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Publishing games in the Play Store / App store - Let's share what we learn

gaussgunner

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Finally I got my approval. My experience with App Review Team has been... okay, let's skip that part, as developer agreements say I can't say anything about it. :shittydog:

My condolences.

The first rule of App Review is you do not talk about App Review........ but everybody knows about the butthurt.
 

DavidBVal

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First week has been rather good. Day 1 had a shitton of downloads, since then it has been going down but still to better levels than Play Store was during the first month. I hope it doesn't go down further. When did it stabilize for you, Guy de Incognito ? Still not happy with App Store? I am optimistic at this point, especially considering Play Store didn't bless me until I was 3 months and 50K downloads in.
 

Guy de Incognito

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First week has been rather good. Day 1 had a shitton of downloads, since then it has been going down but still to better levels than Play Store was during the first month. I hope it doesn't go down further. When did it stabilize for you, Guy de Incognito ? Still not happy with App Store? I am optimistic at this point, especially considering Play Store didn't bless me until I was 3 months and 50K downloads in.

I'm not sure you or I have had the typical experience on Android or iOS, but here's an overview of how my apps did so see if you can draw some conclusions.
My productivity app on Android took 16 months to get up to 60 downloads per day, and then over a couple of months it jumped to around 600-700 per day (it's now around 400 per day). That same app on iOS had 20-30 downloads per day in the first week, and then dropped to 10-20 where it's been for the past 3 months. Buyers per download are now twice as high as on Android (it was much lower the first couple of weeks), but with the tiny number of downloads per day it's a small amount of money.
The casual ad supported game I published on Android had 5-10 downloads per day for 2 years before jumping up to 1500 per day over a course of a month and then after a month falling to around 100 a day within a couple of days (ouch!). That game on iOS had around 15-20 downloads per day for the first week and now it's down to ~5 downloads per day.
The RPG game I published only on Android had a total of 250 downloads for 6 months before jumping to 50 downloads per day, and then after 3-4 months jumping to around 800 downloads per day, and then after 3-4 months dropping to around 400 downloads per day (with those ups and downs). I'm not optimistic about this game on iOS at all, but porting it won't take me more than a week so I might as well do it.
 

Mustawd

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Fair enough.


First week has been rather good.

didn't see that this was on the app store. downloaded on my iphone. Will probably download on my ipad once I get around to digging it out. Will let you know my thoughts.
 

Guy de Incognito

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DavidBVal Guy de Incognito sounds like you're both selling enough apps to make a living, not have to do other work, is that correct?

No, not the case for me, but I'm only selling one (pretty niche) app so maybe when I start selling my game I'll have enough to keep me out of the gutter without having to find other work.


Are people playing your RPGs on tablets or basically just phones now?

Of 115K downloads for my RPG game :cool: tablets are 15.5K, 9K are 7"-10" and 6.5K are 10" and above.
 

Mustawd

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didn't see that this was on the app store. downloaded on my iphone. Will probably download on my ipad once I get around to digging it out. Will let you know my thoughts.

Spoke too soon. When I checked on the download I actually noticed I got a compatability error (I have an iphone 5c). Didn't check if it works on iPad2 or not.
 

DavidBVal

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I'm not sure you or I have had the typical experience on Android or iOS, but here's an overview of how my apps did so see if you can draw some conclusions.
My productivity app on Android took 16 months to get up to 60 downloads per day, and then over a couple of months it jumped to around 600-700 per day (it's now around 400 per day). That same app on iOS had 20-30 downloads per day in the first week, and then dropped to 10-20 where it's been for the past 3 months. Buyers per download are now twice as high as on Android (it was much lower the first couple of weeks), but with the tiny number of downloads per day it's a small amount of money.
The casual ad supported game I published on Android had 5-10 downloads per day for 2 years before jumping up to 1500 per day over a course of a month and then after a month falling to around 100 a day within a couple of days (ouch!). That game on iOS had around 15-20 downloads per day for the first week and now it's down to ~5 downloads per day.
The RPG game I published only on Android had a total of 250 downloads for 6 months before jumping to 50 downloads per day, and then after 3-4 months jumping to around 800 downloads per day, and then after 3-4 months dropping to around 400 downloads per day (with those ups and downs).
Well, you know more than me as I just have one game on Google and 1 week experience on Apple, but gathering both our experiences, I think Google takes its time until it has gathered enough data to give you a decent placement. They need downloads, ratings, retention data, etc. of your game, before they place you in a "recommended for you" profile, which is when the big downloads come. Then I guess there's some kind of rotation between your app and others, which I guess is influenced by monetization per download (they want their cut). At leat that's how I'd design it, and it would explain the crazy ups and downs.

I'm not optimistic about this game on iOS at all, but porting it won't take me more than a week so I might as well do it.

You should port it, if only because of the knowledge you'll gather (and after all the effort put into a game, you must maximize the people playing it!). Also who knows, you might get thousands of downloads if you get featured by Apple, and even if not, it might give you a steady income over decades.

What are you using, LibGDX too?

Spoke too soon. When I checked on the download I actually noticed I got a compatability error (I have an iphone 5c). Didn't check if it works on iPad2 or not.

iOS 8.1 64 bit; that is, 5s or later, iPad mini 2 or later (2013 or later).

sounds like you're both selling enough apps to make a living, not have to do other work, is that correct?

I left my previous job as IT manager 6 months ago, so far I haven't regretted it. And EK isn't even focused on monetization: no ads, you can't buy gold/items, no skins, no multiplayer, etc. which is where money lies. And is extremely time consuming to develop, with so many areas, dialogues, scripted scenes, etc, and I'm still easily 800 hours away from considering it complete. I could have monetized all this 3-year effort effort differently, but who knows, maybe then I'd have failed. The fact it's cheap, huge and keeps growing is a big sales argument.

