If the DAU of your previous apps are high - you could consider putting up house ads or interstitials of your own to move users to this app.
I wonder if it is possible to place ads on Cut The Rope - direct deal would be difficult I assume, but for AppFlood/PlayHaven type advertisers I think it is possible to target a specific app - i.e. if Cut the Rope is using them (?).
I would reiterate - go slow on the ads - since you are trying to get into stratospheric territory.
If you can sell paid apps - you may consider making the game ad-free - and making extra levels paid (although that may require some reengineering to get things right again).
Thank you adforandroidapps for your terrific feedback (as usual)!
About the static/dynamic condition of the game, i have to say that that was on purpose, to be a mixed of intelligence and skill. We don’t really know if people would like that more or less than a more static approach… i guess time will tell . Adding new stages is something that is already considered, but we are waiting to have a decent amount of downloads to do that, then we will evaluate whats the best difficulty and static/dynamic balance of those stages.
We add a button in my brothers app “Color Fill” which currently gets around 8k-10k downloads a day and we are also spending money on Facebook ads
Our Fb page is getting around 60 likes per 1000 downloads which i think will help us a lot to spread the game
I have considered what you said about the interstitial and we will take a decision soon
We got 2.5k downloads yesterday (now i got the exact figure) with a total of 12k (9 days) and it seems that we are going to get around 3-3.2k downloads today , hope the upward tendency continues
You could consider going interstitial-free - my naive thinking suggests to me that when you drop interstitials - you AT MOST lose half your revenue. While the possibility of improving via downloads is LIMITLESS (if the app has good potential) - if it is a middling app - then perhaps interstitials are ok, since you will get a certain number of downloads from keywords etc. and “virality” is really not working - but when viralit is working for a new app or one with potential, one would suspect that dropping interstitials altogether could be considered ??
Facebook 60 likes per 1000 downloads - is quite good - and this is “non-incentivized” i.e. you don’t reward user anything (other than of course that you have videos on facebook which may improve people’s likelihood of liking something or other). Apart from the facebook videos (which is interesting idea) - you also show facebook (I think) when user exit (yes/no/facebook/g+) dialog box.
Do your facebook videos explain that doing as suggested in the video will not necessarily get the jewel to land in the middle ? And that the stage may have to be attempted a number of times (and thus the introduction of skill - as you mentioned) ? Perhaps you should introduce “skill” as a factor into your Description etc. - so people know it is not just a “static” puzzle - and requires skill at the advanced stages (which means by necessity that the same level may have to be repeated to “get it right”.
I am concerned about the fact that if i dont use interstitial now and then i suddenly add them people would start thinking that i am ruining the game, that now i only care about the money… etc, things i have constantly read on others game comments, while if have them from the beginning, people would be use to them… what do you think about it?
Yes, this is a concern which I also thought along the same line of (prior to release of my first app). However, now I would qualify that to include some nuances - firstly there is no real “user base” i.e. there is considerable churn going on (new users replacing earlier ones) - esp. true for so-so apps (perhaps there is a real “user base” for apps like Angry Birds). After a few months very few of your early users are still using the app (perhaps a very core group maybe there - but it becomes smaller and smaller if you have a steadily growing app).
But there is an easy way to avoid that - so one need not be shackled by earlier decisions. One way maybe to check if the app is a new install (some key - perhaps the earliest version number the user has used can be used to “tie” to a certain behavior of the app). While you will lose revenue from this group of users, it will free you from doing new things for newer versions of the app. So you could start off not showing interstitials - but if app stagnates and you really “have to milk the users” (who you get from keyword search etc. and not from virality etc.) so you could switch to showing interstitials (but earlier users will still not see interstitials).
Even without this - what you COULD do is for users now - you just show one interstitial and second one appearing after considerable amount of time. Later if app fails to be “huge” you could scale down the interval between the first and second appearance of the interstitial. Or if you want to be even more giving - extend the interval until first appearance of 1st interstitial also. So for now the interstitials appear VERY rarely. Later you can just scale that down (perhaps even over a few version updates) - so the change is imperceptible to your long-term users.
At the very least, I see your current rate of showing of interstitials as too much.
