Rated 5 stars. Good game, nice graphics, sounds and gameplay.
- How fun do you consider the game to be on a scale of 1 to 10.
8
- How is the performance? Does it run smooth on your device?
Smooth on Samsung Galaxy S III, but I never have a performance problems on this device. I'll test your game again tomorrow on Samsung Galaxy Tab 3, where every non-native game lags.
- What's your opinion on this "pay model".
It's a bold move and it might work. How does it look like so far?
- Any suggestions or critiques?
I didn't like only one thing. I cover my view with fingers when dragging power and aiming.
Hey Noga, thanks a lot for the feedback and for the rating.
To answer your questions:
The pay model: Before developing the game I knew that I won't be making any big money from this pay model. I've read that only about 2% of people actually donate, so I knew from the start that unless the game becomes crazy big (millions of downloads) then I wouldn't be making any real money. That being said and known, I still wanted to try it out and see how it works.
Here's the breakdown so far:
- Only 2.3% of people donated.
- Out of those 2.3% the majority decided to pay the minimum amount ($0.99), which is still better than nothing.
- 98% of the people that donated are from US, while US being only 50% of the userbase. It appears Americans are more inclined to pay than any other country.
Marketing:
- The game right now has about 3k downloads. You say those download numbers are nice. I don't consider them nice at all considering you need tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands to make any money (regardless of pay model: ads, donations, iaps).
- The game is now getting around 200 downloads / day organically (from searches).
- Initial marketing, if you can even call it that, was done through reddit and xda-forums. On xda it was featured on their front page which got me around 500 downloads in that day (I was expecting more to be honest, they have millions of visits / day). The other was reddit. The game was on the front page or /r/android with around 120 upvotes. From reddit 450 downloads came and a big bunch of good reviews.
- So, from my "marketing" I gathered around 1k downloads. The rest of 2k downloads came from the store itself and from people sharing the game because they liked it.
- Even with 3k downloads now, the game is nowhere to be found on the playstore other than searches. It doesn't appear in the "Trending" category, and on spot 80 on the "top new" category. I don't understand how their algorithm works but I see games with 500 downloads and 20 reviews being in these categories, while my game is nowhere to be found.
- I expect the game to reach around 5k downloads and then disappear into an sea of apps without anyone ever finding it again. Same thing happened to my 3 other games. Initial download spikes of around 2k, then a fast death. So, I'm either doing something wrong after that initial spike, OR , unless the game goes viral after the spike, there's no chance to recover.
Bottom line, indie devs we are pretty much fucked when it comes to marketing. Either dish out thousands of dollars on advertising, or hit the lottery like "Flappy bird".
Did you release any games?