June 16, 2015 at 12:16Transformice Story: An Indie Game With 60 Million Users
- Transfer
In May 2010, Transformice game appeared, which was created by only two developers for their own pleasure and in their free time. This game belongs to the class of multiplayer platformers. Transformice owes its success to publications on platforms such as 4chan and Something Awful.
After 4 years and many updates, 60 million accounts have already been registered in the game.
This is not to say that the development of the game Transformice has already been completed. On the contrary, this game is under active development. And today I would like to talk about what we have been doing these four years both for the development of the game and for its monetization, because making a game is not easy, but even harder - to make money from it. So, the numbers!
In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marshald and I worked for a French video game company, he worked as a developer, and I was a graphic designer / technical artist. Prior to this, Jean-Baptiste created small browser games; this was his hobby. And once he asked me to help create a new game with improved graphics.
I was amazed at his ability to make fun and funny games. Naturally, I agreed and offered him a story about mice that use boxes and boards to help their mouse friends escape traps and get cheese: Transform-mice. The ability to create boards and boxes we then gave only the super-mouse (Shaman), but the name Transformice remained.
Transformice Poster 2010
At first we made a game with a simple plot: the mouse needed to get to the cheese and return to the mink. Moreover, only one player (Shaman) had the ability to create boards and boxes in order to help other mice. After about three weeks, we made a fully working prototype.
First prototype, 2010
We launched the game on May 1, 2010 (it seemed funny to us if we did this on Labor Day in France). We talked about our launch only at the then only known French video game forum - JeuxOnline. And, you know, things went well, people liked the game, even in that very simple form: then there were no accounts, cheese counters, but there were just plain brown mice and the same simple graphics. The physical engine (Box2D) and the multiplayer mode sometimes led to rather curious situations, and people quickly got hooked on our game. Soon, we added accounts and began to count the cheese, which became a kind of currency in the game, for which you could buy a variety of caps for your mice.
A few weeks after the launch, it’s not clear how SomethingAwful found out about us. The game was not even translated into English, but it did not bother anyone, everyone played and shouted "OMELETTE DU FROMAGE". The funniest video in Transformice’s history (with more than 1 million views) was shot right then. I really recommend that you watch it if you are not familiar with our game - it seems to me that this is the best review.
After we quickly translated the game into English, a real nightmare began: they learned about us not only on the SomethingAwful forum, but also on the 4chan forum. Our only small server could not stand such an influx of users. And, of course, as according to the law of "meanness", in the same period Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Indiegames.com and PC Gamer wrote about us. We had to work hard to ensure sufficient bandwidth.
We had problems with the server quite early. We paid for servers from our own pockets and could not afford to pay for ten servers. Therefore, we chose a quick and cheap solution - we placed a horizontal Adsense banner under the game and opened a Paypal account for donations.
An advertising banner gave good results - an average of 47 € / day, which allowed us to increase the number of servers. By the end of 2010, using the banner, we had earned approximately 11,000 € and had an average traffic of 80,000 unique visitors / day.
The “Donate” button through Paypal collected about 3,000 €, and by the end of next year we removed it. The list of users who have made donations is on our site so far . Surprisingly, most donations came from the United States and Norway, but almost no one came from France, despite the fact that France is our home country. We do not yet have such habits and such a culture.
For several months, we continued to increase the number of servers in order to cope with the massive influx of players. At the same time, we continued to work full time in the same French company, and in our free time we fixed bugs and added some kind of content (hats!).
We understood that this can no longer go on and we need to choose: leave the company and create our own in order to serve the game (which at that time already brought us income), or completely forget about the game and save our workplace, because we had no free time for our own affairs. Naturally, we chose the first option.
In April 2011, we quit and created Atelier 801. We freed up time, added something to the game, created some seasonal events, and gradually our player base grew from 150,000 to 300,000 unique visitors per day.
We had a very unusual player base: more than 50% of our audience was in Brazil, the second place was taken by the United States (11%), then Turkey (8%), France (7%), Latin America (5%) and Russia (3 %). We tried to localize the game to satisfy the needs of our users, and in the case of Brazil and Turkey, it really worked.
Despite the fact that these two countries were not very attractive for advertisers, the banner still brought good income: an average of 280 € / day, and in October this figure reached the level of 1000 €. In total, in 2011 we earned 103,000 € on the banner. In addition, as the game’s .swf file was distributed across the Web, we added a small ad (which you can skip right away) before downloading. We earned approximately $ 150 / day on this ad, and in 2011, with the help of it, we earned another $ 55,000.
These results inspired us very much. We calculated the incomes and expenses and decided that for work we need to hire another person! We did not pull the cat by the tail and hired our most dedicated moderator as a community manager. His duties were to respond to the huge number of emails that we received almost daily.
But not for long music played. See the red line on the ad revenue graph? This is the moment when we were banned from Google Adsense.
Atelier 801, end of 2011
Then it was a serious blow. Since Google Adsense pays with a 60-day delay, our ban meant that for clicks that collected more than 13,500 €, we won’t be paid. What we had: the need to pay three salaries and pay about 30 servers. And at the same time, our main source of income simply disappeared.
At first we tried to replace Adsense with other advertising platforms, but none of them worked even at 50% of Adsense, and the amounts began to decrease. While we were looking for ways out of the situation, Jean-Baptiste and I did not pay a salary for several months to pay for servers and pay a salary to the manager of our community.
