How can an indie game overtake Angry Birds?

After the phones have become smarter than many of their owners, selfies are widespread. Making your own self-portraits in any place, even the most inappropriate for this, has become a favorite occupation of social network users and, above all, Instagram. Then I got the idea to make a game based on this trend. I and my colleagues from the studio have long been engaged in the development of games to order. There was a period when the team felt very tired from one of the long-term projects. I decided to distract the developers and offered to take a short time out in order to work on my indie product without customers and publishers - to do everything on my own.

The beginning of our difficult journey

We took the aforementioned social network Instagram as a basis. In this project, they decided to realize the same goals that real network users face: a short-term goal is to make new selfies and collect as many likes as possible, a medium-term goal is to attract new followers, and a long-term goal is to achieve fame and popularity (in the case of the game - to go through it all) From the very beginning, we decided that we would treat the new trend with irony, and the main character would be a glamorous girl with plump lips, a smart chest and a small dog in her hands. So we hoped to attract a male audience to the initially female match3 genre. First, we wanted to depict it in a comic style: only lines and solid colors, no gradients, details and trifles, difficult combinations and color transitions. Such pictures are simpler, and we would be able to create a lot of diverse content in a short time. When it seemed that the decision regarding graphics had already been taken, our artist showed me Mandy the illustrator Dina Eagle. And I realized that the innocence and sexuality combined in her are what we need. We took the pictures as reference, so Sophie appeared.


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Further, the case was behind the gameplay. It was necessary to figure out how users will collect likes. Here our recent prototype of Bubble Bumble with a simple but sticky gameplay came in very handy: tap the balls of the same color, put together a combo and move the red line away from you. Only in My Selfie Story, unlike Bubble Bumble, we made the gameplay finite and smashed it into levels. Sounds were picked up on pond5.com, the cost of sounds on this resource is $ 1-2, music is about $ 50.

The publication of the game and the first attempts to advance

In October 2014, the release of the game. By the way, we didn’t do any promo in front of him. The game was launched with 12 levels. Of course, we did not count on any profit, for the beginning we wanted to see what the indicators and user responses would be. For the first version of retention (involvement of players), ratings, reviews were at a high level. The players wrote enthusiastic comments, asked to continue ... To our surprise, 80% of them were girls, and they liked Sophie. We moved on and within a couple of months released two new episodes. The image of glamor Sophie had to change a bit - they began to discover her interesting aspects: hobbies for music, sports and travel.

Monetization and promotion

In winter, we began our experiments with ASO (application page optimization). Not knowing how it works, we acted by trial and error. Key words were tied to large-scale games that approached the audience and grew in ratings. As a result, we got a good growth in the downloads of the game (AppStore: it was 100 per day, it became 300; Google Play: it was 500, it became 1000). True, we could only assess the result of this optimization only a few years later. Prior to this, they did not attach too much importance to her, thinking that downloads are growing due to the uniqueness of the game.

When more content appeared in the game, monetization improved markedly. The game was quite difficult and the main purchase was additional moves inside the levels. Somewhere in 3-4 months, the game came to self-sufficiency, and even began to bring a small income. A sharp appreciation of the currency at the end of 2014 also had an effect: we felt pretty good at transferring income into rubles.

After six months, it became clear in which direction the game was developing, what changes and improvements were coming in the future. We decided to rewrite the code and update the interface, added Russian and Ukrainian languages. As a result, the estimates in the stores went up sharply.

During this period we tried to promote the game relatively free of charge. They tried to create viral posts on social networks, printed flyers, negotiated with bloggers and even did cross-promo with a group of cheerleaders and a motoclub. We spent a lot of effort on the organization of all these events, but we didn’t see a sharp increase in downloads.

In the summer of 2015, our series of experiments with paid promotion began. We paid attention to the VKontakte mobile advertising platform that was just beginning to develop. These analysts showed that such an advertisement would not pay for itself in our situation, but we decided to try to spend 20,000 rubles to understand how it works and what the numbers will be. For this amount, we received about 500,000 impressions and 10,000 conversions. At that time, we had no mechanisms for tracking the number of ad units. According to rough estimates, there were about 1,500 - a total of ~ 15 rubles per user. And if we also take into account organic matter (we have risen to the TOP-10 category), then in this case 7-10 rubles. It was possible to work with such indicators, in the future we conducted about five more similar campaigns.



