

Postmortem of a commercial failure: My first Android Game App - irrlichthn
http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1289

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dsr_
I had never seen this game, or heard anything about it. Your first enemy is
obscurity.

Now I've downloaded your game and played it. Here are my thoughts:

\- It blares music at you as soon as you run it. Bad first impression.

\- No tutorial, no introduction, no obvious help function.

\- There's a slowly descending purple-and-black background and a lot of green
rain. Oh, look, there are some flyspecks at the top of columns of rain. I put
my finger on the screen, and a new column of rain starts falling upward. Oh!
It's a shooter, and if I'm shooting up, then the rain must be... whoops, I'm
dead.

Flyspecks? Yeah, it looks like you don't bother detecting screen density and
changing the graphics accordingly. I can't see anything interesting on a
300dpi screen.

There's nothing to suggest that the gameplay is innovative, or surprising.
Does it get better later? Or even different?

~~~
highwind81
I agree. This game is not that good. Its failure might have something to do
with Google Play store users being stingy but I think mostly it's because the
game is not that good.

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ortusdux
Personally, I view The side-scrolling space shooter genre as a niche market.
People who enjoy and seek out S^4 games are looking for either a 'bullet hell'
game like Ikaruga(1) or a nostalgic game like R-type(2). Side-scrollers are
great game design practice, but the market is full of very discerning
customers that would much rather pay 5$ for an emulator than buy an
unpolished, depth-less, programming experiment.

I do not say this to bash the game. I have a list of android apps I hope to
program, and a side-scroller is halfway down that list. At the top of that
list is a tip calculator. It would be foolish to charge 10 cents for a tip
calculator. I would be even more foolish to draw broad conclusions from the
very small number of sales. But the most foolish thing I could do is call it
quits before I get to the apps in my list that don't exist in the market in a
dozen variations.

(1) <http://youtu.be/EGNSdcy-apU?t=2m30s>

(2)
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rty...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dotemu.rtype)

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sojacques
Like dsr_, I had never seen this game before, and he is totally right saying
that your lack of promotion is a mistake. I just tried it, and I spent nearly
15 minutes shooting the bad guys. I believe it has a bit of potential.

You should give it a try with a real promotional effort, bigger objects (I can
barely distinguish enemies on my screen (KDDI pantech is06 for info)), and an
ad-supported model. Even though this may not be the next angry birds, you can
definitely get away with more than 16euro if you promote your game correctly.

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bookwormAT
"It's difficult to make money on Google Play with normal, sold apps."

What I'm missing in this article is the part where he published the same game
on a different app store and made good money.

Without that part, the complaint is not very convincing. There are many
reasons why a product can be a commercial failure. Most products are.

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orangecat
I believe it was patio11 who observed that it's incredibly hard to make money
with paid games, and this is a perfect example. Your game has potential, but
it's lacking in polish and this is your competition:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.int13.shog...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.int13.shogun)

~~~
ianlevesque
The competition has less than 5000 installs. It's super hard to make money on
Android with paid apps.

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DominikR
I don't know if you have tried this, but I did with my app, that I release 4
weeks ago:

Show the user a dialog after 3 days of use (I additionally make sure that the
app has been opened at least 5 times) asking him or her to review your app on
google play if he enjoyed using it and you will upgrade his app to the pro
version for free.

You can't check if the user actually reviewed your app, or if the user gave it
a good or a bad review, but I had good experiences with that. That's a simple
mechanic that will get you some nice reviews, because a user that regularly
uses your app after 3 days probably wont hate your app. :-)

You can easily compare the result of this by checking this link to my app:

<https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.flipster>

We are both in the same category of downloads (between 1k and 5k - I currently
have 1,7k downloads) and its 47 reviews vs 8.

~~~
ccoggins
I really like this idea. I've downloaded plenty of apps that pop up a dialog
asking you to review them. I've always found the pop up to be fairly pesky,
but I think I would change my mind if it offered the better version for doing
so.

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LaaT
Totally irrelevant, but your blog is revealing email addresses of commenters.
Do you really want that?

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jamesu
Some of the more successful indie games tend to market well before release in
order to stir up interest in the game. Would Minecraft have been as successful
if Notch just kept quiet and released a paid copy instead of releasing an
alpha after a few days of development so everyone could talk about this new
cool new sandbox game being developed? Probably not.

Given the ease at which you can post information on the internet these days,
this should be a no-brainer for any modern developer.

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mgl
Have you been considering replacing the paid version of your app with a free
version but supported with ads? This model looks more profitable on Android
Market.

~~~
irrlichthn
Yes, thought about that. But then I took a look at how much you get paid
though ads and decided that it's not worth it. You need a really, really quite
big amount of users for getting money out of ads, and the game isn't the type
of blockbuster game it would need to be for this.

~~~
bodo_leer
Not a Blockbuster game? What did you expect? You're game does not offer
something unique to the genre. There's a lot competition to your game and many
of the other games are better executed. Maybe you should hire someone to do
the graphics for you, especially the explosion.

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smashing
I think the comments in the article are really telling. If there is one lesson
the author should take away from the experience it is this: BUILD A NARRATIVE.
If you passed High School English you have enough tools to do so, therefore,
there is really no excuse except laziness.

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317
Do anyone else have some feedback on this article? I wonder if it's really
this difficult to make money with android...

~~~
daredevildave
Without trying to sound too harsh, and apologies to the developer it does,
this seems to be a case of "Launch mediocre game with no marketing to Google
Play and make no money." I'm not really sure what he was expecting.

I suggest:

1\. Use this as a learning experience for how the Google Play store works.

2\. Find an artist to work with (this looks like programmer art).

3\. Develop a game that innovates on the genre you wish to work in.

4\. Try again, and keep trying.