Why did it happen so? Suddenly, our domain was blacklisted without any notifications, without any letters from Google. Contacting someone from Google Adsense employees is simply unrealistic: the only way to at least try to sort things out is the user forum. But there, people often know no more than yours. One forum participant, however, hinted that we got a ban for our page with a list of users who donated for the development of the game, but in the future he refused to talk with us.
On New Year's Eve, we thought that our Wordpress site with a lot of content could help us get unban, but ... in the end, all our efforts were again futile.
A happy coincidence helped us: our friend once went to the same school with his current Google employee. Just a couple of emails, a few minutes - and we are banned. Still, never underestimate the connection.
And only then we found out the reason for our ban: the Google program found that our banner was at a distance less than 150 pixels from our flash game, and this is prohibited by the Adsense policy (always read what is written in small print!), And on on this basis we were automatically banned.
We reinstalled the Adsense banner in February 2012. But still 150 pixels is a lot, and most of our users with outdated computers and low-resolution screens have not even seen it. We gave the banner to work for several months, during which he brought us about 150 € / day, but this was not enough to pay the servers and pay the three of us. We were very upset, no longer wanted to be so dependent on advertising and decided to make Transformice a free-to-play game.
We prepared for this serious step for a very long time and carefully. Different thoughts revolved in our heads: What if the players hate us for demanding money? Can we make an income? Suddenly, the players abandon our game?
We wanted to set low prices and conduct honest monetization, so that the players knew what they were paying for, and at the same time ensure that most of the add-ons could be received through the game (so that avid players would not feel cheated). In general, pricing was very difficult. We constantly thought how much we have the right to ask people to play our browser-based flash game with cute little mice.
As I already said, for their money we wanted to give the players the maximum of what we can offer: I completely redrawn all the created elements (at that time it was about 150-200) and added the ability to choose different color options and transitions for each element.
There were two ways to access the settings of the elements: spending a lot of cheese or a bit of hard currency - strawberries. We also selected about 20 items that could be bought for strawberries (well, for cheese, of course, too), and added 5 colors for coloring fur mice. During testing, we purposefully showed them on our mice, and our players really wanted to get the opportunity to change the color of their mice.
With tremendous fears, after six months without a salary, we removed all the advertising banners and on June 14, 2012 launched Transformice in free-to-play mode. And that step ... worked!
As you can see from the graphs, the reaction of the players was amazing. They rejoiced at the opportunity to support their favorite game, and the first month brought us more than 250,000 €! We were astounded.
Quickly, we hired several more employees: three developers, three community managers, one financial director and a system administrator. Considering that at that time we had about 3 million active players and 40 servers, we thought that we should increase the team to sleep a little longer and better.
Also at the end of 2012, we moved to a larger and more expensive office.
In general, between June and December 2012 microtransactions brought us 1,068,300 €, that is, an average of 5,262 € / day. Each peak on the graph corresponds to the release of new content / seasonal updates, in which new hats and fur color options appeared. The red line is the breakeven point of our company, taking into account the payment of wages to all employees. At the end of 2012, we broke our own record for the number of players playing Transformice at the same time - more than 86,000 users were online.
After a few months, monetization slowed, and at the beginning of 2013 the revenue line was very close to the breakeven line. Looking back, I can explain this by the fact that in December 2012 we held an action: we created an Advent calendar, and players received rewards every day. As a result, we gave away a bunch of content (hats, titles, cheese and even hard currency) for free. Now I understand that this was a huge mistake on our part, because users could use their gifts for quite some time. This has stalled our revenues over the next few months.
By October 2013, the situation worsened even more, and we decided to use the banner again: placed it on the site next to the game, but this time made it not horizontal, but vertical. We realized that this did not bother our players at all, and the banner worked much better than before (confident 500 € / day compared to 150 € / day at the beginning of 2012). This good extra income allowed us to stay above the breakeven line.
Looking back, I understand that we were complete fools, once we refused an advertising banner: even if things went as bad as at the beginning of 2012, in 18 months it would have brought us more than 100,000 €.
At this time, we observed an outflow of players, and in 2013 our active users decreased by 15%.
At the end of 2013, the situation did not improve; even the holiday season did not help. And the year 2014 began at all gloomily: as a rule, January and February are not the best months in terms of income.
Then we made one of our most important decisions: we will no longer give out free caps during some seasonal events. Instead, we will only sell them (for cheese or for strawberries). We still remember that crazy giveaway during Christmas 2012, as a result of which the future of our game was in jeopardy. Although the players for her were very grateful to us.
The players did not take our decision very well: many of them deservedly wrote complaints on the forums. We continued to distribute badges and titles, but without hats they did not feel any more interest in playing on. On the other hand, there were players who liked our decision: they did not want to play, for example, the entire period dedicated to Valentine's Day for the sake of getting some kind of hat. But, basically, the players wrote us down as traitors.
In the end, the negative went away, and slowly, but surely, our sales began to grow. More often, we were still above the breakeven line: in that period, the number of players decreased slightly, but monetization went better.
In general, in 2014 we earned 929025 € from sales and advertising, and after paying all taxes and fees our profit was 40309 €.
