Game Discoverability Day: Free vs. Paid: Discoverability for Smaller Mobile Games

[Music] this is a quick timeline of my history as a game developer I worked on small teams large teams and all by myself I've created 17 mobile games as a solo developer and most of those were self-published a bunch of icons are probably a terrible way of showing games so here for you games I'll be talking about today [Music] [Music] [Music]

all right let's go back here okay so in the middle of last year my work at revival productions was coming to an end I had stopped reading games to for about three years to work on a spiritual successor to descent I knew I wanted to go back to the reading games full-time but I wasn't sure if I could still make a living doing paid games on mobile like I had in 2014 when I was looking through my previous games analytics on the App Store something stood out this last column over here that's the sessions that players have played the game in the last year and Inferno to my best my best-selling game by a large amount is actually played lot three times less than slide race which is down near the bottom slide this is an infinite puzzle game similar to Tetris in a few ways I wanted to make a sequel and it seemed

like a good idea to make sliders to a free game so I studied lots of free games and watch lots of videos about how to make free-to-play games I'll come back to how that worked out first sight just to later well let's step back for a second and ask why I chose mobile games over other platforms actually the reason is simple touch arcade and Pocket Gamer consistently cover my games and Apple gives them minor features I spent a long time working on overload with the guys at revival it's an awesome game but very people very few people knew about the game and the sales reflect that it reminded me how hard it is to get attention and then I should take whatever attention I can get and just for reference the mobile version of inferno 2 has sold about 50 times better than the PC version when people talk about discoverability they often mentioned reaching out to content creators and building the community but not me I don't like spending time talking to people I'm not sure there I'm sure there are other things that are worth doing on a game that takes a month

I'm not sure these things are worth doing on game that takes a month or two if you make free-to-play games you need to make a good game and you need to do a lot more stuff on top of that this is just the ASO side of things you need to think about the icon to tie it all the screenshots the description the video you can optimize those things this is stuff I don't want to do I don't want to spend time doing anything really besides making a game so I just do a good first pass and I don't spend any time refining but if you want to do well with free games you should be doing this stuff so if I don't like spending time on major aspects of making my game successful why am i up here my goal is not to make the most amount of money possible with my games my goal is to make as many good games as I can before I die like that's my goal in life that's my bucket list is to make lots of good games so I've made that the core of my strategy like I basically say if I make lots of games that are decent people will follow me and then they'll buy more

of my games and I can keep making games so first I create lots of small titles quickly I have lots of experience I'm able to focus I'm impatient the next game is always appealing to me that's the fun part of game development is working on the games then I create all the stuff that I don't enjoy doing though I do enjoy making trailers more or less except for the capturing the footage part and then around launch I email about a dozen press people and do some social media posts and I usually contain this to a dozen people because those are people who consistently cover my games I usually spend about a day promoting the game when it's about to launch and the days after the launch I usually update the game to deal with feedback and refine it based on reviews and then I move on as fast as possible I'm usually excited to work on something new in fact I've probably worked on the new game for the next game for a week by the time the previous one is released this cycle does not include contacting people at the App Store or Google Play

I've never talked to those people but obviously they see the games on touch arcade and Pocket Gamer because I would say like 15 of the 17 games are released on App Store have been featured the only forms I use our touch arcades I just respond to the people there because they like my games and then I also do a weekly blog post but it's more more for me than anyone else because it just helps me sort out my thoughts and this is what happens when I get into a good cycle this is the sales chart from my iPhone releases in 2014 it's not very impressive but keep in mind that the Android versions were adding decent multiple on top I didn't realize it at the time but I averaged $10,000 a month between these four releases for on those two platforms and my next game was inferno - which outsold all these games combined stopping to do another interesting project is one way to screw up the cycle and that's what happened with inferno - but there are other ways to do it you can also do your trailer too early and you don't making a second one like I

did with scorcher you get too ambitious and you end up with an alpha trailer early on and then nothing close to a finished game like gigatron because I ran out of money or you can usually end up doing too much at once and it's hard to finish something when you're doing multiple things at once I can usually handle two projects at once one that's starting and one that's finishing but I can't handle more than that I have trouble so keep in mind that I make rkt action and puzzle games my deeper and more relaxed action games that have actually sold better well that usually involves more complexity in a longer dev cycle many other genres are actually better suited to paid games for small developers such as adventure games role-playing games and other story based experiences I'm not against doing larger games but all my games have either been less than 2 months or more than 10 months something in between is probably the sweet spot for me and I'll try to aim for that in the future now everyone knows that free games are winning the battle for a market share and paid games are going to extinct this graph is from

