Post-mortem of the Card Crawl game
A year ago, the indie-KKI Card Crawl appeared in the stores. In honor of the anniversary of the release, the creators of the game shared figures and details about the project.
Hi, we are Wiebke and Arnold Rauers, a small team from Berlin. We love developing games and creating interactive stories for touchscreens.
Card Crawl – 1 Anniversary
On March 12, 2015, our beloved Card Crawl took its first steps in the world of mobile games. Here is a description of how she grew up.
Launch
A few days around the 12th were definitely the most interesting in the history of Card Crawl. When the game got into the features, especially in the USA, where it took third place [in fact, the game came in first place in terms of downloads, – approx. editors], – it was cool. We repulsed the investments in a week. Although the game was praised by many, in the first few weeks there were an awful lot of bugs in it. One of the most noticeable is the “paired” bug, because of which the cards of swords and shields always went in pairs. In addition, the game had serious memory problems on older devices. About a month later, in version 1.4, we fixed this bug.
Version 2.0
In June, we released the first addition to Card Crawl, in which we added new maps and game modes, improved some indicators and slightly changed the balance. The Daily Dungeon mode remains the most popular in the game to this day, and many players still enjoy these daily competitions.
Release on Android
In August 2015, we released the Android version of Card Crawl, which also became very successful. Of course, we expected that there would be some sales on Android too, but the reality exceeded our expectations. To date, the average revenue from the Android version is almost the same as from iOS. But more on that later. The business model by which we distributed Card Crawl on Android [free demo and paid full version – approx. editors], among other things, brought us a lot of new players who liked the demo of the game so much that they bought the full version. Although we were told horror stories about Android as a platform, we eventually completely changed our minds, and in the future we will be happy to be released, including on Android.
The second update is version 2.1
In December, we released another content update, which included 10 new cards and The Deck Merchant deck editor. The Deck Merchant is such a cool feature that allows players to create their own decks and share them. As a result, new versions of the game are obtained. There are no restrictions in custom decks, and therefore you can build a deck of 25 cards with monsters or 50 cards with shields. Many players have very cool decks as a result, and with the most popular – “Caramel” from user Chloe – 1600 matches have been played. Each deck has its own high score table, so players get the opportunity to participate in new competitions. We have a total of 111 custom decks that have been played over 100 times, and that’s great.
Update 2.2 – Balance and Delve mode
In February, our latest update was released, which included some major changes in the balance, zeroing the high score table and a new Delve mode, which replaced the Streak mode. Delve is a mode with gradually increasing difficulty and with a new high score table. Many players took it well. Some complained that monsters in the opponent’s deck fall out too randomly. For now, we decided to observe how the best results of the players will change in this mode.
As you can see, Card Crawl has changed quite a lot this year. We spent a lot of time to make a game that we ourselves would like to play every day. We got a lot more from our players than we expected, so again we want to thank everyone who has played Card Crawl in the past or talked about it. Thank you very much!
Awards
We think it’s obvious that the success of Card Crawl was the best reward for us in 2015. He brought us financial stability, amazing fans who are looking forward to our new games, mentions in the lists of the best games of the year and three (yes, three) awards from Pockettactics!
We won in the categories “Best Card Game”, “Readers’ Choice” and “Editors’ Choice”! Thank you, it’s amazing!
In addition, we were recently nominated for the German Games Award in the category “Best Game Design”, which is another achievement for Card Crawl. The jury will name the winners on April 7, 2016, and Max, Oliver and I are going to personally represent Card Crawl. It’s great that the game was singled out among other great games that have been released in Germany over the past year.
Sales
By tradition, here are some figures from the first year of Card Crawl’s life, when the game was sold on iOS, Google Play and Amazon. In total, for the period from March 11, 2015 to March 12, 2016, Card Crawl earned about $ 100 thousand. To this was added $2 thousand from Amazon.
Here are the downloads for the last year (paid version for iOS and free version for Android).
Here is the sales curve for the year.
Here are the exact numbers from both platforms.
As you can see, the revenue was divided as follows: approximately 76% from iOS and 24% from Android. We have already mentioned that we are very happy with the release on Android and that the game still gives excellent performance on this platform. Here are the conversion figures: we have 124,613 Android installations and 12,236 buyers. The average conversion rate after 1 day is 4.4%, after 15 days – 8.6%, after 30 days – 9%. This is very good compared to the standard values for frituplay of 2% after 30 days.
Conclusion
Card Crawl turned out to be very successful both from the point of view of reviews and from a financial point of view, and we are proud that we were able to make a game that will stay on mobile devices for a long time. This success will help us develop our next games, and hopefully with its help we will stay afloat for at least another year. And now let’s applaud Max Fiedler for the amazing art and Oliver Salkic for the incredible music and soundtrack. Both of them made Card Crawl a fantastic game! Thanks guys, and thanks to all the players!
Source: Tinytouchtales