In January 2015, we managed to publish Transformice on Steam, after which several interesting articles were written about us, and US players began to pay more attention to us. At launch, the game showed 5,333 concurrent users and ranked 41st in Steam popularity. Thus, we were able to stay on the main page in the “Popular New Games” section for almost a week, and during the first month the game was downloaded 400,000 times. In the same month, over 120,000 new accounts were created through Steam, 38,423 of which were played for more than an hour.
It should be noted that for all these years before being published on Steam, we had all the same four articles that appeared during the launch of our game in 2010. At that time, users somehow found out about us through reviews and recommendations that we did not think about the need for additional PR. Now I can say that, probably, we missed a lot of opportunities while we were improving the game. Apparently, this prevented us from creating a solid and serious game development studio. We just quit our job and devoted time to the game without looking back at others, which probably prevented us from successfully promoting our other developments.
Over the past four years, we have published three more games: Bouboum, Fortoresse and Nekodancer. Together, they collect about 300,000 unique visitors per month and generate enough revenue to pay for their servers. But we were unable to promote these games with the help of our Transformice player community. It’s worth considering the success of the studio in the future if you rely on the success of just one game.
In principle, to be honest, we don’t have much to complain about: we have a huge base of players, we made a fairly successful game that brings us fairly regular income. Now we have 12 people working in the studio, and we have the opportunity to create and develop other games. Now we need to study game marketing and make the best use of the accumulated potential and our experience.
And now the time has come to tell us what we did right and what not!
CORRECT
1. Physics
In 2010, flash games on a physical basis were very popular, just remember the game Fantastic Contraption. By the way, this game had a serious impact on us when we made our game (which made the creator of Fantastic Contraption Brian Fargo contact us!). Incredibots, QWOP, Crush the Castle later appeared ... Playing these games alone is a lot of fun, but none of them had a multiplayer mode.
People liked messing around with the physics engine in principle, but in multiplayer mode it became even more interesting. The players studied the physics of the game and, in principle, we could give them a ball for beach volleyball, and they would still be interested in spending time together.
Today this direction is not so popular in browser games, but our game came out just at the perfect time for its genre.
2. Real-time multiplayer mode
If you remember, then 2010 was the time of games on Facebook. In the world of desynchronized interaction, real-time multiplayer mode in a browser game was a great alternative.
In browser games, real-time multiplayer mode is rare, because, as a rule, this requires serious resources from both the developer and the player. Multiplayer in itself is a serious challenge for any indie developer, but it's still worth it! For us, the ability to play with someone is a “masthead”, which is why we only create multiplayer games.
3. Accessibility and convenience
This item is very important for any indie developer who wants to attract an audience. It is unlikely that someone will want to play your game if the player needs to spend a lot of time downloading and installing it.
Our game "weighed" less than 1MB, was available in all desktop operating systems and browsers, due to the popularity of Flash Player. We also made the “Guest” mode in the game for those who did not want to register just to try to play. The registration process was also quite simple: when creating an account, e-mail was not required, we invited players to enter it later for a bonus in the form of cheese or accessories.
We did this in order for the players to get involved in the game - this is necessary in the field of browser games, where the player rarely concentrates on something longer than a few minutes. I must say that this greatly contributed to our success.
We did not understand this right away, but those who concentrate on developing countries should definitely keep this in mind, because often these players have quite specific equipment. Do not abandon them! This leads us to the following point:
4. Localization
Generally, this can be attributed to the “Accessibility and Convenience” item, but nevertheless we will pay special attention to this item.
As soon as we saw that English-speaking players are playing our simple French game, we immediately tried to translate it into English. In addition, we translated it early enough into Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Every time we notice that a certain community of players from a certain region is being formed, we make every effort to localize it into the language of this community (even Arabic and Hebrew). And it turned out to be even more important than we thought.
Developing countries often do not have access to many interesting games: they either do not translate into their language or are too “heavy” for their equipment. Most large studios do not even consider these countries as potential regions, because often these countries are small, not very rich or have a high level of piracy (hello, Poland!).
But for you this is a good opportunity to get these players, because a lot starts with little things!
We just asked our players to help us with the translation, and they gladly helped us. This is a fairly cheap (almost free) and high-quality method (after all, players already know your game, and therefore translate well). Even large studios often use this option for localization. All you need to do is export the .csv file to Google Drive - and go.
Even if players from some countries do not spend a dime in your game (because they can’t afford it or they don’t have any payment methods), you should still not forget about them, because the most important indicator in multiplayer and free -to-play games is just the number of players. The more players, the more fun the game, and the more success it then achieves.
About 30% of the population can read English. And, as one of the developers said, many games sin with a lack of localization and lose potential players.
5. Two-man teams.
This is both good and bad. Good, because you have to consider the capabilities of only one person, and when you work in a large team, there is always a risk that someone will lag behind, slowing down the whole team. Many indie teams went wild on the fact that from the very beginning there were a lot of people in the team. Better if you yourself will try to develop the game. But, to be honest, this happens very rarely.
Jean-Baptiste and I are very complementary, we immediately began to develop our competencies, which allowed us to do without attracting a large number of people. This was one of the keys to our success.
The disadvantage of such small teams, of course, is that in this case you can’t quickly make some big games. It will be difficult to fix the numerous bugs of the multiplayer game that always arise, and it is difficult to cope with the presence of hundreds of thousands of players together.
But in the end, just because there were two of us, we were able to release Transformice in just three weeks.