3 years ago it's 92 to 8% and it's only gotten farther than that since then very few developers are making only paid games on mobile and the main reason these are screen caps of today's top charts with a grossing chart on the right minecraft is a top-selling paid game and it's ranked number 62 in the grossing chart the next theme after minecraft isn't ranked number 224 and this chart doesn't measure ad revenue just in-app purchases so there's plenty of ad based games that are way above Bloom's td6 there's no question paid games are a bad idea if you're trying to make a lot of money if that's your only goal you should make free games and I'll get back to that let's see how paid games have done for reading games over the past 7 years Ferno plus is the third game I'd launched as rating games and my most successful of 2012 it got some press coverage but no Apple feature that I can remember it wasn't a significant launch but it had a pretty long tail because

it's a pretty good game after moderate success in 2012 converting four games to iOS I spent about 10 months on a larger game called bomb cats it was a huge disaster and the most stress I felt as a developer in my life it's still painful to talk about to be honest but just search my blog if you want to learn more let's move on after bomb cuts failure crush was a desperate attempt to get some money back well I also worked on Android ports of all my games it was a pretty simple game so I tried launching at $0.99 to see if maybe $0.99 games were better for me because I all my previous gaming had been in $1.99 it was my fifth solo release and I still couldn't break the top 200 in the paid game sales charts the Android ports ended up doing pretty well and I signed a contract to work on a game with Cartoon Network so raiding games was able continue despite Bobcats failure after the Powerpuff Girls game which was another 10 month project like Bobcats I went back to smaller games Joey Joey was the second release in 2014 and probably

the start of what I would call the golden era of raiding games releases I got the usual amount of coverage and some actual good featuring by Apple for the first time it had a solid launch week and my first game to break the top 200 in the paid sales games charts fluid came the month after with pretty consistent results June had fewer game releases that year so even though it sold less loot got a higher ranking on the charts I'm gonna tight all these rankings together at the end so you'll see why I'm covering that super cross fighter or same year another month later also got good coverage it was a remaster of a game I did three years before that but it still got featured by Apple and had a sales spike the week after because it was released a little bit in a weird time in my best Us sales days so far thanks to that feature and it broke the top hundred then came Inferno 2 and I finally had my first hit game they got the number three slot on the new games list the highest of all my games notice that it took over a

thousand sales to reach number 44 the top rankings in September of the next year I launched Devastator it got a good feature by Apple though not quite as good as inferno to notice that it reached almost the same paid game sales rank with under half the number of sales we can start to see the effect of fewer paid games being released because this game sold way less than inferno to almost got the same ranking the sales of course dropped off a cliff because his name was way too hard at launch but it also only took five Meek's to five weeks to make so why did it launch 11 months after inferno - well I started working on overload before I knew how successful Inferno 2 was going to be I was a huge descent fan and had worked on descent 3 so it was a very cool opportunity to work on overload a spiritual successor the next year after Inferno 2 was pretty messy in terms of development and was probably my least productive since I started reading games after Devastator I

went back to overload with more people helping out and revival 2 decided to do a Kickstarter this was two years after Kickstarter had peaked these pics are from the overload Kickstarter campaign when we decided not to shave until we made it it was the second most stressful time in my life as a developer and we only made it with 2 hours remaining and it was not worth it I have to say like we promised so much stuff from the Kickstarter that we ended up taking like a year longer than it would have taken to make the game otherwise and that year cost way more than what the Kickstarter made on the positive side the cent fans love the game and I learned a lot about unity and became a better programmer because of overload so getting back to paid games we now fast forward to my first paid release since Devastator this game released two weeks ago and I have to admit I was a bit worried that it wouldn't make it out in time for this talk it looks like a normal launch sales curve to me except for a bigger than usual Saturday spike thanks to an extra feature on that day it's doing

about as well as I expected to be honest the game stands out visually but let's also score focused and score focus games don't sell that well in my experience they're just a little too hardcore for most people and it doesn't have quite the same appeal to a broad audience it has significantly fewer sales than Inferno 2 but a much better chart ranking and this is four years four and a half years after Inferno 2 launched so let's look back at a bunch of numbers to see how many downloads it takes to get a certain slot in the top page charts if you look at the early years verses 2019 you can see it takes a lot fewer downloads to get it into the top like number 25 is 664 downloads and I bet in 2013 that would have been like ranked 100 so this chart kind of graphs the approximate sales to chart ranking it used to take over 200 downloads to get into the top 200 games in 2013 and now if you get 200 downloads you'll be in

the top 80 the top yellow line shows how many downloads you need to get to reach the top 50 and that's down below it's around 300 games now 300 downloads a day so why are the top games selling less because people are making less of them everyone is making free games and not many are making paid games because there are more free games and many more of them are good many people are less willing to pay for paid games to be honest it's hard to judge based on one game released this year and I need to release more to make any definite conclusions but I don't think paid games are dead they're just been gutted now let's look at a comparable free game which released four months ago this is sliders two's launch which got a similar level of coverage and featuring a scorcher the overall revenue is actually very similar to Scorchers for the first five weeks just a bit more smoothed out notice that it was getting around six thousand downloads a day but never broke the top 200 in free games

when I said the games had a similar level similar level of featuring I wasn't under selling it they literally had the same slot in the new games list and usually I found that the slot on the new games list is directly corresponds to how many downloads I'll get for my game regardless of quality I'm not sure if Apple meant to give them the same slot but it sure makes for a nice comparison the games are different and I would still expect a reason about reasonably similar sales between the two so let's compared more directly these are the first week downloads in the US only with a same featured slot sliders to release at a better time of year in late November but scorcher had a better bonus feature I'm not sure this ratio is totally accurate what it feels about right to me and for lower lower price gains the ratio will be a bit closer than 20 to one the important thing aside from the ratio is where the games ended up on the charts they're just a lot more free games getting tons of downloads so it's a lot harder to get on to the top charts their long-term slide just to is

continue to do pretty well for people who figure out the game it's very satisfying and enjoyable to play it was my first game to get a significant Apple feature beyond a good launch slot it got game of the day in the u.s. in January a bunch of other countries in February and then China and March it was like getting three extra launches for the game the best revenue day was actually from the China feature mostly due to ads so here's the total stats for slightest - up until last week given the quality of the game their downloads these revenue revenue numbers actually seemed pretty low the reason is the retention and ad revenue numbers aren't good enough for a game of this quality I'm happy with the downloads and overall results but I've been lucky and those download and those numbers up here the especially the ones at the bottom they could be even worse and I'll show you why this is pivotal this was touch arcades game of the week that weekend came out it's not a bad game

it was feature than new games we love lists and it got quite a few downloads the first week but it was just a little too hard for people to figure out for lots of people to figure out and not quite as good as sliders - this is what happens when you don't really know how to make a free game if it had been paid I would estimate it would have made three times as much if not more than this amount so making free games is harder than paid games in a few ways you have to be more hardcore about ease-of-use issues and refining the UI flow and keeping things simple this is the easy stuff the stuff is the developer that you can handle it requires a shift in mentality but it's not painful now we're getting to the more painful stuff doing a free game means you have to think about ads or in-app purchases or both you'll feel more constraints on the genre and you expect the complexity of your game the game systems will be warped to fit the need to retain users and generate revenue ad based games need to be simple and easy to get into and

in-app purchase games need to be deep and content heavy you also need to be obsessive with your stat tracking this page right there it updates in real time you can see every dot pop-up for every time someone installs your game or start your game and it's kind of it's not good for your mentality I looked at this page multiple times especially when sliders to launch I was like I can't do this I can't handle this as a solo developer so after launch you'll get emailed by lots of IDI companies offering to boost your revenue saying you're not making enough money do you use multiple companies or you stick with one for simplicity how much do you negotiate how much time is required to set up all this stuff to make them negotiate with each other in real time then there are the reviews some negative reviews provide critical info about a bigger issue but many others are not as fun to read and they might be useful so you have to suck it up and just read them anyway and all that ASO and UA stuff that I mentioned before that needs to be done - making free games is overwhelming and I have a

simple recommendation if you want to do them if you don't enjoy obsessing over optimization and stats get someone to help you it could be a partner a publisher a co developer or consultant if you're doing free games I'd almost say this is a requirement let someone else who knows what they're doing handle the stuff that sucks you'll have to share some of the money but there will probably be a lot more of it this is what it feels like to make a pay game in 2019 it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but you have to go into it with the proper expectations there are still some players who love and prefer paid games there are lots of them on touch arcade and you'll probably be able to make more of these games if that's important to you and comparing these two games sliders and scorcher had similar featuring and Reverend numbers in the first few weeks it's still too early to tell what the long term sales will be and sliders too has had lots of help

