as in early 2012, in 18 months it would have brought us more than 100,000 €.
And at this time we observed the outflow of players, and in 2013 our active users decreased by 15%.
At the end of 2013, the situation did not improve, even the holiday season did not help. And 2014 began at all gloomily: as a rule, January and February are not the best months in terms of income.
Then we made one of our most important decisions: we will no longer hand out free hats during some seasonal events. Instead, we will only sell them (for cheese or for strawberries). We still remembered that insane distribution of gifts during Christmas 2012, as a result of which the future of our game was under threat. Although the players for her were very grateful to us.
The players took our decision not very well: many of them deservedly wrote complaints on the forums. We continued to distribute badges and titles, but without hats, they did not feel more interested in playing further. On the other hand, there were players who liked our decision: they did not want to play, for example, the entire period devoted to Valentine's Day for the sake of getting some kind of cap. But, basically, the players recorded us as traitors.
In the end, the negative went away, and slowly but surely, our sales began to grow. More often, we were still above the break-even point: at that time the number of players slightly decreased, but the monetization went better.
In general, in 2014 we earned 9.090525 euros from sales and advertising, and after paying all taxes and fees, our profit was 40,309 euros.
In January 2015, we managed to publish Transformice on Steam, after which we wrote several interesting articles about us, and players from the USA began to pay us more attention. During the launch, the game showed 5333 simultaneous users and ranked 41st in popularity on Steam. Thus, we were able to stay on the main page in the “Popular New Games” section for almost a week, and during the first month the game was downloaded 400,000 times. Over the same month, more than 120,000 new accounts were created via Steam, 38,423 of which played for over an hour.
It should be noted that for all these years before publication on Steam, we had all the same four articles that appeared during the launch of our game in 2010. At that time, users somehow themselves found out about us through feedback and recommendations that we did not think about the need for additional PR. Now I can say that we probably missed many opportunities while we were engaged in improving the game. Apparently, this prevented us from creating a solid and serious game development studio. We just quit our job and devoted time to the game, without looking at others, which probably prevented us from successfully promoting our other developments.
During these four years, we have published three more games: Bouboum, Fortoresse and Nekodancer. Together, they recruit about 300,000 unique visitors per month and generate enough income to pay for their servers. But we were not able to promote these games with the help of our Transformice community of players. It is worth thinking about the success of the studio in the future, if you rely on the success of just one game.
In principle, to be honest, we don’t have much to complain about: we have a huge player base, we made a fairly successful game that brings us a fairly regular income. Now we have 12 people in the studio, and we have the opportunity to create and develop other games. Now we have to study the marketing of games and make the best use of our accumulated potential and experience.
And now it is time to tell what we have done right and what not!
RIGHT
1. Physics
In 2010, flash games on a physical base were very popular, it suffices to recall the game Fantastic Contraption. By the way, this game also had a serious impact on us when we made our game (which made Brian Fargo, the creator of Fantastic Contraption, contact us!). Incredibots, QWOP, Crush the Castle appeared later ... Singly, playing these games is very fun, but none of them had a multiplayer mode.
People liked to tinker with the physics engine in principle, but in multiplayer mode it became even more interesting. The players studied the physics of the game and, in principle, we could give them a beach volleyball ball, and it would still be interesting for them to spend time together.
Today this direction is not so popular in browser games, but our game came out just at the perfect time for its genre.
2. Multiplayer mode in real time
If you remember, then 2010 was the time of the games on Facebook.In the world of desynchronized interaction, the real-time multiplayer mode in the browser game was a great alternative.
In browser games, multiplayer mode in real time is rare, because, as a rule, it requires serious resources from both the developer and the player. Multiplayer itself is a serious task for any indie developer, but still worth it! For us, the possibility of playing with someone is “Masthev”, so we only create multiplayer games.
3. Accessibility and convenience.
This item is very important for any indie developer who wants to attract an audience. It is unlikely that someone will want to play your game if a player needs to spend a lot of time downloading and installing it.
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Developing countries often do not have access to many interesting games: they either do not translate into their language, or are too “heavy” for their equipment. Most large studios do not even consider these countries as potential regions, because often these countries are small, not very rich or have a high level of piracy (hi, Poland!).