Are people playing your RPGs on tablets or basically just phones now?

Tablets are 25% of my downloads and 30% of purchases.
 

Mustawd

Guest
So it allowed me to "Get" it. It attempted to download. Then got a message saying something like: "This app is over 100MB. Unless it is extended you can't download this without Wifi". Then I hit ok, even though I was already on WiFI.

Next I got an error message saying the app is not compatible and then it closes and stops my download.
 

DavidBVal

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So it allowed me to "Get" it. It attempted to download. Then got a message saying something like: "This app is over 100MB. Unless it is extended you can't download this without Wifi". Then I hit ok, even though I was already on WiFI.

Next I got an error message saying the app is not compatible and then it closes and stops my download.

Sometimes I wonder what apple does with all the money. Google doesn't show you apps not compatible with your device, and their list has 12K devices, yet Apple can't properly filter? Oh well. If it didn't even install, then it didn't cause one of the crashes I got.
 

gaussgunner

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I left my previous job as IT manager 6 months ago, so far I haven't regretted it. And EK isn't even focused on monetization: no ads, you can't buy gold/items, no skins, no multiplayer, etc. which is where money lies. And is extremely time consuming to develop, with so many areas, dialogues, scripted scenes, etc, and I'm still easily 800 hours away from considering it complete. I could have monetized all this 3-year effort effort differently, but who knows, maybe then I'd have failed. The fact it's cheap, huge and keeps growing is a big sales argument.
:bro:

Tablets are 25% of my downloads and 30% of purchases.
So that's at least 70% playing RPGs on phones. Damn. I remember seeing tablet-only mobile RPG ports a few years ago, like Avadon which was barely playable on smaller tablets, and now you're missing most of your sales if you don't support phones.

I'll stick with desktop for now though. So nice after screwing around with [mobile] html5 crap for the last 5 years.
 

Guy de Incognito

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I've found that when I get an unexplained cut in downloads on Google Play that my average rating from those users who do download does go up significantly. For example (and this is just one example, there's been many instances of this behavior) when one of my games was at around 1.5k downloads a day, the average rating was 3.6. When it was cut down to around 250-300 downloads, the average rating was 4.3. This is not a good tradeoff in terms of revenue for an ad supported game (although it doesn't fall proportionally, probably because the users who rate my game better tend to play it more), but could be a hint to how and why Google Play decides to show the game to whom. In this case, Google has correctly guessed which users will like my game and is recommending it to them. Now if only they found ten times as many of those users...
 

DavidBVal

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I've found that when I get an unexplained cut in downloads on Google Play that my average rating from those users who do download does go up significantly. For example (and this is just one example, there's been many instances of this behavior) when one of my games was at around 1.5k downloads a day, the average rating was 3.6. When it was cut down to around 250-300 downloads, the average rating was 4.3. This is not a good tradeoff in terms of revenue for an ad supported game (although it doesn't fall proportionally, probably because the users who rate my game better tend to play it more), but could be a hint to how and why Google Play decides to show the game to whom. In this case, Google has correctly guessed which users will like my game and is recommending it to them. Now if only they found ten times as many of those users...

Yes, I observed the same exact thing. Probably when Google Play doesn't give any visibility to your game, you only get downloads from people coming from keyword search, similar downloads, or web links. Such people will likely give you better ratings, knowing what to expect from your game as they've come looking for it in the first place. Also, check the daily downloads by country, as less developed countries are notorious for giving 1-star ratings much more often (old devices, lack of localization, etc)

Update on iOS: down to 50 downloads per day, which is less than expected after 20 days. Conversion rate is almost 2x the android one, but still, with so few downloads, not noticeable. Still I think it'll go up, but I'm an optimist :D
 

DavidBVal

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An update about Apple App Store, 40 days in.

Downloads compared to Play Store in a similar time frame, (40 days after release, jan 31) are rather low: 16%. Sales are a 25% of what they were on Android on Jan 31.

I believe updates are very important for positioning correctly in App Store, and I am about to release the first update since release, so let's see how it goes.

Ratings are good, averaging 4.65 stars, so slightly better than Android. But with very, very few ratings (46 in 4K downloads, a proportion six times lower than android)
 

Siveon

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Shadorwun: Hong Kong
But with very, very few ratings (46 in 4K downloads, a proportion six times lower than android)
I attribute this to the App Store rating system being god fucking awful. Trying to rate anything on my phone takes forever, and I can almost never see if the review went through or not.
 

Ninjerk

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DavidBVal I think somewhere you mentioned making your store icon stand out and you were right--I got a new phone this week and remembered it was your game from the icon.
 

DavidBVal

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DavidBVal I think somewhere you mentioned making your store icon stand out and you were right--I got a new phone this week and remembered it was your game from the icon.

Glad to know. Yeah everyone else is full square with bright colors and usually a face. Which is a known marketing technique btw, as our brain has specific "circuitry" to recognize faces and they naturally catch our attention.

Getting close to 500K downloads on android, Apple has improved but very slowly after 4 months in (around 100 dls/day). I get some crazy peaks on Apple when I get linked from somewhere, but it usually lasts a few days.
 

Ninjerk

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DavidBVal I think somewhere you mentioned making your store icon stand out and you were right--I got a new phone this week and remembered it was your game from the icon.

Glad to know. Yeah everyone else is full square with bright colors and usually a face. Which is a known marketing technique btw, as our brain has specific "circuitry" to recognize faces and they naturally catch our attention.

Getting close to 500K downloads on android, Apple has improved but very slowly after 4 months in (around 100 dls/day). I get some crazy peaks on Apple when I get linked from somewhere, but it usually lasts a few days.
IIRC you're doing this full-time now? If so, how is that working out?
 

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