6. Graphics
I don’t want to praise myself, but the design and the artistic part played an important role in our success, despite all the simplicity. Cute little mice contrasted very strongly with cruel trials, and the sight of rushing mice across the screen often caused a smile. Our graphics were simple, but still, they were slightly higher than the average flash game that you can find on game portals. The players liked it, and I am very grateful to my previous work for the fact that I learned to work with flash graphics.
7. Feedback
Our players often shout in the forums that we never listen to them. But in fact, we listen to them often and have done so from the very beginning of the development of the game. We keep in touch with players, accept proposals for new content - this allowed us to retain our players. Although often their ideas require serious improvements in order to implement them in the framework of our game.
We try to listen to what they want to receive, but we will never do exactly what they say, because most often the players themselves do not know what they want.
WRONG
1. Team of two people
When we began to create Transformice, we did not think about what would happen next. We just wanted to make a little fun game in our free time, not understanding what we will do next: who can seriously think about a multimillion-dollar MMO when there are only two people in your team? We missed a lot of opportunities because we tried to cope with the influx of visitors. In the first months, thousands of players wanted to play our game and could not do this simply because we did not have an appropriate server for so many users. The more players you have, the higher your requirements, and having a team of only two people - a developer and a designer, we simply could not fix errors, add functionality and perform many other tasks on time.
2. Carefully read what is written, especially if it is written in small print.
Now we can already say that the Adsense ban was good for us, but then it was not at all perceived, and we were a lot of nervous about it. Before this situation, we were rather careless about how we make money. As practice has shown, if your business model relies on only one source of income, then it’s better to make sure many times that you are doing everything right.
Also, do not think that you can do something illegal or contrary to the rule, and no one will know about it. By such actions you dig a hole for yourself, and do not forget about karma.
3. Hiring employees too fast
When we began to receive income from microtransactions, we were very glad that we could finally increase the team. We approached the issue of hiring employees not very responsibly: the company grew from three to ten people in less than eight months. And we were not ready for this. We made mistakes, tensions grew, and we realized that we practically did not understand how to manage personnel. We always tried to provide good working conditions and at the same time completely forgot about project management, thinking that everyone will find a job without setting specific tasks. Recently, we are correcting ourselves, but in order to understand the importance of this aspect, it took us a lot of time.
4. Lack of solutions for mobile devices
All four years we did not allow ourselves to even think about the mobile version of Transformice. We reasoned like this: “Come on, it's Flash, this game requires a serious processor, keyboard and mouse. On mobile devices, you simply can’t play this game. ” Yes, and we were too busy with the PC version of Transformice.
We had neither specific figures, nor experience for such reasoning, therefore, probably, we should not have discarded this direction. When we tried to create a version of the runner game for mobile phones in the form of spin-offs of Transformice, people were disappointed: it was not a full game. They wanted to get our game as a whole and were ready to put up with the fact that it would not be as comfortable as on a PC.
Finally, a couple of months ago, we drew attention to this area and created a small version of the game using Adobe AIR. To our surprise, this game went very well on Android, but turned out to be completely unsuitable for iOS. Well, it would probably be too simple if we got it all at once.
Now we have taken the time and are working on a mobile version of our game. I think that she will appear in the next few months.
5. Monetization: we did not understand what we were doing
When we decided to switch to free-to-play mode, we again stopped paying attention to what other studios were doing. In our heads, the F2P mode existed in only two versions: normal, in the style of League of Legends, and terrible - in the footsteps of Zynga / King. We were so nervous because of the mere thought that the players would hate us, that we did everything very honestly, but at the same time greatly underestimated the prices and didn’t receive part of the profit.
When prices have already been set, you can reduce them at any time, but raising them will be very difficult - we learned this in our own skin. It was difficult for us, because we had no idea about the average revenue from one paying user, the costs of zero profit, business plans and forecasting.
At a master class by Nicholas Lovell, I was really amazed: he asked us to raise our hand and lower it when we would feel that it was impossible to offer our players such a price. And he began to count: $ 1, $ 5, $ 10, $ 100, etc. Most hands dropped at $ 500. Then he said: “There is no right answer to this question, except that you should not allow yourself to give up. If players are willing to spend that much money in your game, let them do it. ” And he was right. We really did not conduct our pricing policy correctly, because we proceeded from how much time it would take us to create an element, and not from how expensive and valuable it would be for our players. For a long time after starting microtransactions in Transformice, you could get everything which is possible for only $ 20-30. We did not provide an opportunity for our “superfans” (or “whales”) to stand out somehow, and also we could not raise prices. We just add content and some kind of opportunity for people to spend money, but still we can’t create a mechanism to make our “whales” stand out from the crowd.
Of course, we are very grateful to the F2P model and are fully aware that monetizing Transformice somehow would hardly have turned out differently, but still we are somewhat disappointed, because there is always a LOT of work for our little indie team, and it never ends. In the future we are going to learn other methods of monetization and in our next game Dead Maze we will even return to the model of “premium” accounts.
Conclusion
Transformice turned out to be a serious test for us, and during its creation we learned a lot. Sometimes the lessons came out too cruel, in some cases we missed a lot of opportunities due to lack of experience, but in general we were very lucky that we were able to participate in this matter. We firmly believe that luck is an important factor in the development of the game. In our case, for example, we were lucky that we released the product at the right time for it.