But for you it is a good opportunity to get these players, because a big one starts with trifles!
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Approximately 30% of the population can read English. And, as one of the developers said, many games sin by lack of localization and lose potential players.
5. Teams of two people.
This is both good and bad. Good, because you have to consider the possibilities of only one person, and when you work in a large team, there is always the risk that someone will lag behind, slowing down the whole team. Many indie teams got stung by the fact that from the very beginning there were a lot of people in the team. It is better if you try to develop the game yourself. But let's be honest, this happens very rarely.
Jean-Baptiste and I are very complementary, we immediately began to develop our competencies, which allowed us to do without attracting a large number of people. It was one of the keys to our success.
The disadvantage of such small teams, of course, is that in this case you can not quickly make some big games. It will be difficult to correct the numerous multiplayer game bugs that always arise, and the presence of hundreds of thousands of players together is hard.
But in the end, just because there were two of us, we were able to release Transformice in just three weeks.
6. Graphics
I do not want to praise myself, but the design and the artistic part played an important role in our success, despite all the simplicity. Lovely little mice contrasted very strongly with the cruel trials, and the sight of the rushing mice all over the screen often caused a smile. Our graphics were simple, but still it was slightly above the level of the average flash game that you can find on game portals. The players liked it, and I am very grateful to my previous work for learning how to work with flash graphics.
7. Feedback
Our players often shout on the forums that we never listen to them. But in fact, we listen to them often and have done so since the very beginning of game development. We keep in touch with the players, accept proposals for new content - this allowed us to keep our players. Although often their ideas require serious improvements in order to implement them within our game.
We try to listen to what they want to get, but we will never do exactly as they say, because most often the players themselves do not know what they want.
WRONG
1. Team of two people
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When we began to receive income from microtransactions, we were very glad that we could finally increase the team. We did not approach the issue of hiring employees very responsibly: the company grew from three to ten people in less than eight months. And for this we were not ready. We made mistakes, tension grew, and we realized that we practically do not understand how to manage staff. We have always tried to ensure good working conditions and at the same time completely forgot about project management, thinking that everyone will find something to do without setting specific tasks. We have been corrected lately, but it took us a very long time to understand the importance of this aspect.
4. Lack of solution for mobile devices
For all four years, we did not even allow ourselves to think about the mobile version of Transformice. We reasoned like this: “Yes, quit, it's Flash, this game requires a serious processor, keyboard and mouse. On mobile devices, you simply cannot play this game. ” Yes, and we were too busy version of Transformice for PC.
We had neither concrete figures nor experience for such reasoning, therefore, probably, we should not have rejected this direction. When we tried to create a version of the game-runner for mobile phones in the form of spin-off Transformice, people were disappointed: it was not a full-fledged game. They wanted to get our game entirely and were ready to put up with the fact that it would not be as comfortable as on a PC.
Finally, a couple of months ago we paid attention to this area and created a small version of the game using Adobe AIR. To our surprise, on Android, this game went very well, but for iOS it turned out to be completely unsuitable. Well, it would probably be too easy if we got everything at once.
Now we have taken the time and are working on a mobile version of our game. I think that it will appear in the next few months.
5. Monetization: we did not understand what we were doing.
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Conclusion
Transformice turned out to be a serious test for us, and during its creation we learned a lot. Sometimes the lessons went too brutal, in some cases we missed many opportunities due to lack of experience, but in general we were very lucky that we were able to participate in this matter. We firmly believe that luck is an important factor in the development of the game. In our case, for example, we were lucky that we released the product at the right time for it.
We continue to work on Transformice, but we are creating other completely different games to get away from the image of the studio with one successful project and become a stable company. And we hope that on our way all our past mistakes will stand in good stead.
After 4 years and many updates, 60 million accounts have already been registered in the game.
')
We can not say that the development of the game Transformice has been completed. On the contrary, this game is under active development. And today I would like to tell you that we have been doing these four years both for the development of the game and for its monetization, because making the game is not easy, but even harder is to make money from it. So the numbers!
