J-Bird, or as a bummer game sold

A month ago, I spent the experience - how much will a mobile game made in a day make?
The brief result is that the earnings of a developer's knee iOS are not much different from the average salary of a provincial Russian programmer.

So, in order.
First was the Word.
And the Word was Byte ...

Just kidding, the order is different.
Yes, and the text will be non-canonical.
')
Let me remind you that a month ago, a remake of the old D-game J-Bird was made in 1 working day with major changes in the direction of the reversi idea. $ 6 spent on design. On the swift - 7 hours. Testing and writing an article on a popular resource took 2 hours of the author’s life. And it was the best watch in my gray life.

How does J-Bird earn?

After approval by the glorious Chinese guys from California, the game was exhibited in the store for $ 1. At the same time within the application uses advertising from Google and Chartbust.

The full-screen Chartbust is shown if the player dies. You can die three times.

Google, as usual, hangs in the background at the bottom of the phone and happily winks with colored balls and brokers.

How to track the number of installations?

Each new player, starting the game, sends a php request to the server, where it is instantly entered into the mysql database. The total number of players is displayed in the J-Bird application on all screens.

In swift language it looks like this:

let urlRoot = "http://www.bashni.org/sites/jbird/request.php?" // here is your site let u = UIDevice.current.identifierForVendor let udid = u!.uuidString let name = UIDevice.current.name var params = "s=\(score)&imea=\(udid)&name=\(name)" let urlParams = params.addingPercentEncoding(withAllowedCharacters: .urlHostAllowed) let url = URL(string: urlRoot+urlParams!) let session = URLSession.shared let task = session.dataTask(with: url!, completionHandler: { data, response, error in if data != nil { let dataString = NSString(data: data!, encoding: String.Encoding.utf8.rawValue) OperationQueue.main.addOperation({ self.updateRank(dataString) }) } } } }) task.resume() 

Through the delegate, the received data is sent to the current ViewController visible by the user.

  func updateRank(_ response:String) { self.delegate?.updateTotalRank(response) } 

For the feeling of being crowded, 860 fake names and results were entered on the server, which were automatically joined by 12 test devices from the developer, 9 checkers from Apple and 7 relatives, whom I nobly cross out with $ 6 for pictures.

At the time of this writing, the number of users is:



928.

It is necessary to subtract 6 more users who downloaded the game for free at the time of publication of the first article on Habré. I agree, sparsely use the sale.

For a month, the game bought 928 - 860 - 12 - 9 - 7 - 6 = 32 people. Low bow to you from a guy from Chelyabinsk.

This is 32 * 0.7 = $ 22. Apple takes 30%. I bow to you, Apple. And that is not all! To them you will receive free laces for ski boots and a brush for a mustache. Just kidding

I do not have a mustache - but there are advertising cents. Chartbust has no earnings, but Google brought up to 15 cents a day, with 1,500 views a day (that is, eCpm reached $ 0.1), but why should I consider this eCpm indicator to be extremely low, almost 0. With that number of views on other applications I have a dollar a day! And here - zilch. However, for the month earned on advertising $ 2.


Fig.1 Earnings per day, number of hits, eCpm.

Total for 9 hours of work Navaro $ 24. At the same time, the tendency remains - 1 week - 1 purchase. So by the end of the year will be 50-60 dollars.

Normal numbers. Without a wonderful fairy tale. It's a pity.
Harsh conclusions do yourself.
Note The game was not advertised anywhere, did not publish links anywhere. Pure Habr.

One note on game design

Since the game was made simple, the author managed to pass only 11 levels out of 30. It was necessary to twist the coefficients and release a new version 2.0 - it managed to reach level 22! By the New Year pass the game to the end, I give a tooth. I have 29 of them left.

A little bit about the coefficients.

On boards with a sequence number> 2, a field of this type appears.



To pass this field, you have to jump on it until it loses a spike. Each jump with a probability of 1/3 spike may disappear. So sometimes you jump, jump like Buratino, and the time of life melts. That is, there were cases of 12 times had to jump, but to no avail.
And th! How it enraged me!

I decided to limit the number of jumps, randomly determine the number of jumps from 0 to 5. Uniform random variable. But it became uninteresting to play. Then I returned the normal distribution, but with a trimmed tail. That is more than 6 times just do not jump. And it became interesting to play again.

Here I am writing an article and playing. By golly, stuck like a fool.

Fool, no fool, but now I have $ 50 every year.

And maybe more ...
What do you want! Amen!