Games for the Windows Phone Store - 5% conversion without marketing

Games and entertainment applications for mobile devices are one of the most popular types of applications. The interest shown by developers in this context to Windows Phone is quite understandable. The network has a lot of materials that reveal the secrets of developing games for this platform and, as practice shows, the entry threshold for programmers is low enough to master all the necessary tools in three, four weeks. An important point in this case is the return on investment. Will your game be able to earn the money for which you expect how much competition on this platform is, what is the percentage of conversion, what marketing efforts are required to promote the game? Not many companies dare to reveal such secrets and talk about their experiences,

Our questions will be answered by Alexander Milkin , Playtox Partner Relations Manager.



Alexander, what is the Playtox company currently ?
Playtox was established in 2009, and over the years has become a prominent player in Russia and the world. Today, Playtox games in Russia are more than 500 thousand unique visitors per day, more than 50 million game hours spent in games and more than 30 million registered players.

What platforms are you developing applications for?
Technologically, our games are browser-based, they are adapted for mobile devices.You can play them from any mobile device, and it doesn’t matter whether you use an old Symbian OS phone or your latest iPhone.
Also, for the convenience of users, we integrated the ability to login into games using the main social networks, and for users of modern devices (Android OS and Windows Phone), we release versions for smartphones. These are special shells that use the capabilities of the native browser of a mobile device and facilitate access to the game.

How long have you been publishing your games on the Windows Phone Store ?
In November 2013, we released for Windows Phone 8.0 one of our hits, World of Shadows, and a little later, in December 2013, My Farm and Brotherhood. Of course, we had some doubts that Windows Phone would show some good results, but the first two months after publication all our doubts were dispelled.

And what were the results?
In February 2014, we began to take stock of the first results and were pleasantly pleased that, without putting any effort into marketing and promoting our games, we received about 240,000 organic plants (“My Farm” -35k, “ Brothers"- 95k," World of Shadows "- 110k). Of course, it should be borne in mind that our games are distributed according to the freemium model, and the main mechanism for monetization is in-game purchases. It was very interesting that the conversion, that is, the percentage of those users who somehow began to spend money on the game, amounted to 5%, which is a very high indicator. For example, compared to Android, we actually began to earn tens of times more relative to the number of installations. The general financial results also pleased us, for a rather short period our income was about $ 50k.

Almost a year has passed since you released your first game, what is the current situation?

To date, we have already launched 7 projects in Russia (“ My Farm ”, “ Steel Legion””,“ Brothers ”,“ World of Shadows ”,“ Associate professors ”,“ Generals ”,“ Zagrebals ”) and the total number of downloads is approaching one and a half million. With ARPUs at around $ 1 and higher, LTV Windows Phone users can go up to $ 10.



What are your further plans for Windows Phone ?
Our applications show a steady increase in users, and we are very pleased to release our games on the Windows Phone platform. Obviously, due to the youth of this platform, competition among those who are willing to develop and port games is not high and this allows us to hope for future growth. In the near future, we plan to transfer several more games in order to expand the audience.