We continue to work on Transformice, but we create other completely different games in order to get away from the image of the studio with one successful project and become a stable company. And we hope that on our way all our past mistakes will do good service.
After 4 years and many updates, 60 million accounts have already been registered in the game.
This is not to say that the development of the game Transformice has already been completed. On the contrary, this game is under active development. And today I would like to talk about what we have been doing these four years both for the development of the game and for its monetization, because making a game is not easy, but even harder - to make money from it. So, the numbers!
In 2010, Jean-Baptiste Le Marshald and I worked for a French video game company, he worked as a developer, and I was a graphic designer / technical artist. Prior to this, Jean-Baptiste created small browser games; this was his hobby. And once he asked me to help create a new game with improved graphics.
I was amazed at his ability to make fun and funny games. Naturally, I agreed and offered him a story about mice that use boxes and boards to help their mouse friends escape traps and get cheese: Transform-mice. The ability to create boards and boxes we then gave only the super-mouse (Shaman), but the name Transformice remained.
Transformice Poster 2010
At first we made a game with a simple plot: the mouse needed to get to the cheese and return to the mink. Moreover, only one player (Shaman) had the ability to create boards and boxes in order to help other mice. After about three weeks, we made a fully working prototype.
First prototype, 2010
We launched the game on May 1, 2010 (it seemed funny to us if we did this on Labor Day in France). We talked about our launch only at the then only known French video game forum - JeuxOnline. And, you know, things went well, people liked the game, even in that very simple form: then there were no accounts, cheese counters, but there were just plain brown mice and the same simple graphics. The physical engine (Box2D) and the multiplayer mode sometimes led to rather curious situations, and people quickly got hooked on our game. Soon, we added accounts and began to count the cheese, which became a kind of currency in the game, for which you could buy a variety of caps for your mice.
A few weeks after the launch, it’s not clear how SomethingAwful found out about us. The game was not even translated into English, but it did not bother anyone, everyone played and shouted "OMELETTE DU FROMAGE". The funniest video in Transformice’s history (with more than 1 million views) was shot right then. I really recommend that you watch it if you are not familiar with our game - it seems to me that this is the best review.
After we quickly translated the game into English, a real nightmare began: they learned about us not only on the SomethingAwful forum, but also on the 4chan forum. Our only small server could not stand such an influx of users. And, of course, as according to the law of "meanness", in the same period Kotaku, Rock Paper Shotgun, Indiegames.com and PC Gamer wrote about us. We had to work hard to ensure sufficient bandwidth.
We had problems with the server quite early. We paid for servers from our own pockets and could not afford to pay for ten servers. Therefore, we chose a quick and cheap solution - we placed a horizontal Adsense banner under the game and opened a Paypal account for donations.
An advertising banner gave good results - an average of 47 € / day, which allowed us to increase the number of servers. By the end of 2010, using the banner, we had earned approximately 11,000 € and had an average traffic of 80,000 unique visitors / day.
The “Donate” button through Paypal collected about 3,000 €, and by the end of next year we removed it. The list of users who have made donations is on our site so far . Surprisingly, most donations came from the United States and Norway, but almost no one came from France, despite the fact that France is our home country. We do not yet have such habits and such a culture.
For several months, we continued to increase the number of servers in order to cope with the massive influx of players. At the same time, we continued to work full time in the same French company, and in our free time we fixed bugs and added some kind of content (hats!).
We understood that this can no longer go on and we need to choose: leave the company and create our own in order to serve the game (which at that time already brought us income), or completely forget about the game and save our workplace, because we had no free time for our own affairs. Naturally, we chose the first option.
In April 2011, we quit and created Atelier 801. We freed up time, added something to the game, created some seasonal events, and gradually our player base grew from 150,000 to 300,000 unique visitors per day.
We had a very unusual player base: more than 50% of our audience was in Brazil, the second place was taken by the United States (11%), then Turkey (8%), France (7%), Latin America (5%) and Russia (3 %). We tried to localize the game to satisfy the needs of our users, and in the case of Brazil and Turkey, it really worked.
Despite the fact that these two countries were not very attractive for advertisers, the banner still brought good income: an average of 280 € / day, and in October this figure reached the level of 1000 €. In total, in 2011 we earned 103,000 € on the banner. In addition, as the game’s .swf file was distributed across the Web, we added a small ad (which you can skip right away) before downloading. We earned approximately $ 150 / day on this ad, and in 2011, with the help of it, we earned another $ 55,000.
These results inspired us very much. We calculated the incomes and expenses and decided that for work we need to hire another person! We did not pull the cat by the tail and hired our most dedicated moderator as a community manager. His duties were to respond to the huge number of emails that we received almost daily.
But not for long music played. See the red line on the ad revenue graph? This is the moment when we were banned from Google Adsense.
Atelier 801, end of 2011
Then it was a serious blow. Since Google Adsense pays with a 60-day delay, our ban meant that for clicks that collected more than 13,500 €, we won’t be paid. What we had: the need to pay three salaries and pay about 30 servers. And at the same time, our main source of income simply disappeared.
At first we tried to replace Adsense with other advertising platforms, but none of them worked even at 50% of Adsense, and the amounts began to decrease. While we were looking for ways out of the situation, Jean-Baptiste and I did not pay a salary for several months to pay for servers and pay a salary to the manager of our community.