In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marshald and I worked in a French video game development company, he worked as a developer, and I worked as a graphic designer / technical artist. Jean-Baptiste created small browser games before, it was his hobby. And once he asked me to help create a new game with improved graphics.
I was amazed at his ability to make fun and funny games. Naturally, I agreed and offered him a story about mice that use boxes and boards to help their mouse friends avoid traps and get cheese: Transform mice. We then endowed with the ability to create boards and drawers only a super-mouse (Shaman), but the name Transformice remained.
Transformice poster, 2010
At first we made a game with a simple plot: the mouse needed to get to the cheese and return to the mink. Moreover, only one player (Shaman) had the ability to create boards and boxes in order to help other mice. After about three weeks we made a fully working prototype.
The first prototype, 2010
We launched the game on May 1, 2010 (it seemed funny to us if we did it on Labor Day in France). We told about our launch only in the only French video game forum known to us then - JeuxOnline. And, you know, things were going quite well, people liked the game, even in the simplest form: at that time there were still no accounts, cheese counters, but there were only simple brown mice and the same simple graphics. The physics engine (Box2D) and multiplayer mode sometimes led to rather funny situations, and people quickly got hooked on our game. Soon we added accounts and started counting the cheese, which became a kind of currency in the game, for which you could buy a variety of hats for your mice.
A few weeks after the launch it is not clear how the SomethingAwful forum learned about us. The game was not even translated into English, but nobody cared about it, everyone played and shouted “OMELETTE DU FROMAGE”. The funniest video in the entire history of Transformice (which gained more than 1 million views) was shot just then. I really recommend you watch it, if you are not familiar with our game - I think this is the best review.
After we quickly translated the game into English, a nightmare began: they learned about us not only on the SomethingAwful forum, but also on the 4chan forum. Our only small server could not stand such an influx of users. And, of course, as per the law of “meanness”, Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Indiegames.com and PC Gamer wrote about us in the same period. We had to work hard to ensure sufficient bandwidth.
We got problems with the server quite early. We paid for servers from our own pocket and could not afford to pay for ten servers. Therefore, we chose a quick and cheap solution - we placed a horizontal Adsense advertising banner under the game and opened a Paypal account for donations.
The advertising banner gave good results - an average of 47 € / day, which allowed us to increase the number of servers. By the end of 2010, with the help of a banner, we earned about € 11,000 and had an average attendance of 80,000 unique visitors per day.
The “Donate” button through Paypal collected about € 3,000, and by the end of next year we removed it. The list of users who have made donations, is on our site so far . Surprisingly, most donations came from the United States and Norway, but almost no one came from France - despite the fact that France is our home country. We do not yet have such habits and such a culture.
For several months we continued to increase the number of servers in order to cope with the massive influx of players. At the same time, we continued to work full-time in the same French company, and in our free time we fixed bugs and added some content (hats!).
We understood that it could no longer continue and we need to choose: leave the company and create our own in order to serve the game (which at that time already brought us income), or completely forget about the game and save our workplace, because we had no free time for our own affairs. Naturally, we chose the first option.
In April 2011, we quit and created Atelier 801. We freed up time, we added something to the game, created some seasonal events, and gradually our players base grew from 150,000 to 300,000 unique visitors per day.
We had a very unusual base of players: more than 50% of our audience was in Brazil, second place was occupied by the United States (11%), then Turkey (8%), France (7%), Latin America (5%) and Russia (3 %). We tried to make the localization of the game to satisfy the needs of our users, and in the case of Brazil and Turkey it really worked.
Despite the fact that these two countries were not very attractive to advertisers, the banner still brought good income: an average of 280 € / day, and in October this figure reached 1000 €. In total, in 2011 we earned € 103,000 on the banner. In addition, as the .swf file of the game was distributed on the Web, we added a small advertisement before downloading (which you can skip right away). We earned about $ 150 / day on this ad, and in 2011 we earned another $ 55,000 with it.
These results inspired us a lot. We calculated income and expenses and decided that we needed to hire another person to work! We did not pull the cat by the tail and hired our most enthusiastic moderator as a community manager. His duties were to respond to the huge number of emails that we received almost daily.
But not for long music played. See the red line on the ad revenue graph? This is the very moment when we were banned from Google Adsense.
