See you later Bouncy!

Well, June is here and I finally have some time to make a new post.

Mainly I would like to share some final thoughts about Fluff Eaters, including downloads and sales in both platforms iOS and Android, the next project, prototype and future work.

Fluff Eaters

Keeping it simple and short, I will start with Fluff Eaters. We launched the iOS version a couple of weeks ago and we have some results now I would like to share. More from the experience than charts or numbers, I think it will be helpful.

Android

Let’s start with Android to compare. The Android version came in July last year, after presenting on Tokyo Game Show and GamExpo, the game was in development for enough time and was time to be released.

The expectations were not so high, first game we actually release, many things to experience and understand. From the promotion point of view and the overall attention it got, considering Fiery Squirrel is a tiny team, the results were very nice, some of them in Venezuela, and the rest in game review sites around the world. Generally speaking it was a good result.

From the economic point of view, the numbers are very low. For the paid version of the game, there are around 50 downloads, for the free version (which is not available anymore) with ads,  around 500 downloads, the free version generated almost zero profits.

Of course Fluff Eaters was not initially designed to be free, the free version was available for some time to test, basically.

iOS

First of all, I understand clearly that if a game is not properly promoted (featured on the App Store, has a good review in a big site, whatever gives it exposure), the game will not sell, Fluff Eaters was not featured on the App Store (at least not yet ;)), didn’t have much attention from the press but a couple of small mentions in Pocket Gamer and TouchArcade made the difference to get some downloads on the release date. Maybe for people used to release a lot of games, that’s a normal thing but since this is the first experience of this type, was quite good for us.

There were a couple of surprises on iOS, first, the game was featured on many Chinese sites, which was completely unexpected. In addition, the game was pirated a lot of times, we know that because we have Apple’s stats and some inner stats we created for ourselves plus the game center which gives us how many people are playing.

All of this translates into more than 350 people playing in less than three weeks, from which around 48 of them were actually bought and given away (promotional codes). I think that considering the game was not actually featured in the App Store, the promotion was not that big, the results are good, at least I’m happy with many people playing.

Thoughts about the results and how could they help?

• Results from Google Play are clearly different from the ones from the App Store. In less than three weeks downloads in the App Store (for the paid version) were three times the downloads for Google Play
• The promotion on the Chinese side was a big surprise, if I knew about that before, of course the strategy would have been different
• Feature is everything in the market? I would say yes, if you wanna have a “successful game” whatever that sells, needs a very good exposure
• Even though being featured is what brings you “success”, choosing the right strategy is very important. For example, from those 350 downloads, pirated, paid, gifts, whatever, if the game was free, people would be able to download it legally and review it, which I think is important… yes, I didn’t know that you could not review games that you downloaded using promotional codes (makes a lot of sense but didn’t consider it)
• I personally like games you paid once with no in-app purchases, no ads. Clearly making a game like this now is not so easy to sell, so… different strategies will be tested for the upcoming projects and will share results too

Upcoming Projects

Fluff Eaters is finally done (for a while at least :)), the next project should be Collow which has solid prototype of core mechanics here and you can test it. The plan is to expand it, test different ideas that are on paper yet and see how it goes. The strategy for this will be different, less develop, smaller scale projects and a business model different as well. Please stay tuned if you are interested on how it progresses.

There is a new idea about a very simple game, whose prototype will be probably done in one of the following weekends, once it’s done, it will be shared on twitter or something.

Feel free to ask questions.

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