after those first five weeks but working on scorcher was more enjoyable and the launch was way less stressful and I would have enjoyed working on sliders too more if it were paid and made the same amount of money I don't like that nagging feeling that I need to keep working on a game I like finishing things and feel good about finishing things and moving on to the next thing and I'm always excited about the new game that's coming up more game ideas I finally get to work on this thing so if you're doing paid games you probably need to get an Apple feature to be successful that's not new that's been true for eight years probably you'll also have a lower cap on the revenue you make but you might enjoy working on the game more there are fewer paid games but I don't think the good ones are necessarily selling less there's just a lot fewer of them on the other hand I studied free games for many months before doing pivotal and sliders - and I still sucked at it it takes a certain mentality to do free games well and it's hard to do by yourself get an expert to help you and you'll be

less stressed and probably make a lot more money I'm not saying this because I have anything to sell I'm not an expert but I've talked to other developers and all our publishers and other people who do this sort of thing and like you guys just know so much more about this than I do and you actually want to do that stuff and I don't and before I end I have a couple more quick slides earlier Ike recommended not doing an early trailer but sometimes it works out if you have the right game and trailer I have around 2,000 followers on Twitter but a tweet with the trailer from speed demons was this game got over 12,000 views in the first week it was the most liked and retweeted thing I've done by a factor of like 5 and it opened up new opportunities for raiding games but it was a risk spending that much time on a trailer that early in development it just happened to work out this time let's take a look at some total sales numbers as well cuz everybody like stats these charts are a few days old so scorcher sales are a little bit off and

the free games only show in-app purchases only I don't know what happened with Google Play this year but it's been sucking for me regardless my better games have had better long-term sales and that's pretty encouraging I think because if you look at the top charts those games have had good reviews in general and have continued to sell pretty well and when a new game comes out those are the games to get the bigger boost and a little while back someone put together a comparison of first week versus first year sales for a bunch of steam games sign in from GDC asked me to do the same thing for my game so here are six games in order of release the ratios are actually lower than I expected though the revenue revenue numbers are pretty much what I would expect the biggest few factors in what affects the ratio are the perceived game quality and style of game leads to better long-term sales and the games with the lower ratios usually had better features in their first week even though Devastator at the bottom has the lowest ratio that's because it got a really good feature and then people really didn't

like the hard Cornus of it after it was no longer featured so I don't think it's a time thing that affects the ratio I think the ratio is still the same over time and that's it's and we're just on time perfect so if you have any questions there's a microphone right there I'm happy to answer any questions now or if you want to talk outside that's fine too so I'm curious who you recommend getting help from who do you have had partners that you've enjoyed working with and what do you think I who would I recommend anybody who does free-to-play games if you have a good game to show off you could just like you could contact any publisher there's lots of other small

developers who are doing free games and making lots of money you could contact some of them like I'm not one of those guys but but you have had people contact me it's not like I've reached I haven't really reached out to anyone people just if you get your game featured on Apple people will just email you and some of them will actually play your game and then like tell you what they like about it and then offer to help you make it better and I usually don't respond to those things but some people are more persistent and sometimes they are obviously another developer who has interest in the game so that's what really happened with sliders is multiple people emailed me about it and like this game should be doing better I'm like okay sure tell me how and so that'll happen eventually but not right now yes since you don't 'soon all that stuff how discoverability has now never been a problem for you how would you learn ASL if you've never been a publisher no since you never

liked doing here so and doing screenshots and icons and truly like doing a lot about them you always focus on the content of the game so why discoverability has never been a problem for you it's never been a problem because when I first my first few games weren't actually that successful but they got the attention of touch arcade consistently like my first game fireball it hasn't sold that terribly well but it was a good game and the people on touch arcades forums liked it and they would keep talking about it and then my next game was pretty good more attention and so touch okay just kept consistently covering my games because I was consistent and putting out good games and I did it pretty fast which most people don't do the games quite as quickly so because I was able to do the games consistently and fast I just kept getting coverage and and eventually Apple started picking up on that and started featuring the games and so now I have a pretty reliable I put out the game I tell touch forget about

it I tell Pocket Gamer they cover the games Apple features games somewhere on the new games we love lists usually not that high but depends on the game so it's just been a cycle of putting out lots of quality games to get to the point where people will pay attention to the new games that I put out so it's I don't really like I think I've gotten a little better at the screenshots and like the descriptions and stuff but I don't really know for sure like doing the trailers I think helps because those are actually on the store now but beyond that I don't think I'm like that much better than what I did in 2013 or 2014 okay pretty pretty lucky you are thank you okay looks like it thanks for coming [Applause]