Atelier 801, end of 2011
Then it was a serious blow. Since Google Adsense pays with a 60-day delay, our ban meant that for clicks that collected more than 13500 €, we would not be paid any money. What we had: the need to pay three salaries and pay about 30 servers. And at the same time our main source of income simply disappeared.
At first, we tried to replace Adsense with other advertising platforms, but none of them worked even by 50% of Adsense, and the amounts began to decrease. While we were looking for ways out of the situation, Jean-Baptiste and I did not pay myself a salary for several months in order to pay for the servers and pay the salary to the manager of our community.
Why did it happen so? Suddenly, our domain was blacklisted without any notification, without any emails from Google. Contacting someone from Google Adsense is simply unrealistic: the only way to somehow try to understand the situation is a user forum. But there people often know no more than yours. One forum member, however, hinted that we received a ban for our page with a list of users who donated to the development of the game, but later he refused to talk with us.
On New Year's Eve, we thought that our Wordpress site with a huge amount of content could help us get unbanned, but ... in the end, all our efforts were again in vain.
A happy coincidence helped us: our friend once went to the same school with the current Google employee. Just a couple of emails, a few minutes - and we are unbanned. Yet never underestimate the connection.
And only then we found out the reason for our ban: Google found that our banner was at a distance less than 150 pixels from our flash game, and this is prohibited by Adsense policies (always read what is written in small font!), And On this basis, we were automatically banned.
We reinstalled the Adsense banner in February 2012. Still, 150 pixels is a lot, and most of our users with outdated computers and low-resolution screens have not even seen it. We let the banner work for several months, during which it brought us about € 150 / day, but this was not enough to pay for the servers and pay our salaries to the three of us. We were very upset, we didn’t want to depend so much on advertising and decided to make Transformice a free-to-play game.We have been preparing for this serious step for a very long time and carefully. Different thoughts were spinning in our heads: What if the players hate us for demanding money? Can we get income? Suddenly, players will refuse our game?
We wanted to set low prices and conduct fair monetization so that players know what they are paying money for and at the same time ensure that the majority of add-ons can be obtained through the game (so that avid players do not feel cheated). In general, pricing was very difficult. We constantly thought how much we can ask people to play our browser-based flash game with cute little mice.
As I have already said, for their money we wanted to give players the maximum of what we can offer: I completely redrawed all the created elements (at that time there were about 150-200) and added the ability to choose different color options and transitions for each element.
It was possible to get access to the settings of the elements in two ways: by spending a lot of cheese or a little hard currency - strawberries. We also selected about 20 items that could be bought for strawberries (well, for cheese, of course, too), and added 5 colors of mouse fur. During testing, we purposefully showed them on our mice, and our players really wanted to be able to change the color of their mice.
With huge fears, after six months without a salary, we removed all the advertising banners and on June 14, 2012, we launched Transformice in free-to-play mode. And this step ... worked!
As you can see from the graphs, the reaction of the players was amazing. They were happy to be able to support their favorite game, and the first month brought us more than € 250,000! We were amazed.
We quickly hired a few more employees: three developers, three community managers, one financial director and a system administrator. Considering that at that time we had about 3 million active players and 40 servers, we thought that we should increase the team in order to sleep a little longer and better.
Also at the end of 2012, we moved to a larger and more expensive office.
In general, in the period from June to December 2012, microtransactions brought us € 1,068,300, that is, an average of € 5,262 / day. Each peak on the graph corresponds to the release of new content / seasonal updates, in which new caps and options for fur colors appeared. The red line is the break-even point of our company, taking into account the payment of wages to all employees. At the end of 2012, we broke our own record for the number of players playing Transformice at the same time - more than 86,000 users were online.
After a few months, monetization slowed down, and at the beginning of 2013 the revenue line was very close to the break-even point. Looking back, I can explain this by saying that in December 2012 we had a campaign: we created an advent calendar, and the players received awards every day. As a result, we gave a bunch of content (hats, titles, cheese, and even hard currency) for free. Now I understand that from our side it was a huge mistake, because users could use their gifts for quite some time. This stalled our earnings over the next few months.
