

Domino from launch to $50k+ per month in revenue - alexknowshtml
http://davemartorana.com/logs/ramblings/flyclops-domino-2012-in-review/

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egb
What ad providers are you using?

Why did you build your own infrastructure instead of using Apple's turn-based
GameCenter like Letterpress does? What specifically was missing, in terms of
the quote "more revealing was how deficient Game Center actually was for
building a complete, feature-rich multi-player game"

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themartorana
Hi, Dave here.

For banner ads we're using iAd and Admob as a fallback. For interstitial
(full-screen ads) we're using Chartboost, Revmob, and Greystripe primarily.

GameCenter has a _very_ small payload, but more importantly, we wanted to be
able to do polling (for "live" play), maintain custom stats, have stat
thresholds (after "n" date, resigning will count as a loss), maintain whether
people are online (actively playing), have custom push notifications that were
more than just "you've been challenged" or "it's your turn", have chat, be
able to make "random matching" parameterized (based on game variant, player
ability, etc.), have Facebook and email-based auth, store invitations and
player preferences on-server instead of on-device, have player nudging, player
blocking, and more.

That's a pretty long but incomplete list. Most importantly, we can do whatever
we want, whenever we want, without shoehorning it in to GameCenter. Take a
look at the biggest deficiency of Letterpress - even Loren admits that it's
GameCenter. I'm not knocking it - creating something that is universally
usable is hard...

Mostly, we just have all of the control at our fingertips, and can do so much
more :)

~~~
egb
What's your revenue split between banner and interstitial? I've only been
doing banner so far, but have been gearing up to try Revmob.

GameCenter's payload size got increased from 4K to 64K - you must move a lot
of data! :-)

I do agree on chat, etc - I ended up making my own node.js chat server /
presence server alongside GameCenter. Custom matching sounds quite cool.
Nudging? Hm, could be done with APNS alone maybe, but yeah I see that then
you'd be tracking match data on your server alongside GC and that's almost the
same as building your own game server.

I agree that GC isn't great, but for us one-person shops the zero maintenance
cost is a key factor. At least when it's working and not full of bugs :-)

Great article, still re-reading it a few times!

~~~
themartorana
We moved 1.5TB between devices and servers last month I think...

For a one-person shop, getting a game out at all is pretty amazing! I
certainly see the appeal of Game Center. I'm not knocking it, we just wanted
more flexibility and control. We started with a single API server and single
DB server, but it was still over $200/m, so it was a cost we were willing to
eat personally and experiment with - but we knew it had to become self-
sustaining quickly, or we'd have to rethink our strategy.

As for ads - iAd pays about 75% as well as RevMob and Chartboost - believe it
or not. That said, this month we're about 28% banner, the rest interstitials -
they're worth it, as long as you don't abuse them.

