After being an indie game developer I begin to doubt myself

The game itself has a good rating. So i think it's not the game :)

I think marketing is your main weakness.

Did you do those presentations in other game forums? This would help increase spreading your notification "around the world".

500 bucks per month, with your first game is not bad at all in my opinion.

Work on your marketing and it should work. :)

Good luck!

The game itself has a good rating. So i think it's not the game :)

I think marketing is your main weakness.

Did you do those presentations in other game forums? This would help increase spreading your notification "around the world".

500 bucks per month, with your first game is not bad at all in my opinion.

Work on your marketing and it should work. :)

Good luck!

Thanks for your reply. We work hard to complete the game , $500 can only pay the office rent , we do not have any other income for the past 5 months. So it is a little hard.

You should visit some gaming forums and present your game there.

This would be a good start i.m.o.

Good news is that with 10-30 installs a day (600 per month) and $500 income per month, you have a pretty healthy ARPU value of over $1... You just need more users!

You might have to hire an advertising/marketing company to help you get more users. As long as the cost to acquire 1 user is under $1, then it will be worthwhile.

Also, don't forget about google adwords, showing your game in other peoples games.

They're pretty cheap, and can work well if you have a game with a good rating

Just having it on the store is not enough, you definitely need some marketing to push yourself up on the top lists.

The sad reality is that if you are not on the top lists, and/or featured somehow somewhere, it is very hard for your users to find your game.

I do think the video needs work. It doesn't really do a great job explaining the game (what the player can do, the scope of the game, etc). Once you have the video, it makes it easier to share the game with publications.

Can the player share anything from the game onto the social channels? Where are the installs coming from? Are they localised in one country? A region? Is that something you can captialise on? (e.g. China, could you advertise or share social media on WeChat?)

Thank you all.

Hodgman : the ARPU can not reach $1 , the revenue is coming from appstore + playstore so the total installs is more than 1500 per month.

Olof Hedman : You are right. the users are hard to find the game. We don't have extra budget to buy google adwords , i think it's expensive.

yaustar : None of us knows how to use the video process software , we just take a screen record and upload to youtube , maybe later we need to hire professionals to do. Currently the game does not contain any social share feature, later we will integrate facebook sdk in it.

Forgot to mention that you have to remember that you have released a product to the world which honestly not a lot independent developers have done so you have already succeeded in that respect.

You don't have to go full on in learning video editing software, more of think about what you want to show the user. If you only had 30 secs to convince a user to try the game, what would you show them?

Without any social integration, it makes it hard for players to share and therefore makes it hard for the player base to grow organically.

For a new game, 500$ is not great, it is amazing.

You need to work on your user acquisition and retention.

In terms of acquisition, now that you are making 500$, you should put some of that into marketing. There are several channels and facebook native app install is still one of the most successful (but expensive) ones.

You can send it for blogs and reviewers for more exposure.

For retention, measure everything, check where and when the users are exiting the game and if there is a way to fix that.

Now to be realistic, assuming you will live and pay your rent from your first game, is not really that feasible. Maybe when you reach your 10-15th game, but it seems the game is on the way of becoming a hit.

Good luck.

bro, you need really to work on your marketing!

The video doesn't explain anything! It's only a bunch of effects and sounds!

Take a day and learn how to make a simple video, cut the best scenes, show your different monsters and bosses, write it on the screen... put an intense music to fit the game art on the video...

and after you do it, make an update so the Google Play and the App Store can bump it a little bit...

and at the end, you will try to advertise without a budget... so try to find people / communities who like to play this type of game and show it to them!
But remember, before you do it, please improve your page, video, screenshots! :D

We don't have extra budget to buy google adwords , i think it's expensive.

You're right.

I don't do our marketing, but know we have used it sometimes.

I thought they were cheaper then they are, asked the guys doing our marketing about it now, and yeah, they are pretty pricy per user.

You need arpu of >$1 for it to be a straight win, but if you can use it to climb on toplists, then it might be a win even with lower arpu

see if someone can share some marketing tricks.

Moving to Business.

1. grossing $3K per year per warm body is not exactly making a living. its pretty obvious you guys need to get some sort of jobs to support yourselves while you get the company up and running, and perhaps fund the company as well. reducing your living expenses will free up funds from the jobs for use by the company. all profits from the company will need to be plowed right back into the company. not until the company can pay for everything (gear, marketing, telecom expenses, office furniture and supplies, etc) and still have a bunch left over for you two (say at least $20K each per year or whatever you need to live on) - only then should you quit your day jobs.

2. market research: how much do the best selling games of this type make? maybe just one of this type of game won't get the returns you seek. you may need a dozen titles to get what you want. or maybe these games just don't cut it at all as a way to make a living and you'll need to do some other type of game that sells better. also, can you match the quality of the best selling games of this type? if you can't, you have no product at all. 2nd place is 1st loser.

3. assuming there's evidence that these games can get you the desired returns, its all about marketing, marketing, marketing. and then some more marketing.

One small but important thing, don't do the English text yourselves if your English isn't perfect, ask someone to do it for you on the app store, there are plenty of errors (mostly small ones) but it can easily scream "the English will suck in game" to global players.

After getting the game and playing 2 stages i wanted to buy the limited edition and instead got this : https://www.dropbox.com/s/ip9mdffcl7lfv7v/2016-09-24%2018.26.08.png?dl=0 so that could be why you're not getting more money, wouldn't let me purchase (no password / pay popup, just get this message, on IOS 10)

After getting the game and playing 2 stages i wanted to buy the limited edition and instead got this : https://www.dropbox.com/s/ip9mdffcl7lfv7v/2016-09-24%2018.26.08.png?dl=0 so that could be why you're not getting more money, wouldn't let me purchase (no password / pay popup, just get this message, on IOS 10)

Thanks for your advice. The IAP seems to be bug of appstore's review. Our update version gets "Ready for Sale" state in the morning but the new-added IAP items : giftbox and golden was still in reviewing states. So you can't do purchase. I don't know why , maybe tomorrow will be OK.

1. grossing $3K per year per warm body is not exactly making a living. its pretty obvious you guys need to get some sort of jobs to support yourselves while you get the company up and running, and perhaps fund the company as well. reducing your living expenses will free up funds from the jobs for use by the company. all profits from the company will need to be plowed right back into the company. not until the company can pay for everything (gear, marketing, telecom expenses, office furniture and supplies, etc) and still have a bunch left over for you two (say at least $20K each per year or whatever you need to live on) - only then should you quit your day jobs.

2. market research: how much do the best selling games of this type make? maybe just one of this type of game won't get the returns you seek. you may need a dozen titles to get what you want. or maybe these games just don't cut it at all as a way to make a living and you'll need to do some other type of game that sells better. also, can you match the quality of the best selling games of this type? if you can't, you have no product at all. 2nd place is 1st loser.

3. assuming there's evidence that these games can get you the desired returns, its all about marketing, marketing, marketing. and then some more marketing.

Thanks for your advice, by two days to ask on the forum, I now have more clearly how to do the next step. Thanks for all the warm people like you on the internet.

I would suggest resetting the 8 hour timer for people who couldn't purchase it in next update then, the package will probably be gone by the time it's fixed :(

Finished first pack of 4 levels, enjoying it, the difficulty goes up pretty quickly at times but it's nice and surprising that it's non linear (althought it may be just a tad much at time). In any case enjoying it so far.

500$ per month each?

With below 50 installs a day?

I've actually studied the mobile market a lot the past 2 months, and these metrics would indicate your game is far above average actually. Very few games are profitable below the top 1000 games.

I think the problem isn't you, it's the market.

Mobile has the lowest discoverability of all entertainment platforms with approx 800M+ players for 1.4+1.2M games.

Other platforms get a much higher chance of discoverability. Steam for example gives roughly 33 times more chance for a random person to actually stumble across your game because there are this many fewer games (and only 150M players).

I'm surprised indies still even bother to try to make any money on mobile. It worked in the earlier 2010s because it was new, but now, only 170 companies in the world actually make real money on mobile...

Have you considered making PC, console or web-based games?

I heard ad-revenues on Kongregate isn't too bad for a low burn rate partnership.