I can give you an idea - that I used to show an interstitial every 2 minutes or so (or was it 1 minute) - used to get complaints occasionally about ads. Extended that to 3 minutes and I scarcely get complaints on this now (some occasionally). The odd thing was by extending it by that much - there was not a significant change in revenue (maybe a little - but interstitial is about 50% and banner ads are 50% - so overall it’s affect will not be huge). But the user experience changed hugely it seems (from often comments to very rarely a comment about ads). Here I’m talking about the appearance of the SECOND interstitial (i.e. interval between the interstitials) - the first one I am still showing as early as is reasonable.
For starters I would suggest - just increase the second showing of interstitial to be longer than 3 minutes away from the first showing of it.
You may also consider delaying showing of the first showing of interstitial (as suggested in previous post i.e. effectively not showing interstitials) - to conform to “higher standards” of an app which is wishing to be big (by my argument in previous posts above). But showing it once is not that bad - it’s just that I very visibly noticed it when it appeared very soon after the first appearance a second time.
So I would say this is a serious issue - extending interval between 1st and 2nd is essential I would suggest - other stuff you could think about and consider.
Actually, the interstitial is showing every 3 minutes, but i will consider to extend the time between interstitial geometrically or similar.
They are currently 75% of the income btw
Well, for the first version of the app (prior to recent update I guess) - on that I was seeing admob interstitial appear twice in reasonably quick succession - maybe it was more than 3 minutes (and I may have lost track of time while using the app ?). Maybe you are doing every 3 minutes since start of app or something (as opposed to between ad displays) - since first ad attempts may fail (i.e. ad not available esp. for those in weaker ad countries) - and then ad appears suddenly at 5 minute mark, then you decide a bit later that hey it’s 6 minutes, I can show ad again and an ad is available and gets shown (anyway, just guessing that that maybe what you are doing - ignore if it is actually interval between ads).
wow i just downloaded the game and gave it a try. its really well done. The game feels so polished and high quality. That leaves me wondering why does this have still so low downloads. I see ton of “quick crap” games on google getting over 1 million downloads while this one is still in 10k range. Gave it 5 stars.
By the way i love the way the menu was done. Did you do it by yourself or bough a menu system from assetstore and modified it?
Thanks hammerbot for your feedback and the rating :-). The game does have a low number of downloads but it is increasing, i hope this is not stopping soon ;-). Money its very important since we are trying to make a living out of it, but what make us feel best about the game is that we took a step forward in terms of quality, that will pay off sooner or later
The menu was done by our self, i have always liked how parallax effect looks so i asked my brother: “hey, why don´t we try something like that for the menu?, if it does not work at least we learn something…”. It took us a lot of time to make it scroll smoothly though, and it still does not for some devices…
Does it use some framework, or coded yourself (i.e. the bouncy animating buttons etc. all custom views etc. - or is this off-the-shelf stuff since behaves like the big boy’s apps).
Or do pre-canned stuff exist for Unity3D for that.
Just trying to get an idea of the workflow required to get that working. It seems some other apps (from comments by another poster here) using Unity3D are able to use some commonly available projects which is why some genres of apps have very similar apps in some categories.
Well, i am not the programmer so this may not be the most accurate/technical information, but the physics of the boxes were Unity-pre-made, we bought a plug-in for the ropes (which is definitely our week spot) and all the menus, buttons, animations, etc were coded by ourselves (my brother).
If we wanted to make another physics-based box game, it would definitely take us less time, we would just require to reset the physics parameters (mass, gravity, bounciness, etc) and re-skin the game by changing the images. Hope that answer your question
So, how is your game doing? The game was exciting and i like what you did with the menu. Already leave 5 stars on Google Play I look at some stats from AppAnnie and it seems your game has ranked on some countries including UK. How much daily new install did you get currently? Do you mind sharing some stats?
Yes please let us know how your game performs after that 30 days. My game made 7k installs daily and when 30 days passed it dropped down to 600-700 installs daily
My most sucesfull game reached 11 K installs in one day. After 30 days it started droping. After couple of months, i now have also about 700 installs per day.
. Adding new stages is something that is already considered, but we are waiting to have a decent amount of downloads to do that, then we will evaluate whats the best difficulty and static/dynamic balance of those stages.
