As an introduction, I am a small developer who has made three games for android and is working on his fourth. I am doing this part time, so it means a lot of late nights and Red Bull.
Anyway, if you want to check out my apps, here they are:
…and coming soon a breakout like game called “Break This!”
Monetizing android applications is a pain in the butt and something worthy of more discussion! Currently, my revenue is about 4 bucks a day on ads and a trickle of sales. Biggest problem with the market is visibility. Without visibility, it doesn’t matter how good your games are. And now, with the ‘just in’ category gone, things are looking even bleaker.
Visibility seems to be a big problem.
Maybe the users of this forum can help each other by making a special list that would be shown in an menu option. Like “recommendations” something like that.
I have thought of that idea before. Advertising is expensive. But, a private ad network of indie developers, where everybody includes each others ads would be a great way for startup developers to build visibility to each other. As a developer in the network, you would include the ad framework in your app, and this would give you privileges to upload an ad to the network.
Unfortunately, this is not my area of expertise or I would have started something already. Seems like there would need to be a web presence, an online database, and a common SDK for the members to use.
I am not sure how you would balance ads for the network against ads for revenue in your apps either.
Also, I think some sort of review panel would be necessary, where membership into the private network was restricted to only “quality” apps, whatever that means;)
Unfortunately this would probably eventually fail as some apps would get really popular and others would not, creating animosity between members. Even scoreloop has its other games recommendations, but those are dominated by the popular games.
I desided that I wanted to check out the option of a webservice.
I have allready made a database and a xml feed in asp.net.
I will try to get it up and running on my domain tomorrow.
Then I will make a simple sample app that will show the feed in a list.
Now I was thinking. How about a private ring of developers, from this forum only. You will get a publisher key, apps that get more requests are more likely to show up higher in the list.
Running costs of the server can be done with donations.
Ball characters is same in your all games
So next time please change game characters it’s benefit for you
Because games like creative characters like angry bird, fantasy town, world of goo, Spy Mouse and much more…
On android market
I like your games. The 3D graphics are pretty neat, and your menus have a distinctive style. For the most part I found the games quite intuitive and fun right from the beginning. One minor issue I have though - when I first opened the high scores leaderboard for Rebound, it was showing the scores for Easy mode. But the default starting difficulty is Normal, so my score didn’t show up in the list. It took me a while to realize I had to change to the Normal leaderboard to display my score.
Rebound also crashed a few times when I opened the leaderboards. Not sure why, but I submitted an error report.
Apart from that, great work! I agree with you completely about app visibility being an issue though. I don’t think it was a good idea to remove the Just In section from the Market, as it was the starting point for many developers to get their app discovered (myself included). I guess now we’ve got to focus more on work of mouth, and SEO style marketing. Honestly not what I’d like to be doing as an indie developer -I’d rather be writing code for frequent updates.