By October 2013, the situation worsened even more, and we decided to re-use the advertising banner: we placed it on the site next to the game, but this time we made it not horizontal, but vertical. We realized that this did not hinder our players at all, and the banner worked much better than before (sure € 500 / day compared to € 150 / day in early 2012). This good extra income allowed us to stay above the break-even point.
Looking back, I understand that we were complete fools, once abandoned the advertising banner: even if things went as bad as in early 2012, in 18 months it would have brought us more than 100,000 €.
And at this time we observed the outflow of players, and in 2013 our active users decreased by 15%.
At the end of 2013, the situation did not improve, even the holiday season did not help. And 2014 began at all gloomily: as a rule, January and February are not the best months in terms of income.
Then we made one of our most important decisions: we will no longer hand out free hats during some seasonal events. Instead, we will only sell them (for cheese or for strawberries). We still remembered that insane distribution of gifts during Christmas 2012, as a result of which the future of our game was under threat. Although the players for her were very grateful to us.
The players took our decision not very well: many of them deservedly wrote complaints on the forums. We continued to distribute badges and titles, but without hats, they did not feel more interested in playing further. On the other hand, there were players who liked our decision: they did not want to play, for example, the entire period devoted to Valentine's Day for the sake of getting some kind of cap. But, basically, the players recorded us as traitors.
In the end, the negative went away, and slowly but surely, our sales began to grow. More often, we were still above the break-even point: at that time the number of players slightly decreased, but the monetization went better.
In general, in 2014 we earned 9.090525 euros from sales and advertising, and after paying all taxes and fees, our profit was 40,309 euros.
In January 2015, we managed to publish Transformice on Steam, after which we wrote several interesting articles about us, and players from the USA began to pay us more attention. During the launch, the game showed 5333 simultaneous users and ranked 41st in popularity on Steam. Thus, we were able to stay on the main page in the “Popular New Games” section for almost a week, and during the first month the game was downloaded 400,000 times. Over the same month, more than 120,000 new accounts were created via Steam, 38,423 of which played for over an hour.
It should be noted that for all these years before publication on Steam, we had all the same four articles that appeared during the launch of our game in 2010. At that time, users somehow themselves found out about us through feedback and recommendations that we did not think about the need for additional PR. Now I can say that we probably missed many opportunities while we were engaged in improving the game. Apparently, this prevented us from creating a solid and serious game development studio. We just quit our job and devoted time to the game, without looking at others, which probably prevented us from successfully promoting our other developments.
During these four years, we have published three more games: Bouboum, Fortoresse and Nekodancer. Together, they recruit about 300,000 unique visitors per month and generate enough income to pay for their servers. But we were not able to promote these games with the help of our Transformice community of players. It is worth thinking about the success of the studio in the future, if you rely on the success of just one game.
In principle, to be honest, we don’t have much to complain about: we have a huge player base, we made a fairly successful game that brings us a fairly regular income. Now we have 12 people in the studio, and we have the opportunity to create and develop other games. Now we have to study the marketing of games and make the best use of our accumulated potential and experience.
And now it is time to tell what we have done right and what not!
RIGHT
1. Physics
In 2010, flash games on a physical base were very popular, it suffices to recall the game Fantastic Contraption. By the way, this game also had a serious impact on us when we made our game (which made Brian Fargo, the creator of Fantastic Contraption, contact us!). Incredibots, QWOP, Crush the Castle appeared later ... Singly, playing these games is very fun, but none of them had a multiplayer mode.
People liked to tinker with the physics engine in principle, but in multiplayer mode it became even more interesting. The players studied the physics of the game and, in principle, we could give them a beach volleyball ball, and it would still be interesting for them to spend time together.
Today this direction is not so popular in browser games, but our game came out just at the perfect time for its genre.
2. Multiplayer mode in real time
If you remember, then 2010 was the time of the games on Facebook.In the world of desynchronized interaction, the real-time multiplayer mode in the browser game was a great alternative.
In browser games, multiplayer mode in real time is rare, because, as a rule, it requires serious resources from both the developer and the player. Multiplayer itself is a serious task for any indie developer, but still worth it! For us, the possibility of playing with someone is “Masthev”, so we only create multiplayer games.