Unfortunately, over time, the CTR dropped dramatically, respectively, and the cost of the installation increased to about 30 rubles. In our opinion, users began to recognize and ignore ads among posts in the news feed. In the end, this cost did not allow us to continue the campaign.

All the figures above relate to advertising for iOS users in Russia. In the App Store of Ukraine, the user is much cheaper, it is possible for a symbolic amount to rise to the top, but the income from the player is almost zero. The same can be said about the Android audience in both countries.

In developed countries, there are significantly more paying users, so we could not ignore advertising platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Chartboost, Apple Search Ads and others. A user there is much more expensive, for example, on Facebook, the price was about $ 2-3, which is not enough for us at all.

Adaptation of the game on Windows Phone

We decided to look for other ways to attract users. At that time, the Windows Phone platform was rapidly developing. Great hopes were pinned on the new operating system, it was believed that it would enter the top three in the market. Since we were developing the game on a cross-platform Unity, we decided that we should try to release the game in the Windows Store. Having filled the bumps with plug-ins of providers of advertising, social networks and analytics, we made a release. Approximately 300-500 people rocked the game a day, gave good grades and even made small purchases. Over time, a serious bug emerged: players in 90% of cases did not keep up with the closure of the game. We immediately corrected it and downloaded the new version, but Microsoft refused for frank content, despite the fact that the game was initially set to an age rating of 18+ (out of harm's way). All letters to tech support asking for clarification of what exactly seemed to be too frank were left unanswered. We decided to abandon the further support of the game on this platform, and now it hangs there with unreserved progress.

Game support

At the very beginning of the way, I could not even think that 80% of the time for supporting the game is spent not on the gameplay, adding new game mechanics, levels and other things, but on studying analytics and optimizing conversion, retension and other parameters. All this time we are constantly trying new things, experimenting with the location of buttons, the cost of goods, the frequency of advertising, the complexity of levels, etc. Very small steps we move forward. At the very beginning of the journey, the retribution was something like this: 1st day - 25%, 7th day - 3%, 30th day - 0.5%. Now the data - 40%, 10% and 3%, respectively, but still far from the reference 40/20/10. We managed to increase the conversion four times over all time, and the average check five times. Most of the decisions that are made have little effect on the result, at such moments I want to give up and quit everything.

You look at the product and you think: what is wrong? How do other games live? How can they afford to buy players for 2-3 $? There are, of course, obvious moments. For example, there is the fact that the game is too complicated for most girls. It is difficult for us to evaluate this objectively, we have already played the game thousands of times and we know it far and wide. Three months ago, according to analysts, the first episode (12 levels) was held by only 22% of players, while in Russia they play much better than in the States. Resisting ourselves, we smoothly simplify the levels, fearing that in the end it will become completely uninteresting to play, and we will lose all the players. But at the moment the first episode takes place already 30% of users.

results

After almost three years, I can confirm my initial conviction that, despite the abundance of large titles of publishers of free-to-play projects, indie developers can successfully exist. Of course, the pressure of the monsters is felt more and more and it is already quite difficult to release just an interesting game and suddenly get rich. And yes, we really overtook Angry Birds, but only in the rating, and it lasted only a few hours.

Personally, I have gained tremendous experience during this time, having tried myself as a programmer, game designer, analyst, marketer, and many more. And it is a hell of fun to work on your own project from beginning to end, watching your brainchild grow and develop.



For three years, the game My Selfie Story downloaded more than 1,000,000 players. This was also helped by the App Store, which periodically adds our game to the “New and Interesting” selection, and Google Play, which marked the game as the best indie game in Russia in April 2016. There are more than 100 levels in the game - 8 diverse episodes about the life of a red-haired girl . Along with the game on iOS, stickers are installed with Sophie for iMessage. There is also an additional set with more than 50 stickers for 29 rubles for iMessage and completely free stickers for Telegram.



We run My Selfie Story public in the VC, the audience there is quite active, we often get feedback, questions, people participate in the sweepstakes and our polls about improving the game.

Thanks to those who read to the end.
Hoping for feedback from you! If you have any questions, I will be very happy to discuss in the comments.