The history of the development and life of one small game. Release
One of the most important stages in the life of any project is the release. He is one of the most intense. I want to tell you about the release and the next year of life for my first game, which we had been playing for almost a year before. After all, the release is not only downloading the application to the stop and pressing the send button, but also preparing resources for public relations, collecting analytics, quickly correcting errors and making changes to the game balance, and developing the game.
The first part is the history of the development and life of one small game. Start
In the previous article, I described what problems we encountered at the initial stage of development, but in September 2014 I had the finished product on hand and the long-awaited day came - the day of release!
Before that, I did not have experience in the PR of applications, but I had a rather valuable resource - the application “Words beloved”, which is popular and has its audience, at that time it is about 2000 unique users. A promotional module was added to the application, and when the user returned to the application, a message appeared to him saying that the author had a new application and would you like to see it. This is a free and very good way to market your applications, in general, you can even agree with other developers on the joint promotion of their new games.
')
I also wrote several reviews and began to send them to various publications specializing in reviews of games on the Windows Phone platform. They published very little, but I did not notice any significant traffic jumps.
The words “Beloved” application became the main source of traffic and thanks to the cross promo through it, we managed to achieve good results at the start, almost immediately the application got into the top of new, and then the top games in Russia. There are many publications that monitor the tops of other countries and write reviews for games that are not in the top of their country, so there were reviews in other countries and the application began to grow in other countries.
By the end of 2014, it was possible to reach the third position in the top free in Russia, everything in the world is much sadder.
Statistics for 3 months:
Of course, after its peak, the number of users subsided, but the application took a stable place in the race section, on the first page and a lot of good reviews, gives even to this day a good influx of users. People like the game, they play it and sometimes a lot.
General statistics after a year of operation of the game:
And this is how the top players in the game looked like:
But, as in any barrel of honey, there was a fly in the ointment - this is a small profit.
After the start, during the year, we made changes to the game, added content, people played, but we didn’t manage to affect income. In general, I sometimes had the feeling that people who made one medium or large payment, having played for some time in the premium content went away, because we could not offer them something new. Adding new seasons and new cars should have mitigated this circumstance, but it was not possible to turn the tide, but this is one of the blunders and I will tell you more about it.
There are players who have gone through the whole game and require new content. A new map was created specifically for them with a bunch of new obstacles with even more unloading zones, but they didn’t bother to look at the statistics and understand what the players are doing. If on the first map the number of players who made at least one race was 320 328 (do not be surprised at the discrepancy of numbers, this is server statistics, it is less than Google, why I didn’t understand, perhaps because of the UDP blocking), on the extreme map, this figure was 11,443 (this is around 3.5%), and if we consider that when switching from map to map, around 30% fell off, then a new map was made for 8,000 users. This is of course a large number of people, but the complexity of adding content to the end is greatest.
And in the further consideration of races, a lot of players arrive before the first unload and do not go further. This strategy is adhered to by the players in the top. Although it is more profitable to complete one stone than to transfer all the stones to the first unloading.
After some time and gaining experience, for me it should have looked like this.
Problem: Players have consumed existing content and are asking for new.
What can be done:
Solution options:
If I painted it and realized at that time, then I would choose the first option, but I certainly did not do that and added a map to the end of the gameplay and, as a result, we did not notice any significant results, which is understandable.
The following year, we added a new map in the middle of the gameplay and saw a surge in the players' game activity, and the loss of players between the races also decreased. Slightly increased profits.
To increase profits, we added two premium cars, based on existing ones, with graffiti and slightly improved performance. They can only be bought for rubles, but in ruble terms they cost a little more than if you buy game currency for rubles, and buy similar cars for it. As planned, the number of players buying game currency has decreased, but a new lot has appeared, a gaming machine. The total result increased slightly, we slightly raised the average bill, but this did not bring any fundamental changes.
After some time, it was realized that the current project could not be corrected without significant changes, so the idea of ​​the second part began to emerge, but I will write about this in the next article.
Findings:
The first part is the history of the development and life of one small game. Start
In the previous article, I described what problems we encountered at the initial stage of development, but in September 2014 I had the finished product on hand and the long-awaited day came - the day of release!
Before that, I did not have experience in the PR of applications, but I had a rather valuable resource - the application “Words beloved”, which is popular and has its audience, at that time it is about 2000 unique users. A promotional module was added to the application, and when the user returned to the application, a message appeared to him saying that the author had a new application and would you like to see it. This is a free and very good way to market your applications, in general, you can even agree with other developers on the joint promotion of their new games.
