Now that the game has been out for a little over a month, I have enough stats to share.
Promotion
My only means of promotion for the game was my YouTube channel, Facebook page, and 2 forums (Stickpage, and Hyun’s Dojo).
The Slush Invaders Facebook page had info on the game since the start of development, back in April. I had been making STR posts 3-4 times a month, but I was quite inconsistent. I didn’t follow the ideal marketing strategy, where posts are supposed to become more and more frequent as the release date gets closer. But overall, I think I did okay keeping my Facebook fans updated.
Another community I tried to keep updated were in forums. I tried to mirror my posts to Stickpage and the Dojo to stay consistent. They were my primary beta test groups for the game. This was my first time doing a public beta test for a mobile device, and I’m quite proud that the Google+ Community for STR reached a couple dozen members.
I heavily depended on YouTube to get the word out before release. At this time, I have about ~5000 subscribers, which makes my channel medium-small. I spent a day capturing game footage and compiled it into a trailer and posted it about one month before release.
[embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnlAsZtskOo&width=550&height=300[/embedyt]
By the game release date, it had about 7k views. Relatively small amount, but that is to be expected since I sparsely post content on my YouTube channel.
Monetization
I definitely intended to make some money off this game while I was developing it. I had ideas about how to do a simple micro-transaction (buy tokens that let you switch up your team?), just to see what kind of return I would get. I also considered putting in inter-stage advertisements. But as the project went by, the need to “JUST FINISH THE GAME” grew and I put off making money.
It does seem like a waste. I spend half a year to make the actual game, but I decide not to spend 2-3 days to add monetization and be set. Maybe I’m too much of a purist or something.
I did put my game up for sponsorship on FGL, but it did not snag any buyers. I did contact my usual sponsor, but a lack of communication caused me to release the game on my own.
Release
I posted the game on Google Play, Newgrounds, and my website.
Google Play
I am fairly pleased with how the game did on the Google Play Store. My goal was to have 500+ installs. It holds a (4.7 / 5), but I’m not sure how good that is compared to most Android apps.
Newgrounds
Currently, the game has ~7k views with a (3.54 / 5). Written reviews were mostly positive. Usually my submissions get in the daily top 5, but this time it didn’t. Much less of a response compared to Slush Invaders Game.
Player Data
Now for the interesting stuff! Since the middle of development, I had injected Flox’s analytics API to track how much activity was going on across ALL platforms:
Points of interest:
- Players tended to play the game in a single, long session
- Users’ sessions lasted about 20 minutes each
- The game has been played over 73k times (more than I expected!)
The results pretty much matched my expectations. I’m a little disappointed the game wasn’t that popular online, but oh well. I’m quite satisfied with the game itself (and fans liked it!), so low stats are hardly discouraging.
Almost forgot, also, my game got featured on JayIsGames! One of my long time ‘game-dev bucket-list’ items.
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