3. Accessibility and convenience.
This item is very important for any indie developer who wants to attract an audience. It is unlikely that someone will want to play your game if a player needs to spend a lot of time downloading and installing it.
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Developing countries often do not have access to many interesting games: they either do not translate into their language, or are too “heavy” for their equipment. Most large studios do not even consider these countries as potential regions, because often these countries are small, not very rich or have a high level of piracy (hi, Poland!).
But for you it is a good opportunity to get these players, because a big one starts with trifles!
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Approximately 30% of the population can read English. And, as one of the developers said, many games sin by lack of localization and lose potential players.
5. Teams of two people.
This is both good and bad. Good, because you have to consider the possibilities of only one person, and when you work in a large team, there is always the risk that someone will lag behind, slowing down the whole team. Many indie teams got stung by the fact that from the very beginning there were a lot of people in the team. It is better if you try to develop the game yourself. But let's be honest, this happens very rarely.
Jean-Baptiste and I are very complementary, we immediately began to develop our competencies, which allowed us to do without attracting a large number of people. It was one of the keys to our success.
The disadvantage of such small teams, of course, is that in this case you can not quickly make some big games. It will be difficult to correct the numerous multiplayer game bugs that always arise, and the presence of hundreds of thousands of players together is hard.
But in the end, just because there were two of us, we were able to release Transformice in just three weeks.
6. Graphics
I do not want to praise myself, but the design and the artistic part played an important role in our success, despite all the simplicity. Lovely little mice contrasted very strongly with the cruel trials, and the sight of the rushing mice all over the screen often caused a smile. Our graphics were simple, but still it was slightly above the level of the average flash game that you can find on game portals. The players liked it, and I am very grateful to my previous work for learning how to work with flash graphics.
7. Feedback
Our players often shout on the forums that we never listen to them. But in fact, we listen to them often and have done so since the very beginning of game development. We keep in touch with the players, accept proposals for new content - this allowed us to keep our players. Although often their ideas require serious improvements in order to implement them within our game.
We try to listen to what they want to get, but we will never do exactly as they say, because most often the players themselves do not know what they want.
WRONG
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When we began to receive income from microtransactions, we were very glad that we could finally increase the team. We did not approach the issue of hiring employees very responsibly: the company grew from three to ten people in less than eight months. And for this we were not ready. We made mistakes, tension grew, and we realized that we practically do not understand how to manage staff. We have always tried to ensure good working conditions and at the same time completely forgot about project management, thinking that everyone will find something to do without setting specific tasks. We have been corrected lately, but it took us a very long time to understand the importance of this aspect.
4. Lack of solution for mobile devices
For all four years, we did not even allow ourselves to think about the mobile version of Transformice. We reasoned like this: “Yes, quit, it's Flash, this game requires a serious processor, keyboard and mouse. On mobile devices, you simply cannot play this game. ” Yes, and we were too busy version of Transformice for PC.
We had neither concrete figures nor experience for such reasoning, therefore, probably, we should not have rejected this direction. When we tried to create a version of the game-runner for mobile phones in the form of spin-off Transformice, people were disappointed: it was not a full-fledged game. They wanted to get our game entirely and were ready to put up with the fact that it would not be as comfortable as on a PC.
Finally, a couple of months ago we paid attention to this area and created a small version of the game using Adobe AIR. To our surprise, on Android, this game went very well, but for iOS it turned out to be completely unsuitable. Well, it would probably be too easy if we got everything at once.
Now we have taken the time and are working on a mobile version of our game. I think that it will appear in the next few months.
5. Monetization: we did not understand what we were doing.
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Conclusion
Transformice turned out to be a serious test for us, and during its creation we learned a lot. Sometimes the lessons went too brutal, in some cases we missed many opportunities due to lack of experience, but in general we were very lucky that we were able to participate in this matter. We firmly believe that luck is an important factor in the development of the game. In our case, for example, we were lucky that we released the product at the right time for it.
We continue to work on Transformice, but we are creating other completely different games to get away from the image of the studio with one successful project and become a stable company. And we hope that on our way all our past mistakes will stand in good stead.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/260411/
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