')
I also wrote several reviews and began to send them to various publications specializing in reviews of games on the Windows Phone platform. They published very little, but I did not notice any significant traffic jumps.
The words “Beloved” application became the main source of traffic and thanks to the cross promo through it, we managed to achieve good results at the start, almost immediately the application got into the top of new, and then the top games in Russia. There are many publications that monitor the tops of other countries and write reviews for games that are not in the top of their country, so there were reviews in other countries and the application began to grow in other countries.
Picture start
By the end of 2014, it was possible to reach the third position in the top free in Russia, everything in the world is much sadder.
Statistics for 3 months:
In total there were 2,797,876 gaming sessions, while the average duration of the gaming session was 4.30 minutes.
6 363 900 races were held
180 people discovered all the achievements (I never failed = D)
174 people swallowed up all game content
The server knows about 250,000 players.
Of course, after its peak, the number of users subsided, but the application took a stable place in the race section, on the first page and a lot of good reviews, gives even to this day a good influx of users. People like the game, they play it and sometimes a lot.
General statistics after a year of operation of the game:
Number of players: 451 007
Number of races on the server: 12 553 441
The maximum number of races made by one player: 3 054
Average number of races: 27.68
Median number of races: 9
And this is how the top players in the game looked like:
But, as in any barrel of honey, there was a fly in the ointment - this is a small profit.
After the start, during the year, we made changes to the game, added content, people played, but we didn’t manage to affect income. In general, I sometimes had the feeling that people who made one medium or large payment, having played for some time in the premium content went away, because we could not offer them something new. Adding new seasons and new cars should have mitigated this circumstance, but it was not possible to turn the tide, but this is one of the blunders and I will tell you more about it.
There are players who have gone through the whole game and require new content. A new map was created specifically for them with a bunch of new obstacles with even more unloading zones, but they didn’t bother to look at the statistics and understand what the players are doing. If on the first map the number of players who made at least one race was 320 328 (do not be surprised at the discrepancy of numbers, this is server statistics, it is less than Google, why I didn’t understand, perhaps because of the UDP blocking), on the extreme map, this figure was 11,443 (this is around 3.5%), and if we consider that when switching from map to map, around 30% fell off, then a new map was made for 8,000 users. This is of course a large number of people, but the complexity of adding content to the end is greatest.
And in the further consideration of races, a lot of players arrive before the first unload and do not go further. This strategy is adhered to by the players in the top. Although it is more profitable to complete one stone than to transfer all the stones to the first unloading.
After some time and gaining experience, for me it should have looked like this.
Problem: Players have consumed existing content and are asking for new.
What can be done:
- Tighten the balance in the direction of complication, but also because of the numerous reviews that the game is very difficult, it seemed to me a bad idea.
- Add new content.
Solution options:
- Add a card in the middle of the gameplay, it will satisfy 30-60% of the audience, depending on the place of addition. The difficulty depends on the length of the route, and the length of the unloading zones, and most players reach 1 unloading. The number of unloading zones can be used minimally. The term for the development of a new map will be 2-3 weeks.
- Add a card to the end of the gameplay, it will satisfy 2.5% of the audience. The number of unloading zones must be no less than in the previous map. The term of development is 6-9 weeks.
If I painted it and realized at that time, then I would choose the first option, but I certainly did not do that and added a map to the end of the gameplay and, as a result, we did not notice any significant results, which is understandable.
The following year, we added a new map in the middle of the gameplay and saw a surge in the players' game activity, and the loss of players between the races also decreased. Slightly increased profits.
To increase profits, we added two premium cars, based on existing ones, with graffiti and slightly improved performance. They can only be bought for rubles, but in ruble terms they cost a little more than if you buy game currency for rubles, and buy similar cars for it. As planned, the number of players buying game currency has decreased, but a new lot has appeared, a gaming machine. The total result increased slightly, we slightly raised the average bill, but this did not bring any fundamental changes.
After some time, it was realized that the current project could not be corrected without significant changes, so the idea of ​​the second part began to emerge, but I will write about this in the next article.
Findings:
- Before adding any content to the game, you need to study the behavior of players. Perhaps this content will not be claimed by the players. Assess the complexity of adding this content and draw conclusions on the appropriateness of adding this content.
A good article about the analysis of changes in the game. - In analytics, it is worthwhile to lay the division into paying and not paying players and understand for whom this content is created and whether they need it.
- Do not stop there, while developing the game I completely forgot about other platforms. For me, and now remains a big mystery why I did not port the application to the androyd and ayos.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/331458/
All Articles