Why did it happen so? Suddenly, our domain was blacklisted without any notifications, without any letters from Google. Contacting someone from Google Adsense employees is simply unrealistic: the only way to at least try to sort things out is the user forum. But there, people often know no more than yours. One forum participant, however, hinted that we got a ban for our page with a list of users who donated for the development of the game, but in the future he refused to talk with us.
On New Year's Eve, we thought that our Wordpress site with a lot of content could help us get unban, but ... in the end, all our efforts were again futile.
A happy coincidence helped us: our friend once went to the same school with his current Google employee. Just a couple of emails, a few minutes - and we are banned. Still, never underestimate the connection.
And only then we found out the reason for our ban: the Google program found that our banner was at a distance less than 150 pixels from our flash game, and this is prohibited by the Adsense policy (always read what is written in small print!), And on on this basis we were automatically banned.
We reinstalled the Adsense banner in February 2012. But still 150 pixels is a lot, and most of our users with outdated computers and low-resolution screens have not even seen it. We gave the banner to work for several months, during which he brought us about 150 € / day, but this was not enough to pay the servers and pay the three of us. We were very upset, no longer wanted to be so dependent on advertising and decided to make Transformice a free-to-play game. We prepared for this serious step for a very long time and carefully. Different thoughts revolved in our heads: What if the players hate us for demanding money? Can we make an income? Suddenly, the players abandon our game?
We wanted to set low prices and conduct honest monetization, so that the players knew what they were paying for, and at the same time ensure that most of the add-ons could be received through the game (so that avid players would not feel cheated). In general, pricing was very difficult. We constantly thought how much we have the right to ask people to play our browser-based flash game with cute little mice.
As I already said, for their money we wanted to give the players the maximum of what we can offer: I completely redrawn all the created elements (at that time it was about 150-200) and added the ability to choose different color options and transitions for each element.
There were two ways to access the settings of the elements: spending a lot of cheese or a bit of hard currency - strawberries. We also selected about 20 items that could be bought for strawberries (well, for cheese, of course, too), and added 5 colors for coloring fur mice. During testing, we purposefully showed them on our mice, and our players really wanted to get the opportunity to change the color of their mice.
With tremendous fears, after six months without a salary, we removed all the advertising banners and on June 14, 2012 launched Transformice in free-to-play mode. And that step ... worked!
As you can see from the graphs, the reaction of the players was amazing. They rejoiced at the opportunity to support their favorite game, and the first month brought us more than 250,000 €! We were astounded.
Quickly, we hired several more employees: three developers, three community managers, one financial director and a system administrator. Considering that at that time we had about 3 million active players and 40 servers, we thought that we should increase the team to sleep a little longer and better.
Also at the end of 2012, we moved to a larger and more expensive office.
In general, between June and December 2012 microtransactions brought us 1,068,300 €, that is, an average of 5,262 € / day. Each peak on the graph corresponds to the release of new content / seasonal updates, in which new hats and fur color options appeared. The red line is the breakeven point of our company, taking into account the payment of wages to all employees. At the end of 2012, we broke our own record for the number of players playing Transformice at the same time - more than 86,000 users were online.
After a few months, monetization slowed, and at the beginning of 2013 the revenue line was very close to the breakeven line. Looking back, I can explain this by the fact that in December 2012 we held an action: we created an Advent calendar, and players received rewards every day. As a result, we gave away a bunch of content (hats, titles, cheese and even hard currency) for free. Now I understand that this was a huge mistake on our part, because users could use their gifts for quite some time. This has stalled our revenues over the next few months.
By October 2013, the situation worsened even more, and we decided to use the banner again: placed it on the site next to the game, but this time made it not horizontal, but vertical. We realized that this did not bother our players at all, and the banner worked much better than before (confident 500 € / day compared to 150 € / day at the beginning of 2012). This good extra income allowed us to stay above the breakeven line.
Looking back, I understand that we were complete fools, once we refused an advertising banner: even if things went as bad as at the beginning of 2012, in 18 months it would have brought us more than 100,000 €.
At this time, we observed an outflow of players, and in 2013 our active users decreased by 15%.
At the end of 2013, the situation did not improve; even the holiday season did not help. And the year 2014 began at all gloomily: as a rule, January and February are not the best months in terms of income.
Then we made one of our most important decisions: we will no longer give out free caps during some seasonal events. Instead, we will only sell them (for cheese or for strawberries). We still remember that crazy giveaway during Christmas 2012, as a result of which the future of our game was in jeopardy. Although the players for her were very grateful to us.
The players did not take our decision very well: many of them deservedly wrote complaints on the forums. We continued to distribute badges and titles, but without hats they did not feel any more interest in playing on. On the other hand, there were players who liked our decision: they did not want to play, for example, the entire period dedicated to Valentine's Day for the sake of getting some kind of hat. But, basically, the players wrote us down as traitors.
In the end, the negative went away, and slowly, but surely, our sales began to grow. More often, we were still above the breakeven line: in that period, the number of players decreased slightly, but monetization went better.
In general, in 2014 we earned 929025 € from sales and advertising, and after paying all taxes and fees our profit was 40309 €.
In January 2015, we managed to publish Transformice on Steam, after which several interesting articles were written about us, and US players began to pay more attention to us. At launch, the game showed 5,333 concurrent users and ranked 41st in Steam popularity. Thus, we were able to stay on the main page in the “Popular New Games” section for almost a week, and during the first month the game was downloaded 400,000 times. In the same month, over 120,000 new accounts were created through Steam, 38,423 of which were played for more than an hour.
