The history of the development and life of one small game. Release date

    One of the most important stages in the life of any project is the release. He is one of the most tense. I want to tell you how the release went and the next year of life for my first game, which we had been playing for almost a year before. After all, a release is not only downloading the application to the store and pressing the send button, but also preparing resources for PR, collecting analytics, quickly fixing errors and making changes to the game balance, as well as developing the game.

    The first part is the story of the development and life of one small game. The beginning

    In the previous article I described what problems we encountered at the initial stage of development, but in September 2014 I had a finished product in my hands and the long-awaited day came - the day of release!

    Before that, I had no experience in PR applications, but I had a rather valuable resource - the application “Words to my beloved”, which is popular and has its own audience, at that time comprising about 2000 unique users. A promotional module was added to the application, and when the user returned to the application, a message popped up that the author of the application had a new application and if you would like to see it. This is a free and very good way to bring your applications to the market, in general, you can even agree with other developers on joint cross-promotion of their new games.

    I also wrote several reviews and began to send them to various publications specializing in reviews of games on the Windows Phone platform. They were published very little, and I did not notice any significant jumps in traffic.

    The main source of traffic was the “Lyubim Lyubim” application, and thanks to the cross promo, it was possible to achieve good results at the start through it, almost immediately the application got into the top new, and then the top games in Russia. There are many publications that monitor the tops of other countries and write reviews on games that are not in the top of their country, so reviews appeared in other countries and the application began to grow in other countries.

    Start picture



    By the end of 2014, it was possible to reach the third position in the top free in Russia, in the world everything is much sadder.

    Statistics for 3 months:
    There were a total of 2,797,876 game sessions, with an average game session duration of 4.30 minutes.
    There were 6,363,900 races
    180 people opened all the achievements (I have never succeeded = D)
    174 people absorbed all the game content
    The server knows about 250,000 players

    Of course, after its peak, the number of users began to decline, but the application took a stable place in the race section, on the first page and a bunch of good reviews, it gives even to this day a good influx of users. People like the game, they play it and sometimes a lot.

    General statistics after a year of work:
    Number of players: 451 007
    Number of races on the server: 12 553 441
    Maximum number of races made by one player: 3 054
    Average number of races: 27.68
    Median number of races: 9

    And so the top players in the game looked:



    But, like in any barrel of honey, there was a fly in the ointment - this is a small profit.

    After the start, during the year, we made changes to the game, added content, people played, but we were not able to influence the income. In general, I sometimes had the feeling that people who made one medium or large payment, after playing for some time in premium content, left, because we could not offer them something new. Adding new seasons and new cars was supposed to smooth this circumstance, but it was not possible to turn the tide, but this is one of the misses and I will tell you more about it.

    There are players who went through the whole game and demanding new content, a new map was created specially for them with a bunch of new obstacles with even more unloading zones, but they did not bother to look at the statistics and understand what the players were doing at that time. If on the first map the number of players who made at least one run was 320 328 (do not be surprised at the discrepancy between the numbers, this is server statistics, it is less than Google’s, why, I still don’t understand, maybe because of UDP blocking), then on the extreme map, this figure was 11,443 (this is in the region of 3.5%), and if we take into account that when switching from the map to the map, 30% fell off, then a new map was made for 8,000 users. This is of course a large number of people, but the difficulty of adding content to the end is the greatest.
    And with further consideration of the races, a lot of players reach the first unloading and do not go further. This strategy is followed by the players who entered the top. Although it is more profitable to complete one stone than to transfer all the stones to the first unloading.

    After some time and gaining experience, for me it should have looked like this.
    Problem: Players have consumed existing content and are asking for new ones.
    What can be done:

    • To tighten the balance in the direction of complication, but also because of the numerous reviews that the game is very difficult, it seemed to me a bad idea.
    • Adding new content.

    Solution Options:

    1. Add a card in the middle of the gameplay, this will satisfy 30-60% of the audience, depending on where you added it. Difficulty depends on the length of the route, and the length on the unloading areas, and most players reach 1 unloading. The number of unloading zones can be used minimum. The term for developing a new card will be 2-3 weeks.
    2. Add a card at the end of the gameplay, it will satisfy 2.5% of the audience. The number of unloading zones should be no less than in the previous map. The development period is 6-9 weeks.

    If I had painted it and realized at that moment, then I would have chosen the first option, but of course I didn’t do that and added a map at the end of the game process and as a result, we did not notice any significant results, which is understandable.

    The following year, we added a new map in the middle of the gameplay and saw a surge in the game activity of the players, as well as a decrease in the player loss rate between races. Profit increased slightly.

    To increase profits, we added two premium cars, based on existing ones, with graffiti and slightly improved characteristics. You can buy them only for rubles, but in ruble terms they cost a little more than if you bought game currency for rubles, and already bought similar cars on it. As planned, the number of players buying game currency decreased, but a new lot appeared, a gaming machine. The total result increased slightly, we raised the average bill slightly, but this did not bring any cardinal changes.

    After some time, it came to the realization that the current project could not be fixed without significant changes, so the idea of ​​the second part began to emerge, but I will write about this in the next article.

    Findings:

    1. Before adding any content to the game, you need to study the behavior of the players. Perhaps this content will not be claimed by players. Assess the difficulty of adding this content and draw conclusions on the appropriateness of adding this content.
      A good article about the analysis of changes in the game
    2. In analytics, it’s worth laying down the division into paying and non-paying players and understand for whom this content is created and whether they need it.
    3. Do not stop there, while developing the game I completely forgot about other platforms. It still remains a big mystery to me why I did not start porting the application to android and ayos.

    Also popular now: