Hi, I am Tomas and nearly two months ago I left my regular job and became true indie game developer.
I have previous game making experience long back to 8bit computers era but it was always just a hobby. I decided to give it a try and go full time indie. I am not starting with clear table - we (me and friends I co-work with) have already finished some simple games.
To share my experience with mobile games monetization I started to publish series of monthly monetization reports on my blog.
Despite the fact my portfolio is not Android limited, it is currently let’s say Android focused as Android is most important part of my income. The plan is to enlarge supported platforms for current games and also add new titles.
I see you made about $160 in your first month. That is quite good
But I can’t imagine that it would be enough to support you and the team after you quit your jobs.
It is first month… my first target is to reach $750 in mid/short term (6-4 months). So, currently I am on 1/5 of that.
And after nearly two months I have to say that being full time developer (programming was my hobby before) really accelerates my skills. So I hope I will shorten “production” cycle as well as increase quality of my apps.
My indie Income Report #4 for September 2014 published.
In September we were featured in “Free App of the Day” promotion event at Amazon … and if you ask which app was featured, the answer is Shards and Deadly Abyss 2! Yes, two of our games were featured (3rd September Shards, 30th September Deadly Abyss 2).
How is it possible that you got so many downloads which gave you only about 200$. My app got ~1000 downloads in one month and gave me about 70$.
Simple calculations shows that you should have earned ~125 times more which is ~8750$ not ~200$. And it doesn’t matter that it was Amazon. Ads are ads it doesn’t depends from store.
You should think about better monetization in you apps definetly.
That isn’t entirely right. You miss that not all clicks generate the same revenue. For some countries a simple click wouldn’t even give you any revenue.
Furtheremore some types of ads are not fully or not supported at all by devices that use the Amazon Store.
It is explained in report. “Free App of the Day” (FAD) at Amazon means you have some paid app and for one day you give it for free. In exchange you gain very large publicity. In our case, when the game was free, it was downloaded 125k times. But … it is full version - it means without ads
Now, it makes some mess in reports: if I left it in table with downloads of paid version everybody would ask: “oh, 125 000 downloads” and only $200 of earnings? So, I moved it to number of free downloads. In fact these are free downloads (which do not generate any earnings).
For us the FAD was good. Before it there were 1-2 paid downloads of Shards / month. After FAD it gain some publicity and now (some time after FAD) there is 1-2 downloads / day. So, we had nothing to lose, we could only gain… As written in report, it had temporary positive effect also on iOS downloads and GP downloads.
It depends… you know the rules before and no one is pushing you into it. If I had game with stable downloads and some advertising budget I would consider whether to go FAD or do regular advertising campaign. But in my position of small developer with almost no downloads and no advertising budget this was good deal for us.
Your games look very good. Maybe they even look too good. You should try to focus on prototyping and go further if you see the idea is worth spending more time. Anyway you should try to create some 3D titles. In my experience a 3D game can give you much more revenue most of the times.