How I got 365K downloads on the App Store in two weeks (and why I left gamedev after that)

I did not become a successful game developer. My most popular game, Frantic Architect, reached only 410,678 free installations before it was removed from the App Store; it doesn’t compare with Flappy Bird or 2048 .

But I was in the 21st year, I had an unusual but quite solid experience in games behind my back, and I created the game myself, spending quite a bit of effort. It seemed like a great start to an indie game developer.
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Instead, I threw it.

It's been a year and a half since the release of Frantic Architect . Technologies are developing rapidly and I did not spend much time rethinking abandoned projects. But studying today the App Store, I see there developers of casual mobile games that have achieved success with the same strategy that I used then. I doubt that it will work for a long time, but so far it is, and at the same time it is very simple (if not primitive).

You don’t even need a couple of years of programming and design experience that I’ve had. If your goal is to quickly develop a mobile application, you don’t care about its type, and you need a reliable way to quickly get a bunch of users without spending millions on advertising, then the niche of casual mobile games suits you.

I am not interested in repeating this experiment, because I consider this business model a fig. Maybe you can convince me.

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March 17, 2016

I got out of my bed in a university dorm and checked Skype. My game was sent to Apple for testing a week ago, and I knew that it could be approved at any time. I lived in Toronto, and my product manager was in Paris, so I got into the habit of waking up and immediately starting to rake the flow of messages.

I remember reading some congratulatory message that Apple recommended my game in all countries. I turned on the iPad and opened the App Store. Indeed , Frantic Architect was there marked Best New Game.



A few days later, I got access to analytics. The fourth day was the best, the game was downloaded 58,486 times.



After two weeks, the number of downloads quickly collapsed. I was not particularly disappointed, because I did not count on such a volume of users. During the six months of work / procrastination on the game, I had little idea how successful it would be, except for the fact that I was able to sign an agreement with BulkyPix, one of the most successful publishers of casual mobile games of the time.

However, I was not impressed with the ad revenue, given the number of downloads.


There were no in-game purchases in the game, with the exception of a one-time payment to turn off advertising, and it generated very few sales (as expected), so I hoped that most of the revenue would come from embedded ads and videos.

It was the first bell that posed the question to me - is it worth it to continue to do it at all? The initial surge in traffic when the game was released was clearly insufficient to generate acceptable profits, and I didn’t want to constantly give out new content to keep the game up to date, because I didn’t find it to be particularly good. More importantly, I did not even know what type of content players need.

The first users found out about the game thanks to the App Store window, so the game ended up on the tops of lists in more than a hundred countries, which resulted in even more downloads. But I didn’t know who these people were and what interested them in my game. As far as I knew, they downloaded it simply because it caught their eye.

I was lucky that the game was not a “cash cow” for me, because a couple of months later BulkyPix declared itself bankrupt and I did not receive a penny from them. I was pretty upset, but it was not the reason for leaving the development of indie games. I needed a reliable source of income generation, but my approach, which I shamelessly copied from other games, was defeated.

The whole strategy was based on recommending the game to Apple or Google. Casual mobile game will not stand among the thousands of other games released every month, if you just publish it on different sites.

To recommend it, you need to get to the editorial board. You can try sending e-mails or via LinkedIn to get an internal contact and tell him about your game (I never did, but I think it is worth it), but most developers of popular casual mobile games offer them to well-known publishers . These publishers regularly meet with editorial advice and can personally tell about your game. Their connections and reputation are the best way to get the desired place on the first page of the store if your game is just as mediocre as mine (I think yours is not much better, otherwise you would not make casual mobile games).

To push the game to the publisher, you need to tell them about the game, which corresponds to their portfolio, but at the same time has a unique selling point. If they take your game, then they take on everything related to the business, in exchange for most of the income and ownership of intellectual property, and all you have to do is focus on creating a quality game.

In general, the strategy can be divided into five steps:

1. Go through the tops of the lists and the recommended games in the App Store and Google Play, find a game that is very easy to do. At the time of writing, the main candidates are Fire Up! and dunk shot .
2. Find the publishers of these games and look for others who have worked with many different developers. Look for patterns in their game portfolio. All of them usually have short game sessions and simple mechanics. Criteria for the approval of games among publishers are not too different, so if one of them liked your game, then there is a chance that others will approve it.
3. Make prototypes quickly. Do not write anything but the basic gameplay cycle, and keep the graphics simple. It is quite normal to copy other games if you manage to keep one unique selling point. This is usually a mechanic, but if you have artistic talent, you can simply rework the graphics of the finished game in an interesting way.
4. Send playable builds to all publishers you previously found. The pitch sent by mail must be short, no more than one sentence per description of one selling point.
5. Sign the contract and finish the game. You may also need to create sales materials, such as advertisements and descriptions. Pay particular attention to the graphics you’ll need to send to Apple and Google.

My first three games were all ignored, but these are just a few hundred hours of lost work. I would have managed to reduce this number to dozens if I had not fallen in love with the first two games and continued to add various functions to them, despite the fact that they were ignored / rejected by all the publishers with whom I showed the game. Do not do this. Get rid of rejected games and minimize your losses. Casual mobile games should be easy to develop, so starting again will be faster than iterating to improve a boring or broken design.

When I say that the publisher takes on everything related to the business, it means that he maximizes your chances that the game will be recommended. You may decide that there are other marketing methods with which they can help you. Such methods exist, but mostly they relate to the distribution of sales materials to a heap of gaming and technical news and survey media, as well as social networks. This is not very effective if your game is another casual mobile app. To make you understand how little this helps, I can say that the Frantic Architect version for Google Play has reached a total of 3,817 downloads. It was sent to the same sites as the version for iOS (I do not know what these sites are, but you will find a bunch of them if you google the name of the game). However, it was not recommended on Google Play.

From what I saw, cross-advertising with other games in the publisher's portfolio can be helpful. That is, instead of investing a lot of money in advertising, you get free advertising from other games owned by the publisher. I have no data on the sources of downloads of Frantic Architect, but I doubt that BulkyPix did this for my game. For my part it was an oversight at the signing of the contract, but it would not save the game from death.



If I had to explain why creating casual mobile games is a stupid business, I would compare it with a hot dog stall. This is a sample business model, and despite the fact that the food is terrible, buyers come because it is fast and convenient. Developers of indie games of a higher level can be compared with restaurant owners who sell good food, but also have a hard time making money because of the big competition. Regardless of whether you have a restaurant or a stall with hot dogs, how can you convince a buyer that he should come and buy your food when there are so many places to go?

Of course, the favorites will get to the top of the success of the stalls and restaurants. But why not choose a market with less competition, one in which you can quickly explain to the buyer why your product should be bought and not give vague promises of pleasure and entertainment?

I still love the game. I grew up on them and most likely will remain a gamer until the end of life. But if I ever get ready to do another game again, I will not treat it as a business.

I don't really know much about company management. I abandoned many other projects after Frantic Architect , so I don’t even consider it a particularly painful setback. But I don’t think that luck or hard work caused my current job , the provision of a game server for a surviving game with crafting, next month to surpass Frantic Architect in terms of total revenue, despite the fact that the user base amounts to hundreds, and not hundreds of thousands of people. But it is constantly growing since the launch one and a half months ago. I understand why people need my services, adapt to their needs, and can make improvements without wondering what I need to do.

Too many people look at apps in the top lines of the App Store and mistakenly think they have become the most successful. But target customers are much more valuable than occasional ones, and companies that understand this should learn, despite the fact that they are not in the spotlight.