GDC 2014: the authors of Badland told how they tried to make money on their hit
As part of the report at GDC, the executive director and programmer of Frogmind studio Johannes Vourinen told about how much one of the most “Oscar-winning” mobile games of last year earned.
The game Badland as a paid application appeared on the App Store in April 2013. Thanks to the promotion on the main page of the App Store, the project received 100 thousand downloads in the first week.
But after the first week, when the Apple company removed the feature, sales fell. At first, up to 1000 per day, then even more significantly.
Success turned out to be a problem for a young team consisting of only two people. The fact is that they originally had a simple plan. Make a game. That’s all. But what to do with the sudden success, they had no idea.
We started thinking and came to the conclusion that they have three ways: to develop an existing project, to make a sequel or to start developing a new game.
Since Frogmind had no previous management experience, they decided that hiring even one new employee was a dangerous, risky business. Based on this, at the first stage they decided to finalize the existing project.
The plan was this: to release monthly updates, and at the same time to go to all possible other mobile platforms.
Monthly updates steadily gave sales growth. Johannes explains this by two factors:
- the appearance of features in the categories;
- by returning to the project users who had previously downloaded the game, who after the update began to tell their friends about the game.
Discount promotions also performed well (both with a 50% and 70% price reduction). Moreover, there was no need to announce/advertise them. Now there are a huge number of applications in the store that track sales. As soon as the game gets a discount, it immediately features in them.
The free campaign brought the studio 7 million downloads. However, they were not converted into money in any way. Johannes explained this by the absence of any IAPs in the game.
As for other platforms, the indicators are as follows:
- Blackberry brought developers 7000 paid downloads (the first days after the release of the game was in the top 3 grossing);
- on Google Play, the free version of the game with video ads received 6 million downloads (ARPU – 5 cents, 30% – IAP, 70% – advertising);
- on the Amazon Appstore, the free model did not enjoy the same success. The game scored only 130 thousand downloads (ARPU – 7 cents).
The average daily earnings from the paid version for iOS brings the developer the most money – 63%, 35% – advertising and Google Play IAP.
A source: http://www.gamasutra.com