It should be noted that for all these years before being published on Steam, we had all the same four articles that appeared during the launch of our game in 2010. At that time, users somehow found out about us through reviews and recommendations that we did not think about the need for additional PR. Now I can say that, probably, we missed a lot of opportunities while we were improving the game. Apparently, this prevented us from creating a solid and serious game development studio. We just quit our job and devoted time to the game without looking back at others, which probably prevented us from successfully promoting our other developments.
Over the past four years, we have published three more games: Bouboum, Fortoresse and Nekodancer. Together, they collect about 300,000 unique visitors per month and generate enough revenue to pay for their servers. But we were unable to promote these games with the help of our Transformice player community. It’s worth considering the success of the studio in the future if you rely on the success of just one game.
In principle, to be honest, we don’t have much to complain about: we have a huge base of players, we made a fairly successful game that brings us fairly regular income. Now we have 12 people working in the studio, and we have the opportunity to create and develop other games. Now we need to study game marketing and make the best use of the accumulated potential and our experience.
And now the time has come to tell us what we did right and what not!
CORRECT
1. Physics
In 2010, flash games on a physical basis were very popular, just remember the game Fantastic Contraption. By the way, this game had a serious impact on us when we made our game (which made the creator of Fantastic Contraption Brian Fargo contact us!). Incredibots, QWOP, Crush the Castle later appeared ... Playing these games alone is a lot of fun, but none of them had a multiplayer mode.
People liked messing around with the physics engine in principle, but in multiplayer mode it became even more interesting. The players studied the physics of the game and, in principle, we could give them a ball for beach volleyball, and they would still be interested in spending time together.
Today this direction is not so popular in browser games, but our game came out just at the perfect time for its genre.
2. Real-time multiplayer mode
If you remember, then 2010 was the time of games on Facebook. In the world of desynchronized interaction, real-time multiplayer mode in a browser game was a great alternative.
In browser games, real-time multiplayer mode is rare, because, as a rule, this requires serious resources from both the developer and the player. Multiplayer in itself is a serious challenge for any indie developer, but it's still worth it! For us, the ability to play with someone is a “masthead”, which is why we only create multiplayer games.
3. Accessibility and convenience
This item is very important for any indie developer who wants to attract an audience. It is unlikely that someone will want to play your game if the player needs to spend a lot of time downloading and installing it.
Our game "weighed" less than 1MB, was available in all desktop operating systems and browsers, due to the popularity of Flash Player. We also made the “Guest” mode in the game for those who did not want to register just to try to play. The registration process was also quite simple: when creating an account, e-mail was not required, we invited players to enter it later for a bonus in the form of cheese or accessories.
We did this in order for the players to get involved in the game - this is necessary in the field of browser games, where the player rarely concentrates on something longer than a few minutes. I must say that this greatly contributed to our success.
We did not understand this right away, but those who concentrate on developing countries should definitely keep this in mind, because often these players have quite specific equipment. Do not abandon them! This leads us to the following point:
4. Localization
Generally, this can be attributed to the “Accessibility and Convenience” item, but nevertheless we will pay special attention to this item.
As soon as we saw that English-speaking players are playing our simple French game, we immediately tried to translate it into English. In addition, we translated it early enough into Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. Every time we notice that a certain community of players from a certain region is being formed, we make every effort to localize it into the language of this community (even Arabic and Hebrew). And it turned out to be even more important than we thought.
Developing countries often do not have access to many interesting games: they either do not translate into their language or are too “heavy” for their equipment. Most large studios do not even consider these countries as potential regions, because often these countries are small, not very rich or have a high level of piracy (hello, Poland!).
But for you this is a good opportunity to get these players, because a lot starts with little things!
We just asked our players to help us with the translation, and they gladly helped us. This is a fairly cheap (almost free) and high-quality method (after all, players already know your game, and therefore translate well). Even large studios often use this option for localization. All you need to do is export the .csv file to Google Drive - and go.
Even if players from some countries do not spend a dime in your game (because they can’t afford it or they don’t have any payment methods), you should still not forget about them, because the most important indicator in multiplayer and free -to-play games is just the number of players. The more players, the more fun the game, and the more success it then achieves.
About 30% of the population can read English. And, as one of the developers said, many games sin with a lack of localization and lose potential players.
5. Two-man teams.
This is both good and bad. Good, because you have to consider the capabilities of only one person, and when you work in a large team, there is always a risk that someone will lag behind, slowing down the whole team. Many indie teams went wild on the fact that from the very beginning there were a lot of people in the team. Better if you yourself will try to develop the game. But, to be honest, this happens very rarely.
Jean-Baptiste and I are very complementary, we immediately began to develop our competencies, which allowed us to do without attracting a large number of people. This was one of the keys to our success.
The disadvantage of such small teams, of course, is that in this case you can’t quickly make some big games. It will be difficult to fix the numerous bugs of the multiplayer game that always arise, and it is difficult to cope with the presence of hundreds of thousands of players together.
But in the end, just because there were two of us, we were able to release Transformice in just three weeks.
6. Graphics
I don’t want to praise myself, but the design and the artistic part played an important role in our success, despite all the simplicity. Cute little mice contrasted very strongly with cruel trials, and the sight of rushing mice across the screen often caused a smile. Our graphics were simple, but still, they were slightly higher than the average flash game that you can find on game portals. The players liked it, and I am very grateful to my previous work for the fact that I learned to work with flash graphics.
7. Feedback
Our players often shout in the forums that we never listen to them. But in fact, we listen to them often and have done so from the very beginning of the development of the game. We keep in touch with players, accept proposals for new content - this allowed us to retain our players. Although often their ideas require serious improvements in order to implement them in the framework of our game.
We try to listen to what they want to receive, but we will never do exactly what they say, because most often the players themselves do not know what they want.
WRONG
1. Team of two people
When we began to create Transformice, we did not think about what would happen next. We just wanted to make a little fun game in our free time, not understanding what we will do next: who can seriously think about a multimillion-dollar MMO when there are only two people in your team? We missed a lot of opportunities because we tried to cope with the influx of visitors. In the first months, thousands of players wanted to play our game and could not do this simply because we did not have an appropriate server for so many users. The more players you have, the higher your requirements, and having a team of only two people - a developer and a designer, we simply could not fix errors, add functionality and perform many other tasks on time.
2. Carefully read what is written, especially if it is written in small print.
Now we can already say that the Adsense ban was good for us, but then it was not at all perceived, and we were a lot of nervous about it. Before this situation, we were rather careless about how we make money. As practice has shown, if your business model relies on only one source of income, then it’s better to make sure many times that you are doing everything right.
Also, do not think that you can do something illegal or contrary to the rule, and no one will know about it. By such actions you dig a hole for yourself, and do not forget about karma.
3. Hiring employees too fast
When we began to receive income from microtransactions, we were very glad that we could finally increase the team. We approached the issue of hiring employees not very responsibly: the company grew from three to ten people in less than eight months. And we were not ready for this. We made mistakes, tensions grew, and we realized that we practically did not understand how to manage personnel. We always tried to provide good working conditions and at the same time completely forgot about project management, thinking that everyone will find a job without setting specific tasks. Recently, we are correcting ourselves, but in order to understand the importance of this aspect, it took us a lot of time.
4. Lack of solutions for mobile devices
All four years we did not allow ourselves to even think about the mobile version of Transformice. We reasoned like this: “Come on, it's Flash, this game requires a serious processor, keyboard and mouse. On mobile devices, you simply can’t play this game. ” Yes, and we were too busy with the PC version of Transformice.
We had neither specific figures, nor experience for such reasoning, therefore, probably, we should not have discarded this direction. When we tried to create a version of the runner game for mobile phones in the form of spin-offs of Transformice, people were disappointed: it was not a full game. They wanted to get our game as a whole and were ready to put up with the fact that it would not be as comfortable as on a PC.
Finally, a couple of months ago, we drew attention to this area and created a small version of the game using Adobe AIR. To our surprise, this game went very well on Android, but turned out to be completely unsuitable for iOS. Well, it would probably be too simple if we got it all at once.
Now we have taken the time and are working on a mobile version of our game. I think that she will appear in the next few months.
5. Monetization: we did not understand what we were doing
When we decided to switch to free-to-play mode, we again stopped paying attention to what other studios were doing. In our heads, the F2P mode existed in only two versions: normal, in the style of League of Legends, and terrible - in the footsteps of Zynga / King. We were so nervous because of the mere thought that the players would hate us, that we did everything very honestly, but at the same time greatly underestimated the prices and didn’t receive part of the profit.
When prices have already been set, you can reduce them at any time, but raising them will be very difficult - we learned this in our own skin. It was difficult for us, because we had no idea about the average revenue from one paying user, the costs of zero profit, business plans and forecasting.
At a master class by Nicholas Lovell, I was really amazed: he asked us to raise our hand and lower it when we would feel that it was impossible to offer our players such a price. And he began to count: $ 1, $ 5, $ 10, $ 100, etc. Most hands dropped at $ 500. Then he said: “There is no right answer to this question, except that you should not allow yourself to give up. If players are willing to spend that much money in your game, let them do it. ” And he was right. We really did not conduct our pricing policy correctly, because we proceeded from how much time it would take us to create an element, and not from how expensive and valuable it would be for our players. For a long time after starting microtransactions in Transformice, you could get everything which is possible for only $ 20-30. We did not provide an opportunity for our “superfans” (or “whales”) to stand out somehow, and also we could not raise prices. We just add content and some kind of opportunity for people to spend money, but still we can’t create a mechanism to make our “whales” stand out from the crowd.
Of course, we are very grateful to the F2P model and are fully aware that monetizing Transformice somehow would hardly have turned out differently, but still we are somewhat disappointed, because there is always a LOT of work for our little indie team, and it never ends. In the future we are going to learn other methods of monetization and in our next game Dead Maze we will even return to the model of “premium” accounts.
Conclusion
Transformice turned out to be a serious test for us, and during its creation we learned a lot. Sometimes the lessons came out too cruel, in some cases we missed a lot of opportunities due to lack of experience, but in general we were very lucky that we were able to participate in this matter. We firmly believe that luck is an important factor in the development of the game. In our case, for example, we were lucky that we released the product at the right time for it.
We continue to work on Transformice, but we create other completely different games in order to get away from the image of the studio with one successful project and become a stable company. And we hope that on our way all our past mistakes will do good service.