Downloads drop after 30 days...

Hi guys,
I’m really new on Android development and I hear alot of time that after 30 days you experience big downloads drop.
It’s possibly because in the first 30 days you are in new free section of android market and maybe ranking algorithm is giving more visibility to new app/games.
I also hear that this drop after a while get back a bit.
Is it right?
Here my experience until now:
I publish my first game on Google Play on July 7th and after a week my downloads get to about 100-150 per day. I reach 477 in a day when the game was reviewed by a website.
After exactly 1 month August 8th my downloads start to drop quickly to 20-40 per day and everything I did to improve that was pretty useless.
I put posts on android forums, facebook, twitter, and even get reviewed by small blog and website doesn’t change the result.
Do you think this is going to change in the future or my game is dead and I need to move on?
I also improved my game and publish new features but until now nothing happen.
Can you share your experience to give more ideas on how it works?

Cheers,
Gabriele

In my case it was pretty similar and slightly depressing but I kept going. Improving, adding features, etc. After three months of very low downloads something happened (still not sure what) and the downloads increased significantly. I noticed that my game was seen quite often in ‘users of this app used only that app’ for similar games - that’s probably where the downloads were coming from. My daily downloads number is still not too impressive but big enough to provide sustainable income. One important thing though is to make sure your game retains users and they keep coming back. That way even with constant daily downloads number of users playing every day is increasing all the time.

If I were you I’d keep going as well - this game could have potential maybe not to be a block-buster but to be a popular app in a certain niche. I haven’t used it but the screenshots doesn’t grab my heart to be honest - you really need to polish it visually. Spend some money on a professional graphic designer to make it look gorgeous. I mean really gorgeous. You want this app to stand out from other similar ones. The app is simple that you would be able to find someone make a decent graphics for few hundreds $. The direction I’d go with your game is picture puzzles - find gorgeous royalty-free photos and used them instead of numbers. Build it into the game that users want to solve the puzzle to see what the next picture is going to be. Adding more pictures will be easiest and cheapest way to keep your users engaged with very little effort on your side.

So my suggestion is - don’t give up. Make it so beautiful and worth playing. And users will hopefully come.

Update the game regularly (once a month at least), make it better, fix bugs and the downloads will come. Maybe only a little, maybe more - depends on the quality of your game and popularity of the type of game you made.

Thank you guys,
I will follow your suggestions. :slight_smile:
Could anyone else share you experience with numbers about after 30 days drop?

Cheers,
Gabriele

Don’t do pictures, do animations. Animations also add to the gameplay because you have to watch it to see where the tiles go. I dont see any tile puzzles on the market with animations yet. If you’d like to see an example, here is one I made in Java a long time ago: http://www.xdebugx.net/applets/puzzle/puzzle.php

Hi XdebugX,
are you talking about real videos or gif animations?
How can I do that on android platform?
Does libgdx already have features for that?

Cheers,
Gabriele

Use short animations. Animated gifs should work great. What I did was use an animated gif editor to extact each frame out as an image. The source code for my animated puzzle game is available on my site if you want to take a look.

Hi XdebugX,
I will check your animated puzzle game and I’ll try to reproduce it. :slight_smile:

Thank you,
Gabriele

I’m not sure exactly how you would do it in libgdx. I could explain it pretty easy using canvas, but have never used libgdx. Basically to break the images (each frame), of the animation into tiles, you set the clip region to the a square that covers the tile your drawing, then draw the image offsetting the x,y position of the image, so that the PORTION of the image that goes into the current tile your drawing meets at the clip plane. Then do that with a timer for each frame of the animation.

Say your were drawing a 3x3 tile puzzle with 100x100 squares:

This assumes you have an array with which tile goes where by number. So for a 3x3 board you have an array 0-8 each element contains a number for which tile.

for (p=0;p<puzzleWidth;p++) for (t=0;t<puzzleHeight;t++) {
canvas.clipRect (p100,t100,100,100,Region.Op.REPLACE)
xOffset=(int) (tileMatrix [p+(t3)] % 3);
yOffset=(int) (tileMatrix [p+(t
3)] / 3);
canvas.drawImage (frame[a], p100 - (xOffset * 100), t100 - (yOffset*100), paint);
} // pt

To reset the clip plane back to the whole screen for drawing the rest of the app use:

canvas.clipRect (0,0,width,height, Region.Op.REPLACE);

Hi XdebugX,
Thank you for the very detailed tip :slight_smile:
I’m actually a bit in trouble because I’m upgrading to the latest libgdx version and the changes are massive. Anyway they have done a good job and this refactor was required.
I’ll let you know when I’ll have something to show.

Cheers,
Gabriele

Good luck. I’m still using old one because it was too much work and some things that I need disappeared. :slight_smile: I hope it’s the last such big change in libGDX.

You’ll never know with Nate :slight_smile: