Hello. It’s time to share my income report. You’ve helped me a lot by answering my questions so it’s time to give something interesting in return. If you are “TLDR guy”, just go to the charts at the end but I think it’s worth reading.
This is the game I will describe: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apptogo.runalien
Me and my friend are 23 years old (many language) developers from Poland. We decided to learn something about mobile game development and we’ve started with AndEngine. Run Alien is our very first android app. We had a lot of difficulties and I think optimalization was the hardest one (the lattest patch decreased FPS so we had to improve it in our next update).
The goal was to learn development and publishing process by making simple game and don’t invest anything but our time. The game wasn’t so simple as we wanted at the beginning but it’s still rather small game. Learning and developing took about 2 months. We still study and we work in normal job 3 or 4 times a week for 8 hours so we didn’t have a lot of time. Our day looked like: 8h in work + some time in university + rest of the day working on Run Alien. It wasn’t easy but we liked it.
OK enough of boring introduction;)
Run Alien has been published 27th/28th of April (it was 28th Polish time but still 27th Google time). We haven’t invested any money in either marketing or graphics/sounds. We’ve done everything by ourselves and we’ve used some free for commercial use sounds. On the other hand we spent a lot of time advertising the game. We started with our facebooks walls + PMs to friends. Then friends walls and friends PMs to their friends. Then we were publishing the game wherever we could. Blogs, youtube channels, facebook groups, facebook sites, review sites, dappwall, forums, cross promotion group etc. We got some less significant publications but I don’t think it boosted our revenue in any way. Most of websites offered paid reviews but we didn’t want to buy them. The most significant review we got was on youtube channel of CoolLooserTech few days ago (check it out).
As I said we didn’t want to invest and we didn’t expect a lot of money. I said that maybe we would earn enough to buy few beers or bottle of vodka. Whole month has passed and we earned slightly more than we expected but it’s still very low. What I noticed, we were distributed outside of GP in China. It gave us a lot of impressions but almost no revenue (1st, 2nd of May peek).
We’ve reached about 250 place in Polish GP ranking and started to fall down. Now we are outside of any first 500 (it’s very sad) but we still have about 50-60 average daily downloads.
It’s time to post some screenshots instead of describing it:)
1$ = 3 zł so just divide money by 3
Our daily installs chart. We probably finished our 30d time period of new apps and got download peek somehow. Anyone can explain that?
This is our overall downloads. It’s barely more than 2k.
Our admob chart. We use two interstitals + one banner.
In conclusion, we got about 70$ in first month which is low but we were learning so I think it’s pretty fair for very first and really simple game without any paid marketing. Now we are working on something more ambitious and bigger and we gonna invest our first 100$ in next game:)